Dissident Voice

August 9, 2003

Über-indignant editorials are flying from the right like RPG shrapnel at US troops. Wingnut pundits are assuming full defensive posture, talking much faster and making less sense than usual. They’re queuing up around the block rationalizing Bush’s 16-word State of the Union lie and offering up creative explanations why 28 pages in the recently released 850-page report on the intelligence failures and governmental snafus prior to 9/11 are blacked out. Predictably, BushCo’s lies and cover-ups religiously comply with its three cardinal rules of political manipulation.

Distract. Distract. Distract.

16 Words

Wingnuts are feverishly stoking their medicinal stashes of rhetorical skills hoping we’ll be too stoned to remember BushCo knew for months the Niger nuclear evidence was bogus, but lied about it anyway. While attentive readers are hip to this tedious shell game, the wingnuts’ synchronized intellectual contortions allow them one luxury among a haplessly ignorant and mentally malleable public - implying that 16 words exhausts BushCo’s shameless chicanery.

Can’t you just hear the pitch?

"Ok, guys, it’s like this: we’ll get those liberal pantywaists freaked about Niger and get Fox, CNN, and MSNBC to beat it to death. When we’re finished with ‘em, they’ll look like petty nit-picky whiners. We win again!! Whoo-hoo!!" (High-fives abound while Karl ‘Mr. Burns’ Rove wrings his hands, grins maniacally, and mutters quietly, "Excellent. Excellent.").

It’s as simple as this, folks: if Bush lies every time he opens his mouth (and he does), then evidence of his lying should be everywhere (which it is). Hence the necessity for distractions.

Remember? BushCo’s biggest selling point for Operation Kill Lotsa Iraqis was that Saddam and Osama were joined at the hip, killed babies for fun, played WMD™ footsies, and had evil anti-American terrorist connections out the wazoo. Since Day One, any connection between Saddam and Osama has been laughed off as preposterous by anyone not wearing BushCo’s ideological blinders (Free With Partial Brain-ectomy!).

Further, dozens of Americans have died since Dubya declared victory and there’s still no sign of the WMD™ he assured us were aimed straight at our SUV factories, Baby Gap outlets, and reality show production studios. Is anybody with functioning cranial neurons still clinging to the fantasy that Saddam just hid the WMD™ really, really well, sold them to sundry religious crazies, or spirited them away to Syria or Iran? Does BushCo just simply turn the 24-hour propaganda channel to The Weapons ‘Program’ without skipping a beat and face nothing for it?

This was NEVER about weapons ‘programs’ and everybody knows it. It was about long-range missiles, thousands of liters of anthrax, giant barrels of sarin, huge tanks of mustard gas, ‘reconstituted nuclear weapons’, and 45-minutes-and-kiss-your-ass-goodbye.

Mushroom clouds. Millions dead. Imminent danger. Imminent threat.

Too bad none of it was true.

28 Pages

These pages look just like scads of other ‘declassified’ government documents. We’re told they include sensitive national security stuff we’re not smart enough to understand, so the creepy Wolfowitz types go crazy with their big fat markers. They black it out for our good, our protection, our safety.

Yeah, right.

You’d think since 9/11 was such a tragically defining moment, the results of any investigation would be comprehensive, complete, and trumpeted across the country as evidence there’s actually some Homeland Security going on out there and we can finally guard efficiently against further attacks. Sadly, such is not the case.

BushCo knows the corporate media’s attention is focused entirely on what’s being covered up - what’s blacked out. The smart money says its evidence that elements of the Saudi government bankrolled 9/11 for the predominantly Saudi hijackers, that BushCo knows all about it, but is avoiding the inevitable negative political fall-out if anyone finds out.

Protecting corrupt allies. Nothing new here.

Lurking behind all the hoopla, though, are some chilling questions and possibilities. For instance, imagine if the BushCo chickenhawks, in their collective zeal to expand American influence, selectively ignored or (sub)consciously trivialized certain pre-9/11 intelligence, thus implicitly and indirectly conspiring with the hijackers to facilitate the ‘Pearl Harbor-like’ event that neocon PNAC signatories desperately needed to jump-start the radically reactionary agenda they’re daily foisting on the world.

With everything else in place; another brainless Republican in the White House, a fanatically right-wing GOP Congress, a tainted Supreme Court, and a respectfully compliant and docile media run by BushCo sympathizers, all they needed was one catastrophic event to bring it all home. 9/11 was what they’ve been breathlessly waiting for all along and they wasted no time exploiting it. If there’s one thing BushCo’s taught me it’s ‘the ends always justify the means’, no matter how high the bodies stack up. Besides, after seeing what this crowd means by ‘acting in the public good’, I wouldn’t put anything past them.

Distractions like these are harmful to our democratic health, so let’s keep our eye on the ball, huh? Getting these clowns out in 2004.

Allen Snyder is an instructor of Philosophy and Ethics at Pellissippi State Technical Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. He can be reached at asnyder111@hotmail.com. This article is copyright by Allen Snyder and originally published by opednews.com (http://www.opednews.com/), but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.