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{1} Thirteen
"If you have been watching television lately, I think this is unendurably clear in the faces of those screaming people in the South, who are quite incapable of telling you what they are afraid of. They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds. And this same fear obtains on one level or another, to varying degrees, throughout the entire country ..... There is no way around this. I am suggesting that these walls -- these artificial walls -- which have been up so long to protect us from something we fear, must come down. .... I want to suggest this: that the majority for which everyone is seeking which must reassess and release us from our past and deal with the present and create standards of what a man may be -- this majority is you. No one else can do it. The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
-- James Baldwin; Nobody Knows My Name; 1954; pages 112-114.
Today is a "big day" in American history. Despite the Bush-Cheney administration's best efforts to bury the Plame scandal, it has come to the front and center of the public's attention. The news media has been reporting the tension that grips Washington, DC, and comparing the level of administration corruption to Watergate and Iran-Contra.
Recently, Will Pitt shared a message from Ambassador Joseph Wilson with the members of the Democratic Underground. Wilson noted that this scandal will soon come to a head, and that it will result in a struggle to determine the direction our nation will move in.
Let's take a look from the grass roots level. Perhaps, as Baldwin suggests, we can assess the present, and determine what the standards will be for this country in the future. No one else can do it for us. "The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
{2} "The Lion in Winter"
" 'He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things,' one White House ally said, referring to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald."
-- Thomas DeFrank & Michael McAuliff; Bush Pals rip Plame prosecutor; Daily News; 10-24-05; page 7.
Odd: many people would think "he's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things" is an apt description of George W. Bush. Suffice to say that we can expect the republican machine to resort to outright lies, vicious personal attacks, and irrational emotional outbursts in order to hide the truth. Let's look at a few specific sub-groups of the republican machine, and consider how they might react in the upcoming days.
(a) The White House/ administration: There appears to be a fracture within the administration, between the office of the president, and the office of the vice president. Clearly, the foreign policy "experts" that brought us the invasion of Iraq are centered in Cheney's camp. It seems unlikely that the president can protect both camps. Indeed, he needs to take actions to protect himself on his errors on Iraq.
(b) Congress: the republicans in the House and Senate will attempt to put a good face on this scandal, by saying the public isn't paying attention, and that "everyone" believed Saddam had WMD, and posed a threat to the USA.
(c) The pundits: have begun to turn on Judith Miller, and are reporting the tension in Washington and the anxiety in the White House, as this unfolds. More, we know that another five journalists have inside information on how the administration violated the law. Yet they are employed by business interests that are not prone to serving the public the truth. We can expect sophisticated manipulation of reporting, including trained liars like Bob Woodward. More, we can count on irrational fools like Sean Hannity to continue to harp on Bill Clinton's affair; this, we will find, is a good thing.
(d) Fools: the grass roots republicans who are too invested in the "big lie" to admit what frightens them will seek safety by ingesting what Ouspensky called the "ancient rancid bacon (and) .... rotten green ham; and from them comes all the moral scurvy which is eating itself into the life of the people around us." They will spew their contaminated thought processes in a number of ways, from in disguise on progressive sites on the internet ("but how do we answer the charges that Wilson lied?"), to irrational letters-to-the-editor of very newspaper, to emtionally-charged calls to C-SPAN.
(e) The Machine: Behind it is the machine, which owns the corporate media just as surely as it owns the oil companies that are reaping profits from the Iraqi resources. In the message to DU from Wilson, through friend Will Pitt, the question was raised: will we be a democracy, or a fascist state, as we head into the future.
{3} "The Bush administration's purpose is clear -- to limit debate, to limit discussion, to limit having to explain to the American people how much this war will cost and how many lives will be lost before it is over."
--Senator Robert Byrd; Losing America; 2004; page 268.
The job of the progressive democratic grass roots is to counter the administration's attempts to limit debate and to frame the discussions about the Plame scandal. We must be engaged in a campaign to explain to the American people how this scandal is the foundation of the administration's case for the war in Iraq. We must focus on what the cost in resources and lives has been, and will be, because of the corruption of the Bush administration at its highest levels.
In any campaign, there are three groups: 1- those who always support you; 2- those who always oppose you; and 3- the undecided. In a campaign for political office, one can be assured that group one will vote for them; group two will vote against them; and hence invest the vast majority of resources on reaching group three.
However, in a social/political/cultural campaign such as this one, we enjoy the opportunity to be more flexible in our approach. For example, because the corporate media has ignored this scandal for almost two years, it is likely that many of the "mainstream" democrats are not as informed on the issues involved as are readers of the Democratic Underground. Their knowledge of the case is more likely to be similar to that of the "undecided" people -- a group that includes democrats, republicans, and others. Hence, a grass-roots activist can, with a letter-to-the-editor or a call to C-SPAN, help to educate two of the three groups.
More, with e-mails to the talk shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, we can fuel the emtional, irrational rantings of fools like Sean Hannity. We want to encourage them to attack Patrick Fitzgerald and Bill Clinton. Wilson knows he is going to continue to be a target; that's okay, we can neutralize those by bringing the facts to the table.
Our goal is not to limit the debate -- it is to encourage it. Even to provoke it. That includes aggravating, annoying, and antagonizing the opposition. One example should do: Sean Hannity will continue to shriek about Clinton; we need to respond with the simple message that Clinton betrayed his wife, and the administration betrayed the country. When Hannity rants that Clinton's scandal was more of an embarrassment than Bush's, we must make clear than Hannity is more willing to humiliate himself than was Monica.
{4} Worse Than Watergate
" 'He's like a lion in winter,' observed a political friend of Bush. 'He's frustrated. He remains confident in the decisions he has made. But this is a guy who wanted to do big things in a second term. Given his nature, there's no way he'd be happy about the way things have gone'."
-- Thomas DeFrank; Prez is 'The Lion in Winter'; Daily News; 10-24-05; page 2.
George W. Bush is the president. He is responsible for his administration. He made the decision to invade Iraq, after telling the country that we faced a grave danger, and that we risked having the "smoking gun" be a "mushroom cloud." In his state of the union speech leading up to the war, Bush uttered the infamous "16 words" about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake from Niger.
Either Bush was lied to and played for a fool by the vice president's office, or he was involved in the conspiracy to lie to and play the country for fools. Simply put, there is no third choice.
Ambassador Joseph Wilson was exercising his constitutional rights when he wrote the op-ed piece for the New York Times. Valerie Plame was working at the highest levels of the national intelligence community to protect our country from the threats posed by foreign enemies. Both were viciously attacked by an administration that sought to destroy both of them to protect their lies. In doing so, the administration threatens all of our constitutional rights, and our entire nation's safety.
"This world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
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