The ignorance, shameless rank hypocrisy, and outright demagoguery were on all on mainstream media display in an empire exhibiting signs of decay and decline by showing a blatant disregard for the facts of the past which we are condemned to repeat.
Recently Sen. Clinton said that the Iraqi Parliament should replace Prime Minister al-Maliki with a “less divisive and more unifying figure”. Forget the fact that Sen. Clinton was praising the democratic elections in Iraq when they were first held which resulted in the same Iraqi Parliament that she, a non-Iraqi citizen, now demands to consider her wishes for them to remove al-Maliki making him responsible for the destruction of a nation-state that she approved.
How arrogant. How presumptuous. How so very American. And just what if the Iraqi Parliament decides to exercise its freedom that we in the homeland are told our men and women in uniform are fighting for by declining to accept the request from someone who voted for the death and destruction in the cradle of civilization? What then?
Meanwhile the leading Republican candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, remains so self absorbed in demagoguery by claiming it is the Democrats who are in denial of the reality in Iraq yet his words on Iraq expose his own delusions. What can be expected from such a pathetic pathological character that bases his right to the throne on his own distortions of reality by alleging he was at ground zero “…as often, if not more than cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours in the ruins…” even though the historical record indicates America’s mayor was only there a total of 29 hours during a 3 month period. Then clarifying the outright lie by implying he was with them in spirit. Hell a lot of people were with the ground zero people in spirit.
Indeed chicken hawk Giuliani claims that the U.S. was on the cusp of victory in Vietnam when our troops began to come home in 1972. Perhaps we would have won the war in Vietnam if only draft dodgers like Bush, Cheney, Giuliani and other voices in today’s War Party had only served their country in uniform instead of exercising privilege to stay out of the quagmire in Vietnam only to live another day and create a quagmire in Iraq.
In fact it is the fear mongering Giuliani who refuses to see the reality of an existing quagmire in Iraq with statements like “…what we’re doing in Iraq, if we can get it right is going to help reduce the risk for this country”, “It was one of the greatest military victories in American history overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”, “…any withdrawal from Iraq would only encourage future terror attacks”, “People can only embrace democracy when they have an orderly existence” and “We should probably have an Iraq statistical program, in which we measure how many people are going to school, how many people are going to back to work…” in order to restore order in Iraq.
What proven risk did Iraq pose to this country? Since when does overthrowing a dictator of a third world country who the U.S. supported while he was committing terrorism against his own people constitute a “great military victory”? What evidence is submitted to support a conclusion that our withdrawal from Iraq would encourage future terror attacks when the reality is that Iraq never did commit terror attacks against us? The statistical evidence of chaos already exists and America’s mayor responds to the quagmire in Iraq by proposing an “Iraq statistical program”?
Rudy Giuliani’s detachment from reality can best be described in his own words before the United Nations a few years ago when he said “Let those who say we must understand the reasons for terrorism come with me to the thousands of funerals we’re having in New York City and explain those insane, maniacal reasons to the children who will grow up without fathers and mothers, and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all.”
Lost on this limited intellect is the capacity to understand that the hundreds of thousands of funerals occurring in Iraq are the result of the quagmire we created in Iraq. Who will explain those “insane, maniacal reasons” provided by the Bush Administration “to the children who will grow up without fathers and mothers and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all.” Certainly not Giuliani for he is only qualified to lead this country on the new way forward surging into the abyss with the political credentials and ego capable of proclaiming “peace with honor” with a straight face.
I can’t stop hearing the Buffalo Springfield lyrics from the aptly titled “For What It’s Worth”:
“Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down”
The sound is the American Empire collapsing from the weight of its own intractable situation, the quagmire here at home where a sitting President rewrites history to justify continuing a failed foreign policy, one presidential candidate already prone to creating his own reality accepts the newest lie in lock step and without question perpetuates that failure while the other leading candidate blames the victim in order to conceal her own role in the crime. What’s going down is the American Empire for all things conditioned are impermanent. Our future leaders not only cannot remember the past they are now rewriting the past which we will be doomed to repeat.
