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Edited on Mon Feb-09-04 05:28 PM by arendt
The New "L Words":
Lying, Looting, Layoffs, Lunacy, Lese Majeste and Likudniks
by arendt
For twenty years, the GOP have beaten liberals up
so badly that the original meaning of the word
"liberal" has been distorted into an epithet. Liberals
have taken to referring to "the L word", the same way
superstitious actors refer to Hamlet as "the Scotish
play".
Today, fortunately, we have a new set of L words - words
that the corporate media dare not speak because they
reflect so badly on the GOP, their chief stumblebum,
Bush, and the media itself. These words can be used
in those humorous party affiliations so popular on
internet sites. For example, Tom Delay - Lunatic, TX;
or Mitch McConnell - Looter, KY, or Joe Lieberman -
Likudnik, CT or Chris Matthews - Lese Majeste Enforcer,
MSNBC.
These words will stick because they represent what
most Americans who still think (as opposed to those
who mindlessly suck at the glass teat of the media)
understand reality to be.
1. LYING
Beginning with "compassionate conservative",the Bush
team has piled lie upon lie so fast that you need the
entire Internet to track them all.
With absolute control of the coprorate media, the favorite Bush
tactic is the "bait and switch"(B&S), because the media will
always take the bait, then look away for the switch.
The biggest B&S was the phony WMD and Al Qaida links used
as justification for the looting of Iraq by America, and
the looting of the American taxpayers by Halliburton and
Bechtel. But, to talk of looting is to get ahead of myself.
There are so many lies, that even grouping them into
categories leaves a countable infinity. So, I will just
list the top 10 categories:
1. Phony excuses about 911, stonewalling of investigation
2. Lies to start Iraq War, including the McCain whitewash commission
3. Lies about our European allies motives for opposing IW
4. Lies about continued Homeland Security lack of preparedness
5. B&S about "temporary"(B$S=permanent) tax cuts and Patriot Act
6. Lies about critical state of government finances (drown the beast)
7. Lies about the true cost and true beneficiaries of Rx Drug Plan
8. Lying titles for anti-environmental, anti-education laws
9. Lies about "faith-based initiatives" not breaching Church-State
10. Lies about Bush's relationship with Enron, Ken Lay.
Needless to say, you don't have much consciousness-raising to do
when you call these people liars.
2. LOOTING
Lie categories 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 are in service of various kinds of looting.
This administration is mostly populted by Neanderthals from the extractive
industries. I include banking/brokerage/credit cards in that category because,
these days, those business revolve mostly around extracting money from
suckers. (The credit card industry's theme song ought to be "16 Tons and
What do you get?" )
But, as with all episodes of looting, there is a need for enforcers, muscle.
And this administration has plenty of that.
This is the most blatantly criminal administration in history. It appoints
convicted felons, like Eliot Abrams, and other thugs from Iran-Contra.
The Senate GOP leadership is caught red-handed stealing documents from
the Democrats. Two GOP governors are indicted or soon to be for garden-
variety corruption. The head of the Virginia GOP pleads no-contest to
wire-tapping his Democratic opponents. Again, this is just the tip of the
iceberg. The head of the SEC could not manage to indict anyone because
he was formerly one of the people he should have been policing. This GOP
administration is Cicero, IL under Al Capone, but on a national scale.
And, what have they stolen? Well, they stole $3 Trillion in upper-class
tax cuts. Followed up with another few hundred million in Rx Drug Plan
giveaways to Big Pharma and HMOs. They gave Haliburton billions in no-bid
contracts, despite repeated investigations, scandals, and givebacks.
Despite repeated Congressional rejection, they managed to give away 6% more
of what is left of a competitive marketplace to the media conglomerates.
We are all poorer for this naked ripoff.
They let Enron, WorldCom, and others walk away with their ill-gotten loot.
They shamelessly B&S'd the Veterans Administration. All over the world,
they pass out billion-dollar bribes to their crony autocrats and pay blood
money in the millions for people on their hit list. None of this makes America
safer, but it enriches the Carlyle network and the rest of the Military-
Industrial Complex.
In fact, they themselves have admitted that their totally unbalanced Federal
budgets are meant to "drown the beast in the bathtub". And isn't it convenient
that a side-effect of such drowning will be to greatly enrich the drowners?
The American middle class knows that, in the end, it is they who are being
looted.
So call the GOP "looters". It will resonate. Call em the party of Willie
Sutton. (If the GOP hate government so much, why are they in it? Because
that's where the money is.)
3. LAYOFFS
If any name sticks to these bums, it should be "the layoff administration".
Three million jobs lost, mostly sent to coolie laborers in Asia or underpaid
but proud Indian computer scientists. The worst record since Herbert Hoover.
Never has the Wall Street/Main Street split been so obvious. Not since
Teddy Rooselvelt has the income inequality been so high and the legal
accountability of corporations been so low.
Basically, the corporations have looted the intellectual property and the
retained corporate earnings paid by generations of American workers. They
have taken that property and those earnings to third-world countries where
they set up latifundia (Roman slave plantations) with the cooperation of
their crony autocrat rulers in those countries.
These layoffs are the looting of the birthright of the American middle class
and working class. The jobs our parents worked hard to create are sold off
in the same heartless manner as slave families were auctioned in a Charleston,
SC slave market 150 years ago.
The total lack of concern among the GOP for this outrageous and deliberate
de-industrialization of America is the final proof that the GOP only care
about money, their money, not about people. These people don't belong in
government. They belong in one of the many jails they have spent the last
two decades building in lieu of schools.
One other point that people don't look ahead to see. When the middle class
can't find work, or when it can't afford doctors and drugs, it will go
bankrupt in droves. The economy will crater. But the super-rich will have
their money safely out of the country. After the economy hits bottom, they
will rush back in to buy up assets for pennies on the dollar, just like
they did in South Asia after the 1998 capital flight. This whole outsourcing
thing is a giant "dump and run" scam on the US economy.
So, just remember that layoffs are part of the looting.
4. LUNACY
When it became impossible to ignore the total lack of government involvement
in restarting the economy, the Bush administration trotted out the most
ridiculous idea since Marie Antoinette suggested "Let them eat cake."
They suggested that we spend another Trillion dollars (that's Trillion with
a "T" "R") we haven't got to set up moon bases and go to Mars.
It is already well known that military spending has the lowest economic
multiplier effect of any government spending. But, the space program is
even lower - you can't sell surplus moon bases to corrupt third world
dictators. Thankfully, this proposal was laughed off stage immediately.
Al Gore said "Bush wants to go to Mars because he's given up on earth."
Some pundit said "Bush should go. He already has the flight suit."
Amen, brother.
If the administration were serious about reviving a high-tech economy,
one trillion dollars would buy a heck of a lot of biotech research. It
would also pay for a lot of modern infrastructure, like high-speed internet
everywhere. Those would be credible ways to spend money we haven't got.
But the moon mission is lunacy, and lunacy is the trademark of this
administration when it comes to science policy.
This administration has turned environmental science over to corporate
polluters and medical science over to fundamentalist crackpots and fanatics.
They are busy imposing "analysis paralysis" re-evaluation committees on
large parts of the science bureaucracy. When the paralysis has set in, they
will then excoriate government inefficiency without bothering to mention
that they themselves created it.
When it comes to science, the barking madness of these lunatics is on
display for all to see. Scientists are appalled at this administration.
5. LESE MAJESTE
....lèse-ma·jes·té /"lAz-'ma-j&-stE/
....n. <- M.Fr. lese majesté <- Lat. laesa majestas; literally, injured majesty.
....1 a : a crime (as treason) committed against a sovereign power
......b : an offense violating the dignity of a ruler as the representative of a sovereign power
....2 : a detraction from or affront to dignity or importance
The insanity that is the Bush administration could not have survived for
three years without the active and repeated intervention of a blatantly
biased corporate media. The media treat Bush like royalty, and punish anyone
who dares to *effectively* speak against Bush with the equivalent of banishment
or character assasination.
This media has, by its sustained actions and policies over time, demonstrated
that it will not tolerate any direct and sustained criticism of this administration
or its policies. The media has acted like a Halon extinguisher system for all
the transgressions documented in the first four sections. (I'll bet that
Haliburton makes Halon.)
Most of all, it protects the Bush crime family. It protects George W. Bush,
the stumbling fraud and bare-faced liar, constantly. There is an entire corps
of press sycophants who sing his praises like shameless courtiers. They sing
to advance their own careers in the rigidly aristocratic corporate media which
now owns 95% of every kind of media. It brutalizes and marginalizes critics of
Bush while keeping dozens of conservative pundits with lousy ratings on the air.
It protects Neil Bush, who could single-handedly support the National Enquirer.
If Neil had been Bill Clinton's brother, he would have his own Cable Channel by now.
The man is pure slime. He was caught red-handed in the S&L robbery of the 1980s.
But, now he surfaces collecting multi-million dollar bribes from a Chinese guy
for introductions in the computer industry. Now Neil Bush wouldn't know a
transistor from a tummy rub, so this is pure influence peddling - to a Chinese
communist, no less. Finally, he is in a very messy divorce, with testimony
about sexual diseases, allegations of illegitimate children, visits from
Chinese whores in the middle of the night. The man is a walking exhibit for
anti-family values. But, it winds up on page 99; and the tabloids won't touch
it. Guess they don't need another dose of anthrax to get with the program.
Even further under the radar is the shadowy Marvin Bush. If you aren't following
closely, you would never know that this Bush brother was running security at
the World Trade Center on 911. You might wonder just what kind of connections
were involved there; but you might like to keep on breathing. So you don't
even mention it.
6. LIKUDNIKS
Everyone with a brain can see that Bush doesn't have one. We all know someone
is pulling his strings. Now, most people can see Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld
as the actual strings. But, who is doing the pulling? Well, as one pundit put it,
"If 25 people living within 2 miles of this point in Washington, DC had been
sent to a desert island in the year 2000, we would not be at war in Iraq
today."
Those 25 people are the PNAC, led by pro-Likud party ideologues Richard Perle
and Paul Wolfowitz, and populated by Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld,
Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, and anyone else with clout in this pathetic
administration.
The edict of Lese Majeste extends to these Likudniks in the PNAC. The mainstream
press refuses to cover the PNAC in depth, in spite of their website making
inflammatory statements like "we need a new Pearl Harbor to implement our plans
(of invading and conquering the Mid East)".
The Likudnik influence is the absolutely most unspeakable truth about the Bush
administration. But, because the average American cannot distinguish between
Zionist and Jewish - just as they can't distinguish between Christian and
theocratic fundamentalist - no one dares to criticise the most repugnant Israeli
administation since that state was founded. Sharon, the provocateur, accused
war criminal, accused influence peddler, and lifelong thug is given a free pass
by the corporate media.
The idea that American foreign policy is being shaped to the advantage of any
foreign country is repulsive. The charge deserves an honest investigation. But
you can never get such a thing in Bush's Bizarro World, where the "independent'
investigator John McCain announces Bush's innocence before the investigation
has begun, and where Antonin Scalia accepts a free jet ride and a free hunt
courtesy of Dick Cheney, who just happens to have a case before Scalia's Supreme
Court.
Welcome to America, where ideology talks and democracy walks.
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So there we have it. America has arrived at the sixth circle of hell. Level LLLLLL.
This essay was sponsored by the Liberal Committee to take back the Letter "L" .
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