While CNN’s Peter Berger and other analysts are busily advancing Bush’s speech which starts at 10am, let’s consider what Bush will say. Touted by the White House as a “major speech,” Bush will speak on “progress of the war in Iraq and the broader conflict against terrorism.” (CNN).
Allow me to predict: Al Qaeda Syria Al Qaeda Iran Al Qaeda Syria Syria Syria bad bad bad. Oh, and Al Qaeda. (Then lots of Freedom, Freedom Freedoms! With a big dash of “stay the course!”)
Along with the morn, a realization dawned on me today:
Bill O’Reilly’s diatribe against Syria’s al-Assad (while interviewing a stunned General Wesley Clark) — and his call to “take out” the Syrian president (Media Matters Video/Transcript) — was as calculated as Pat Robertson’s recent call for the assassination of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
You’ll recall Pat Lang’s post of Sept. 15. * Say it isn’t so… Please.*: “This guy [an Assad critic] is nobody in Syria but the Neocon, Jacobin crowd are pushing him as a neo-Lincolnesque figure. That nobody, promoted to the press, was interviewed through MEMRI: “”Leader of the Opposition Reform Party of Syria: “The Syrian Regime Is Nurturing Terrorism”; “We in Syria Need Peace More than the Israelis.”
Hmmm .. Bill O’Reilly planting the “Syria seed” in the FOX audience’s brain … MEMRI touting an opposition leader … the Bush administration bleating non-stop about the Al Qaeda infiltrators across the border from Syria … the huge offensives by the U.S. military along the border.
So do you think, like me, that Bush and his buddies like O’Reilly are building up Syria as the next boogeyman for the U.S. average Joe to latch onto?
And we all know what follows a flood of boogeyman propaganda from the Bush regime. BOMBS. And lots of dead civilians.
BUT WAIT! Syrians and human rights lawyers are complaining that Assad is cracking down on Jihadists:
The Jamestown Foundation suggests, much as human rights lawyers here do, that Asad has been cracking down of Jihadists and anyone the regime thinks might assist them. Judging from comments posted on the Syrian jihadi websites, the Jihadists are upset with the Syrian regime. Some state that President Assad is “licking the American boots” and has stepped up the campaign against the mujahideen over the last few weeks with “many clashes and sieges and arrests of large numbers of brothers.” For several months now the Jihadist websites have been debating whether to begin operations against the Syrian regime.
This Jihadist outrage supports the picture that Razan Zeitouneh has already painted for us of crack-down against Jihadists which has been going on for months. (Syria Comment, Oct. 5, 2005)
President Assad is “licking the American boots” ? Huh. A “crack-down against Jihadists” that’s been going on for months? Huh.
Frankly, if I were Assad, I’d be busily licking all the American boots I could while I frantically re-stock my deepest bunker.
Let’s listen to the real terrorist shortly, and see what HE has to say. Watch via the White House video or C-SPAN, or on TV via CNN, MSNBC, or C-SPAN.
