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Bush and Co Reams Nation Good


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BushCo Reams Nation Good

No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care anymore. Ha-ha, suckers

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fgate%2Farchive%2F2003%2F05%2F14%2Fnotes051403.DTL

Ha-ha-ha oh man did we ever get smacked on that one. Conned big time. Punk'd like dogs. Just gotta shake your head, laugh it off. They reamed us but good, baby! Damn.

Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way.

See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha!

No warehouses teeming with nuclear warheads, no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins, no drums of crazy-ass chemical agents that will melt your skin and turn us all into drooling flesh-eating zombies -- unless, of course, you count the sneering vat of conservative biotoxin that is, say, Fox News, in which case, hell yeah baby, we gotcher WMDs right here beeyatch.

Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. We've been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and don't understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team.

But wait, is liberation of a brutalized and tormented people now the reason? The justification for our thuggery? That is so cool! So that means we're going to blow the living crap out of Sri Lanka and Sudan and Tibet and North Korea and about 47 others, right? Right? Maybe Saudi Arabia, too, second only to the Talilban itself in its abuse of women? Cool! As if.

Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, right? Let's ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCo's own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops who've been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically.

Surely they've found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah!

Whoops. Bad news. As The Washington Post reports, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, the very serious-minded group heading up all U.S. inspections in Iraq, the group absolutely certain it would immediately find steaming neon-lit stockpiles of WMDs piled right next to Saddam's personal stash of gay porn and Britney Spears posters and opium pipes, is coming home with its tail between its legs. Found nothing. Nada.

Psychopatriots are a little nonplussed. Bush is merely "embarrassed." Peace advocates are sighing and drinking heavily. We have done this ghastly horrible inane hate-filled entirely unprovoked thing in the name of power and petroleum and military contracts and strategic empire building, our nation is numb and more bitterly divisive than ever and our leaders are not the slightest bit ashamed.

But of course you're not the slightest bit shocked. You knew it all along. The WMD line was just a ploy that, tragically, much of the nation bought into like a sucker pyramid scheme after being pounded into submission with hammers of fear and Ashcroftian threats and bogus Orange Alerts and having their tweezers confiscated at the airport.

And of course the capacity to be outraged and appalled has been entirely drained out of you, out of this nation, replaced by raging ennui and sad resentment and the new fall season on NBC. This is what they're counting on. Your short attention span. WMDs? That's so, like, last February. Hey look, the swimsuit model won "Survivor"!

Because now it's all done. Like a bad trip to the dentist where your routine cleaning turned out to be a bloody excruciating root canal and 50 hours of high-pitched drilling and $100 billion in god-awful cosmetic surgery, now the bandages come off. Smile, sucker. We're at peace once again. Sort of. But not really. Don't you feel better now? No? Too bad. No one cares what you think.

It's all over but the shouting. And the screaming. And the endless years of U.S. occupation in the Middle East, the quiet building of U.S. military bases in Iraq so we can keep those uppity bitches Syria and Egypt and Lebanon in line, forge ahead with the long-standing plan to strong-arm those damn Islamic nuts into brutal compliance with Bushco's bleak blueprint for World Inc. What, too bitter? Hardly.

Should we care that Osama, the actual perp of 9/11, is still running around free? That terrorism hasn't been quelled in the slightest? That the Mideast is more of a U.S.-hating powder keg than ever, thanks to BushCo? That the economy is in the worst shape it's been in decades?

Should we care that we just massacred tens of thousands of Iraqi (and Afghani) civilians and soldiers and suffered a little more than 100 U.S. casualties and have absolutely nothing to show for it except bogus force-fed pride and this weird, sickening sense that we just executed something irreparable and ungodly and karmically poisonous?

Nah. Just laugh it off. Have a glass of wine, make love, go play Frisbee with the dog. Breathe deep and focus on what's truly important and try to assimilate this latest atrocity into your backstabbed worldview, add it to the list of this lifetime's spiritual humiliations, as you wait for the next barrage, the imminent announcement that we're about to do it all again.

Steel yourself. Protect your soul. Because man, they reamed us good. Slammed this nation like a bad joke. Gotcha! Ha-ha-ha.

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May 14, 2003

John McFerrin

Hillbilly in the White House: Bush attack on Iraq handy

When Granny Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies got riled up about something, she would routinely whirl and kick Jethro in the shins. Since he hadnt done anything, he would always ask, What you kicking me for?Her reply always was, Cause Im mad and youre handy.

Enter George W. Bush. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush was all riled up.

A group made up mostly of citizens of Saudi Arabia under the leadership of Osama bin Laden (another Saudi) operating out of Afghanistan had attacked the United States. President Bush first tried bombing Afghanistan but he never could find bin Laden.

He couldnt very well attack Saudi Arabia, even if it is a widely known source of funding for terrorism groups and the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers.

Saudi Arabia has too much oil, which it is willing to produce and sell in ways that serve the economic interests of the United States and American oil companies.

The solution? Saddam Hussein. He was plenty handy because of his long record as a dictator. He had a rinky-dink military that couldnt put up any real resistance.

The riled-up George Bush could kick him in the shins, bomb his country to smithereens, whatever. Saddam hadnt done anything to cause the 9/11 attack, but Bush was mad and he was handy.

The difficulty with this is that Bush is the leader of the free world, head of the only superpower, and has his finger on the nuclear button.

He cant very well appear to take his decision-making model from a little hillbilly woman from a 1960s television show. He has to do better than that.

His solution to that little difficulty was to make up and keep telling a colossal lie. From the time of the attacks, his speeches on the subject always mentioned both al-Qaida (which carried out the attack) and Saddam Hussein (who didnt) in the same paragraph.

He did this over and over so that by the time of the bombing of Iraq, polls showed that close to half of the American people thought that Saddam was directly responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11.

Having managed to fool half the people just by constantly mentioning Saddam and al-Qaida together, President Bush became bolder in his colossal lie.

When he stood on the aircraft carrier to brag about winning the war, he referred to Saddam as an ally of al-Qaida.

The truth is that President Bush tried for months before the war started to find a link between al-Qaida and Iraq. He couldnt do it.

The CIA cant find a link; Army intelligence cant find a link. There is no evidence that any link exists.

The connection is implausible because of the nature of the organizations involved. Like the United States, Iraq under Saddam was a secular state. Just as the United States is ruled by people who happen to be Christian, Iraq was ruled by people who happen to be Muslim.

The church and the state were, however, separate. Saddam may have been a tyrant but he was a military man, not a religious leader.

In contrast, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are Islamists. They want states where the church is the government and rules according to church teaching.

Osama publicly condemned Iraq as it existed under Saddam for being secular. President Bush must have overlooked this when he referred to Saddam and al-Qaida as allies.

In a democracy such as ours, leaders must at least appear to do something in response to things that concern the people.

The attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon scared people. President Bush had to do something.

President Bush could have done something effective in addressing the problem. He could have re-examined American actions to determine which of our policies make people hate us so.

He could have done the dull but necessary work to improve our ability to analyze intelligence so that we could avoid future attacks.

Information to predict 9/11 was apparently available in bits and pieces from multiple sources.

While putting all this together well enough to predict the attacks would have been a difficult task, we didnt have any system that could even attempt it.

He could have worked at making us all safer from future attacks. He could have spent more energy tracking down the ones who actually did sponsor the attacks.

None of this, however, is as dramatic or exciting as rallying the nation for a war. Since there wasnt any evidence that Saddam had anything to do with the attacks, he had to make some up.

Over 100 dead Americans, a few billion dollars, and a few thousand dead Iraqis later, he could announce that we had clobbered an ally of al-Qaida.

He still would not have done anything against anybody who had anything to do with the attacks of Sept. 11 and would have done nothing to make future attacks less likely.

As long as he could peddle the lie that Saddam had something to do with the attacks, however, he would have given the appearance of doing something effective. In American politics, that is often enough.

So there we have it. We may have a president who, when riled, will strike at whatever is handy.

We may have one who is willing to make up a colossal lie and then spend lives and treasure doing something that, because of the big lie, looks like an effective response when it really isnt.

Neither of these is reassuring when that president is the leader of the free world, head of the only superpower, with his finger on the nuclear button.

********

McFerrin, a Beckley lawyer, is one of the Gazettes contributing columnists.

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Media AWOL in noting irony of Bush's flight

Eric Zorn

May 6, 2003

So much for that myth--the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. During the presidential campaign of 2000, it started going around that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, then the leading Republican candidate, had significant gaps in his military record.

Specifically, that Bush failed to report for duty for an entire year toward the end of his hitch with the Texas Air National Guard.

The short version: In May 1968 the silver-spoon son of a U.S. congressman jumped to the top of a long waiting list despite mediocre scores on his pilot-aptitude test and was allowed to enlist in the Guard, a common way to avoid being drafted into combat in Vietnam.

In May 1972 he sought a transfer from Houston, where he flew F-102s on weekends, to a unit in Montgomery, Ala. There, he worked on the U.S. Senate campaign of a friend of his father's and, records indicate, blew off his military obligations.

Bush failed to take his annual flight physical in 1972 so Guard officials grounded him, the story went. He never flew again and received an early discharge to go to graduate school. His final officer-efficiency report from May 1973 noted only that supervisors hadn't seen him or heard from him.

Bush's campaign biography obscured or misrepresented these details. In the summer and fall of 2000, his spokesmen offered various and evolving explanations for what Democrats said represented a far bigger "character issue" than any of the windy exaggerations of their candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

"If he is elected president, how will he be able to deal as commander in chief with someone who goes AWOL, when he did the same thing?" Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said to the Boston Globe, where veteran investigative reporter Walter V. Robinson, a former Army intelligence officer, wrote several major stories on the subject. "This stinks."

Yes, but like Bush at the end of his hitch, it didn't fly. A search of all news publications and programs archived in the LexisNexis database for the last seven months of the 2000 campaign found 114 stories referencing Bush, the Texas Air National Guard and Alabama. Over that same span, nearly 10 times that many stories--1,076 to be exact--referenced Al Gore and the expression "invented the internet," an allusion to the bogus charge then haunting Gore that he had wildly inflated his role in the online revolution.

The "Bush AWOL?" story appeared in this newspaper and was based on good reporting and still-unanswered questions. It faded away--a scant 14 mentions in the database for all of 2001 and 2002 due to the age of the allegations, the lack of any new developments and the urgency of current events.

Last week, though, the president all but wore a "Kick Me!" sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

But for Bush in flyboy attire, a discreet silence. The only voices I encountered raising this issue were David Corn in the Nation; Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who asked, "Tell me if you ever heard of anybody with as powerful a resistance to shame as Bush"; and talk station WLS-AM's token progressives Nancy Skinner and Ski Anderson, who spent a full hour Sunday afternoon savoring the irony of it all.

There was no relentless examination of the damning timeline on cable news outlets, no interviewing the commanders who swear Bush didn't show up where he was supposed to, no sit-downs with the veterans who have offered still-unclaimed cash rewards to anyone who can prove that Bush did anything at all in the Guard during his last months before discharge.

So much for the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. So much for the myth of the "liberal media."

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

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