If the Democrats hadn't regained control of the House of Representatives in 2006, it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but it would have fatally wounded the Democratic Party. To tell the truth, I'm not sure the Dems aren't still dead people walking, congressional elections notwithstanding. They are a herd of deer in the headlights. At the very least, they are guilty of election jitters or political expediency in their efforts to do the will of the people.
And our Fourth Estate? How they doin'? Long months ago, I watched a reporter explain how "labeling" (the NSA eavesdropping program) will be critical in the President's battle over the program. I paraphrase: Labeled as fighting terrorism, the President will win the battle; but labeled as "domestic spying" the program will not win the support of the American people. In short, labels are critical here." I marveled at how easily the rest of the people at the table accepted this revelation. Perception, as the political spinmeisters say, is reality.
This guy and others in the media like him have sold out the American people by covering politics as a process predicated on success or failure. In other words, covering the horse race. This has resulted in the media respecting and rewarding winning with nothing else mattering; witness the oft repeated dictum in the press that "If the Democrats want to pick Supreme Court justices, they got to win the election," with all but a wink and a nod. An alternate version from the 2000 Election: "If the Democratic candidate wants to be picked as President, he needs to select the Supreme Court Justices."
Discussion of the Republican wave of incompetence and corruption was pretty much limited to examination of polls. Bush was up five or six points since his low point after Harriet and Katrina, mostly because of our short attention span. So, the reporters would rather talk about how The President had made a comeback than about the incompetence that lowered his poll numbers to begin with.
Government/Corporate/Media gets the award for the greatest reality show in the world with the Neocons at the controls. Our government had been a poorly produced reality show under Clinton. Under Bush it is a wizard behind the curtain; it is virtual reality as deranged by "Dubya," (his fellow Texans' derisive tag for George W. Bush).
Bush uses religious certainty as a cover for doggedly pursuing a policy most people have seen through as a disastrous mistake that has had deadly consequences for us, the good guys: our military, our defense readiness, the military expansion and transformation desperately needed, and on and on. And those are just the conservative observations.
Bush/Cheney use protecting us as a cover for eviscerating the Bill of Rights and assuming unlimited and unconstitutional powers. These two men have tricked all of us and they are inside their glass dome looking out at us with those arrogant postures. They're thinking: "Go F yourselves, you can't touch us, you are on the outside looking in. If you could get in here, you'd BE in here. Huh, huh"
Snap out of it, Great Leaders. Your reality show is on hold; there is a writer's strike. You are off schedule and over budget. You are unique in history as far as I can tell, on running out the clock when losing. It is almost as brilliant as declaring victory and going home. It is really more like declaring defeat and like Pontius Pilate, washing your hands of it.
But in your hubris you have isolated yourselves to solidify power, and as usual, you got an unexpected, unwanted result: You have trapped yourselves in a fishbowl and given your enemies an embarrassment of riches concerning your screw ups, foreign and domestic, legal and illegal, criminal and civil, military and civilian, ad infinitum with which to prosecute you 'til the end of time.
No charge will be as important as the charge that you conspired to devolve and dissolve our "outdated" ground forces; that you two conspired with Rummy and the top echelons of civilian and military of DOD did knowingly deploy ground forces and by following illegal orders, attrit those forces with all due speed in an illegal war. We gave this administration the benefit of the doubt by saying your only crime was incompetence—But we had it wrong. This was treason.
These young Americans were sacrificed not only for patriotic propaganda purposes, but to eventually stress America's military ground forces out of existence and replace them with the kind of military the Neocons demanded all along: a modern, high-tech shock and awe machine that would shock the Middle East and awe them into joining our "project of the new American Century," perhaps a United States- Israeli -Arab Empire.
Then there was Rummy and his cheap-assed China produced, effing Wal-Mart War. Outsourcing, too? Bilgewater War, that's the new plan. The surge would finish off our conventional ground forces and Bilgewater could move into the Pentagon. The President's Personal Strike Force! Boo rah.
This, too, is part of the plan to replace our soldiers with Black Ops Cowboys. It's already done. Didn't the mainstream press tell us that 150 to 180 thousand private contractors are in Iraq? Aren't most of them vets of our military? Can we blame them for wanting 3 times the pay for the same thing with newer war toys?
But how long was this information known and ignored by media before the American people knew we even had any privatized forces? Were our real troops silenced under national security?
And since when do our military recruiters and our branches of service have to compete for recruits and for seasoned veterans with private contractors who are using the military's money to cowboy up the battlefield.
If we bring home the 130 k plus of our troops, will those contractors still be on our payroll? Is this elite force too expensive for us and, uh, forgive me, part of the reason this war is so costly? Hmm?
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