Nightmerica

[Artemis Bunyon]

I had a dream the other night. It was a terrible dream. Then I woke up, finding no comfort in the so-called waking world.

In a recent, stunning article published in the New York Times, investigative journalist Ron Suskind examined the fundamentalist heart of the Bush cabal's increasingly obvious disconnect from reality. On condition of anonymity, an official told Suskind: "You guys are in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

With a cult-like army of True Believers willing to swallow whatever lies their Commander in Chief and his generals decide to tell them, perhaps we should not be surprised at the flagrant arrogance, the lack of shame being exhibited by the Powers That Be and their ink-stained courtesans in the opinion business. If the shit really starts hitting the fan, they can always start a civil war.

But when the dreamer dies, so must the dream, and you can't wage a war against reality forever. The chickens that got loose when the dreamers fell asleep are coming home to roost. Giant, ugly, five-hundred pound chickens, with foot-long claws, jagged beaks that can gut a bison, and feathers dripping with a wide variety of deadly chicken diseases.

Domestically, this administration has ravaged the country for generations to come. The Great Elite Fleece-and-Cashout Scam of 2000 -- which the PTB refer to ironically as a popping bubble -- was only the beginning. The era of low interest rates, of so-called cheap money, is over. We can now look forward to fifty years of steadily rising interest rates, and an acceleration of the already break-neck speed with which the nation's collective wealth is being redistributed to the untouchable elites at the top of the heap.

America has gone from a record budget surplus to a record deficit, and where do you think those hundreds of billions have gone? Not to a "different philosophy of government", or some abstract set of economic theories, as Bush frequently declares. No. It has gone to those who used Bush as a skeleton key to sneak into the White House and gain access to the Treasury.

Asking where the money went begs the question of where it came from in the first place. The answer to that question hardly ever reaches the front pages of our newspapers, because who cares about 1.3 million Americans falling into poverty in the last year alone? Who cares about another one and a half million Americans joining the ranks of the medically uninsured? Surely the usurious interest Americans pay on their debt -- the fastest of fast tracks for upward redistribution of a society's wealth -- in no way contributed to these luckless losers' dire straits.

That the exploding trade gap, creating a historically unprecedented twin-deficit effect, fuels the divide between the have-nots and the have-mores is not just irrelevant, it's all according to plan. And whenever the truth threatens to poke its way into the dream, it is met with a battering ram of lies. They can always revise their numbers after the fact. Corrections never seem to get as much press (or credulity) as the patently ludicrous projections put out by this administration.

Meanwhile, at the so-called Justice Department, a sinister darkness spreads. Witchfinder General Jesus H. Ashcroft -- who somehow manages to hold onto his job despite an unprecedented regime of gross incompetence and pernicious contempt -- is waging a Holy War against privacy, civil liberties, and every American's constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms. Ashcroft eagerly aided and abetted The Powers That Be as they took advantage of post-911 hysteria. As a result, any American can now be seized in the dead of night, spirited away to locations unknown and held -- indefinitely and incommunicado -- based on pretexts so flimsy as to border on divine revelation.

On Ashcroft's watch -- and frequently on his direct orders -- abuse of authority has become the new normal. Even people who have never committed a crime may find their names on federal no fly lists without warning, explanation, or recourse to appeal. Peaceful protesters are being shadowed by Homeland Security thugs, artist Steve Kurtz was arrested for creating an installation that LOOKS LIKE a chemistry lab, the survellience of private citizens expressing their opinions has been mainstreamed, he's even trying to prevent citizens' access to civil forfeiture information by ordering libraries to destroy those documents… and then there's Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, the federal prosecutor who was targeted with a Justice Department investigation as retribution for his meeting with a Senate committee, where he discussed his concerns about Ashcroft's tactics.

But we shouldn't be surprised. The Preznit has spelled it all out for us: if you're not with this administration, you're with the terrorists. Especially if you've had an abortion. Which, incidentally, is another thing Ashcroft and his goons are trying to find out about you…

PART 2

Eighty miles outside of Baghdad, in the scorching No Man's Land that fades into Iran, half-a-hundred men lay dead in rows. They were Iraqis, newly minted members of the security force slated to take over for American troops once democracy -- or something like it -- has established a foothold in the region. Their convoy had been ambushed by insurgents. They were unarmed. After being forced off their vehicles and marched into position, they were murdered execution style, with a single bullet to the back of the head. The thirsty desert drank their blood.

In Mosul, Fallujah, and throughout the Sunni Triangle, car-bombs thumped out a staccato backbeat to the relentless symphony of despair. On Sunday alone, over a hundred people lost their lives -- and scores more were wounded -- in this horrifyingly unpredictable manner. In Baghdad, insurgents lobbed a mortar shell into Camp Victory, a "secure" military compound, scoring their first dead diplomat. The latest kidnappings include one of the most widely respected Western humanitarians in the Middle East, and a seven-year-old boy.

Nearly two years after the so-called liberation of Iraq, random atrocity is still more ubiquitous than running water or electricity. Nowhere is safe. The insurgents are bombing hospitals at will. Churches and synagogues are being targeted for attack, something that never happened under Saddam's regime. In one sanity-defying incident, 35 children were killed and many more mangled when a bomb went off while American soldiers were handing out candy for a photo-op… and the only solution proposed by American puppet Ayad Allawi so far has been to kick out Al Jazeera for daring to report on this steadily-worsening nightmare.

Maybe none of this would have happened if BushCo hadn't arrogantly chosen to ignore the State Department's plans for post-invasion Iraq. Maybe things would be going more smoothly if the mammoth task of rebuilding a ruined Iraq from scratch hadn't been handed over to a bunch of twenty-something Heritage Foundation interns. Maybe soldiers wouldn't be forced to refuse suicidal assignments if the American people hadn't allowed the Republicans to steal the White House in 2000. Maybe 60-year-old reservists wouldn't be dodging bullets and RPGs in the name of a doomed neoconservative utopia if Republicans hadn't let their party be hijacked by a bunch of fucking maniacs.

Little wonder that bulk-mailers have recently begun pitching cures for "Panic Attacks, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Phobias, Agoraphobia, etc" to go with their black market prescription drugs and penis enlargement scams. Spam of the times, I guess.

Meanwhile, sitting in the Oval Office, Preznit Dubya puts on his happy face and tells the Moonie Times's ideologically correct Helen Thomas stand-in that "the true history of my administration will be written fifty years from now." Looks like fans of George W. Bush: Faith in the White House will have to wait a little while longer for the definitive chronicle.

Of course, rosy proclamations and noble posturing may be fine when discussing a nation his incompetence has likely ruined beyond repair. But when it comes to the possibility of losing the election, Dubya and his cohorts switch into Armageddon mode. In a recent campaign ad, Team Dubya sought to illustrate John Kerry's alleged lack of resolve regarding the terrorist threat with a little animal imagery. Over video of a wolf pack prowling a darkened forest, a portentous female voice intones: "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."

You might think this an odd visual choice for an administration that's been rightly accused of "crying wolf" -- with politically motivated Homeland Security "terror alerts" and dire warnings abouyt Saddam's non-existent WMD -- but desperation seems to have pushed the GOP beyond both shame and self-awareness. The Kerry Team's response -- an ad portraying Dubya as a head-hiding ostrich -- would have been perfect if only they had gone the distance and shown the big bird being torn apart by wolves. Too bad Marlin Perkins and Walt Disney are both dead. Either one of those guys could have arranged that shot, no problem...

[Tamyrlin79]

1. powerful photo... n/t