Twenty Things We Now Know Five Years After 9/11
The imminent fifth anniversary of 9/11 provides the proper moment for a good, ol'-fashioned sum-up of the past
half-decade under CheneyBush, especially because so much has happened in the past 12-months:
The Bush Administration's Katrina debacle, Iraq being sucked deeper into the civil-war vortex, Afghanistan turning once
again into a major war theater, more and more military leaders speaking out about the disaster that is CheneyBush
foreign policy, the defection of so many moderate conservatives from their GOP home, the plummeting of Bush's popularity
to not much more than his fundamentalist base, the revelation that Bush have been spying on citizens' phone calls and emails without court warrants, the indictment of CheneyBush's chief aide
Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice in the case of the White House's outing of a covert CIA agent, the "rendering"
of detainees abroad for extreme torturing, etc. etc.
I'll get to the annual list in a moment. But first let's step back and take a deeper overview. Buckle your seat belts,
here we go.
WHAT 9/11 PERMITTED BUSH TO DO
Whatever you may think of 9/11, and the extent of involvement of Bush, it's crystal-clear that the events of that tragic day were and continue to be used as an excuse for a wide variety of
immoral and illegal actions by the CheneyBush Administration. The radical agenda that was barely on the public's horizon
five years ago has since become all too evident, both domestically and in terms of foreign/military policy, which is why
so many traditional conservatives are abandoning the extremism of the Republican Party.
Launching a war against, and then occupying, Iraq is the most obvious foreign result of the 9/11 tragedy -- even though
Bush has admitted several times that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, and no WMD either. In one of the
worst strategic mistakes in modern American foreign policy, the war against the al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan was
precipitously abandoned and U.S. troops were dispatched to Iraq, a country of no real threat to the U.S.
Domestically, the near-3000 deaths of 9/11 -- and, let us not forget, the spreading of deadly anthrax spores around the
halls of Congress by someone still unknown -- led to the passage of the so-called "Patriot" Act. This collection of
martial provisions gave the federal government and its agents unprecedented police power to violate the Constitution and
Bill of Rights in its supposed hunt for terrorists. All this while very little has been done to actually make the
country more secure, such as checking containers entering ports, improving security at nuclear and chemical plants,
x-raying all air freight, and so on.
In short, Bush used and then grossly abused the awful events of 9/11 -- and continues to do so -- in order to expand and maintain
power, to move aggressively in the world, to pay off corporate and wealthy-individual supporters through huge tax breaks
(in the middle of a war!), to create a one-party system of government, to neuter the legislative and judicial branches
and thus violate our time-honored checks-and-balances system that provides a brake on executive excesses, to amass more
and more police powers in federal hands, to effectively control the mass-media and the vote-counting system in this
country, etc. etc.
9/11 also gave Karl Rove the fear-tools with which to manipulate the populace whenever he wished. Rove knows he has a
lock on about 1/3 of the electorate, the GOP's fundamentalist "base." In several elections since 9/11, he has revved up
the fear machine by rolling out the required buzzwords (abortion, terrorists, gay marriage, the flag, illegal
immigrants, Muslims, et al.) to cobble together enough support to "win" the elections, even if by the slimmest of
margins. (In reference to those margins, election experts have found that there is enough statistical and experiential
evidence to say with some confidence that in key states and regions, those balloting-results were fraudulently
obtained.)
We'll talk some about what can be done to change the situation toward the end of this essay; right now, let's take a
look at this year's compilation of what we now know five years after 9/11.
THE 9/11 LIST
1. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the public to learn much, if anything, about the
events of that day five years ago. Bush had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they
named the executive director, one of their made men (now an Administration official).
As it turned out, the Administration wasn't all that cooperative in furnishing documents, Bush would not testify under
oath and would deign to appear only with Cheney by his side (here's my imagined transcript of that testimony) ( http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/911-testimony.htm ) , and just recently we learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by the
Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal charges be filed. ( washingtonpost.com )
We know that a growing number of academics and scientists have raised serious questions about the official government
explanation of the 9/11 events, especially about whether the Twin Towers fell straight down on their own or were guided
in that free-fall-speed path by pre-set explosives. Behind all these and other conspiracy theories rests a nagging
suspicion among many Americans -- heightened by the admission that the Pentagon lied outright to the 9/11 Commission --
that the Bush Administration may have been complicit in helping orchestrate the 9/11 tragedies. (I do not accept much of
that surmising, but until the Administration comes clean on a number of troublesome questions, Bush will always be, and justifiably so, under a cloud of suspicion for complicity. These questions include why the Secret
Service didn't immediately grab Bush at that Florida school and get him on a plane, why NORAD fighter-jets were MIA on
that fateful morning, why airline stocks were "shorted" just prior to the attacks. Click here for more info on 9/11
skeptic groups. ( http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org )
We now know -- no matter what one believes about the Bush Administration's level of complicity in 9/11 -- that at the
very least the inner Bush circle knew that a huge al-Qaida attack was coming in late-Summer/early-Fall, but they did
absolutely nothing to prevent it or prepare the public for its consequences. They knew because fairly detailed, red-hot
warnings about planes being used as weapons were supplied to the CheneyBush inner circle by numerous countries'
intelligence services around the world. But CheneyBush didn't even call a meeting of involved advisors and
counter-terrorism honchos to move on the intel they were getting. In short, Bush had advance word that something "spectacular" was about to go down, and, for their own reasons, did nothing. Indeed,
when the CIA sent a briefer to Crawford, Texas, to go over the ominously-titled August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily
Briefing, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." -- which talked about N.Y. buildings being cased, preparations for
hijacking of planes, terrorists in the U.S. with explosives, etc. -- Bush barely listened and then insultingly dismissed
the briefer, saying "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
We know that Bush saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the "opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully
with the Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent
hegemony" taking forever to implement unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the public mind. 9/11 came
along and served as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.) ( http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm )
2. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative movement was dedicated to using America's sole
superpower status to move aggressively in the world while no other country or international force could put up much
resistance. The key neo-con leaders in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton,
Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century (PNAC).
The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when the war ends, those
leaders lose their compelling luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT wartime
president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the "unpatriotic" brush, and their political
opposition marginalized. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until
relatively recently, when occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and fight as an
opposition party should.
3. Oil & the Politics of PNAC. We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with him when he launched
an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country
-- and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing -- and thus no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders
from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did
have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other
autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran: If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a
massive dose of "shock": You will be removed, replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S.
The neo-cons -- most of whom were members of PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute
and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998, but he demurred,
seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden, and those terrorists like him, actually were
successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.
But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other recommendations:
"pre-emptively" attacking countries devoid of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating agreed-upon treaties when they
conflict with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) can ever achieve
power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness to use
tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in
2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America and were renewed in
Bush's 2004's National Security Strategy.
4. Sexing Up the Intel. We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda, the Bush Administration had their
work cut out for them in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Therefore, among the first moves by
Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. The various intelligence agencies
reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, that it was an al-Qaida operation, but those finds were
merely bothersome impediments. Since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the
intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special
Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel,
much of it untrue from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly
thereafter, the White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card,
Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of
Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.
Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom
clouds over the U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast, huge stockpiles of chemical weapons
in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the
United Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and
concocted facts. While the U.S. mainstream media was unanimous in its opinion that Powell had cinched the case, the
world didn't buy it (Powell, who resigned in 2004, has since lamented his role in this charade), and the opposition to
the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, former
allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan with large
numbers of troops dispatched, as it turned out over the objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.
5. The Downing Street Revelations. We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an
illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great danger from potential
insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because someone from inside that
body leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos.
We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed around
the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their legislative bodies and their citizens that no decisions had been
made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to go to war a year before the invasion. "Fuck Saddam," Bush told
three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."
We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and that the
legality of the war was in question without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council. But the
Bush Administration rushed to war anyway, in haste because the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding
any WMD stockpiles; the rush to war was accomplished without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the
peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks later, Bush prematurely declared, under a
"Mission Accomplished" banner, that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war.
6. The Big Lie Technique & WMD. We know (again, thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a
paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust
of Bush's justification for going to war was based on these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique,
repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over, drummed those lies into our heads day after day, month after
month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with
Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war because they
couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons,
mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing
the American people and Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.
7. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had precious little to do with
WMD, with Islamist terrorists inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like. There were no WMD to speak
of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe. No, the
reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil, control, support for its ally
Israel, hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.
However, as it turned out, by invading and occupying Iraq, it removed the one buffer against the expansion of Iran's
political and military power in the region; in addition, because the U.S. Occupation was so incompetently carried out,
it pushed Iraq and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had
been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of
American wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now the Administration is quietly willing
to accept an Islamist government that may well turn out to be more attuned to Teheran than to Washington.
8. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and
bunglingly managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation has provided a magnet for jihadists from other countries,
billions have been wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to
speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. etc. Indeed, so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the
Administration know the U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their
considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and "stay-the-course"
remains the operating principle.
9. The Stretched-Thin Military Needs Bodies. We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S.
military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion rates are high, soldiers are not re-enlisting at the
usual clip, recruitment isn't working and illegal scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up. In short,
there are no forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be instituted -- and the recent call up of
thousands of ready-reserve Marines is a draft by a different name -- or all future attacks will have to come from air
power or from missiles, which will merely deliver a message. The air attacks will result in making the citizens of those
countries even angrier at America, and with little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic"
governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since the bombed populations will support their existing governments. In short,
America's and Israel's failures in Iraq and Lebanon demonstrate the limits of highly-armed powers in the modern,
nationalist-guerrillas world.
10. Hiding the Facts from the Public. We know that Bush made sure that there would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using and abusing the intelligence
that led to war on Iraq. This is the most secretive Administration in American history, and they want no investigations
( http://www.oldamericancentury.org/blocked_investigations.htm ) of any of their mistakes or corruptions of the democratic process.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain,
namely at the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House manipulation of
intelligence. But, following the 2004 election, Roberts said no purpose would be served in launching such an
investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11
knowledge. In short, this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any
investigations whatsoever.
11. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great love for legitimate democratic processes,
certainly not inside the United States. (On at least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference for
dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he
had to invent legal justifications that he could claim granted him the requisite power. So he had his longtime
lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much what he wants -- ignore
laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens' phone calls and
emails, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."
And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," from which there is no end, Bush is home free. There always will
be terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief"
will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush also made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or
war-crimes tribunal.
Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has disavowed this legal philosophy of a dictator-like President being beyond the reach of
the law. No doubt the issue ultimately will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has appointed
ultra-conservative Judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In a chilling decision, the appeals panel, of which Roberts was
a member prior to his ascension to the Supremes, ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies"
are non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system
he has concocted; even the Court's recent objections to the tribunal system has had little effect on day-to-day
violations of detainees' rights, as Bush always manage to postpone and delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.
12. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House Counsel, and Pentagon lawyers
beholden to Rumsfeld, devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist
lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side
of death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the "rendering" of key suspects to countries
specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock!, that those under their
command would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to
stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -- if
something goes wrong (and he never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone else's fault.
13. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation
it needs in its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the American
people. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by announcing yet another
"terror" threat, based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he departed his directorate of the Homeland Security
Department, Ridge admitted that he was required to issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no justifiable
reason for doing so; it has been demonstrated ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az7yl-UnsQQ ) that those warnings were activated usually when the Administration was facing an election or when they were having an
especially bad-news day -- a new scandal, especially discouraging reports from Iraq, etc. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on
you, Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be repealed, that vote will be a
nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of Rights.
14. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons, compromised
American national security by revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives -- one, CIA agent Valerie Plame,
who had important contacts in the shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with Iran's
nuclear capabilities. It is possible that the first of "senior Administration officials" to reveal her identity was from
the State Department (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage), but wherever the leak originated, it is clear that
Cheney (through Libby) and Rove deliberately piled on the Plame story in an attempt to punish her husband for telling
the world that Bush's Iraq war was based on phony intelligence. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent, not
incidentally, is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice, apparently to show off how successful the
Administration was in its anti-terrorism hunt, was that a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's inner circle. This
operative could have kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's our war-on-terrorism
government at work.
15. Do You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's voting system and, more importantly, the vote-counting
system are corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the
2004 election results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned by
far-right Republican supporters, but the same objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. There are no
good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the
voting machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on
election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And we haven't even mentioned
Rove's dirty-tricks department whose function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat
voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to knock hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters off
the voting rolls in advance in key states such as Florida and Ohio. Unless the vote-counting system can be changed soon
-- and the vote-tallying scandal will not be adequately dealt with voter-verified receipts -- the integrity of our
elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented, they would mean nothing
without the guarantee of honest elections.
16. There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and itself) by giving
humongous tax breaks, for 10 years out, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition, corporate
tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All
this was done at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the treasury deficit from those tax-breaks
was growing even larger from Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing in on half a
TRILLION dollars!) So far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan
(other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs for skilled
workers, many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands.
17. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't really
care what kind of debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better, since as GOP honcho Grover
Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." They want
to decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head
Start, Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public
education, etc. (The IRS is going to hire private tax collectors!) Bush's plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social
Security System is still on track, though Republicans are keeping quiet about it prior to the November elections.
18. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental policy -- dealing with air and water
pollution, mineral extraction, national parks, and so on -- is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein to
corporations whose bottom line does better when they don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst
sort of grab-the-money-and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the Administration's attitude toward
protecting the public's health can be seen in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to safely return
to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the Twin Towers fell five years ago, even though EPA scientists
had determined that the air was grossly polluted and dangerous.
19. It's Greed for Money, Control, Power. We know from "insider" memoirs and reports by former Bush Administration
officials -- Joseph DeIulio, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. -- that the public interest plays little role in the
formulation of policy inside the Bush Administration. The motivating factors are mainly greed and ideological control
and remaining in political power. Further, they say, there is little or no curiosity in this Administration to think
outside the political box, or even to hear other opinions.
20. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this attitude -- "my mind is made up, don't bother me with
the facts" -- shows up most openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration (good example: global
warming) in favor of faith-based thinking. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist
religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist
base, but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's saying, about evolution
vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government scientific
reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in research grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper
level, why things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter.
AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?
In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at home are taking us into a kind of American
fascism domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are infected with the
militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters,
dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly happening regularly on both the local and federal levels. More and more,
America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, group pitted against group while the central government amasses more
and more power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing The Leader's policies is denounced as unpatriotic
or treasonous.
The good news is that after suffering through six-plus years of the CheneyBush presidency, the public's blinders are
falling off. The fall from power of Tom DeLay is a good symbol of this, and the true nature of these men and their
regime is finally starting to hit home. Cheney is acknowledged as the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen for
what he is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national interests
abroad with his reckless and incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his
over-reaching in all areas.
If a Democratic president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been in the
impeachment dock in a minute.
IF REPUBLICANS LOSE IN NOVEMBER
But there is no way for that to happen unless and until the Republicans lose control of one or both of the houses of
Congress in the November election. If the Dems were to take over the House, for example, they would have subpoena power
to compel witnesses to testify under oath for the first time in nearly seven years, which could lead to productive
investigations of the machinations that sent the U.S. to war in Iraq, to what really happened on 9/11, to the other
myriad scandals and embarrassments: torture, domestic spying, the punishment and outing of CIA agents for political
ends, the Abramoff corruption network, etc., etc.
The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure -- with too many beholden to the same interests that have corrupted
the Republicans during the CheneyBush years -- but in enough instances that matter, they would be different enough to
start to turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back more toward the center and maybe
even, on some issues, in the direction of progressive liberalism.
That is why for the next two-plus months, we need to work our butts off to ensure a Republican defeat in the House,
and, if we're lucky, in the Senate as well -- by a huge margin. We know that Rove and his minions will be doing
everything to steal and manipulate this election. There will be more sleaze and slime and dirty tricks, and perhaps even
some October "surprises," and we need to factor those in and work even harder, including sueing election officials who
refuse to take steps for honest balloting and vote-counting. Landslide victories would make it more risky for Rove and
his minions to try to fiddle with the vote totals.
Winning in November is our job, our moral duty. If we don't take them down in this midterm election, we may not have
another good shot for a decade or more. It's crank-it-up time. Let's get to work. #
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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at Western Washington and San Diego State Universities, worked as a writer-editor
with the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers. ( http://www.crisispapers.org ) To comment: >> crisispapers@comcast.net <<.
First published at The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 8/29/06.
Copyright 2006 by Bernard Weiner.