In Hang in there, America: Competent leadership is just 600-plus days away, Joe Galloway speaks well of our future – the one without the flying monkeys, the Amerikan swastikas, and the Machiavellian Karl Rove.
It will certainly seem like the Millennium to most of us.
Without the future Jailbird-In-Chief and his bitch (that would be Cheney and Bush, in that order), what WILL life be like? Oh, don’t we look forward to those halcyon days! The sun will shine, and the Chicken Hawks will go home to roost, having discredited their species for at least two or three election cycles.
…Galloway lovingly recalls the best-laid plans of the PNAC, the neocons, the flag wearers and the über right of the über Reich as “never having come to pass”. And speaking of passing, what passes for a Conservative now is no longer recognized by Conservatives… but the rest of the world knew that, didn’t it? We all did our best to take a pass at that, though the neos (“new”) never saw reality coming. They were like a deer in the headlights – on their knees praying to the god of the Brahmins as they were.
The permanent majority never wrapped its prehensile tail around the American neck, though they got a good foothold in the pig swill. Like Meister Adolph’s Thousand Year Reich, it didn’t last the duration of its war of aggression (known in Nuremburg and Geneva as the worst crime against humanity). To which the humans who survived Shock and Awe on planet Earth gave a sigh of relief and continue to do so – hopefully with lessons well learned and forewarned about future incursions of the Religious Reich and evangelizers and their bullying pulpit.
While Galloway looks forward to the criminals going off to their repose in billionaire heaven (Montana? Gstaad? Patagonia?) – the farther away the better, he seems to be saying – most of us would like to see them swinging from a tree, but not from any prehensile tails. Hemp would be more likely to bring a smile to our faces, and not the kind you Bogart. A neocon rope dance – a Gallows-sway-ing – would monkey suit them better, to hear my friends and I when imagining that better future, hopefully so different from the bitter near-past, as in those 860 days.
Joe Galloway asks,
The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men – seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing – succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?
Well, Joe, their goal was to destroy government (“to make it so small you could flush it down the toilet”, remember?) – the one they have hated since it was used to tax their granddaddy’s income to build a bigger government and since it was used to corner a snarling Richard Milhaus Nixon.
And how does one kill a government? Many lessons can be learned about that, looking back over the first 860 days of the Turd Reich.
Be aware that the people who gave us Bush wanted government dead – except the departments that they had learned to rape and plunder: DOD mostly. All regulatory agencies 0 including the DOJ – needed young turks who had no experience in any managing, much less experience in calling out anyone. All the people-helping agencies? Ditto. Put in people who wear ties well – “such ordinary-looking men” – especially those from the Federal Society and the Young Republicans, ones already vetted philosophically.
The people who emplaced Bush wanted enablers and they got them. But it wasn’t just that they wanted their pals to get away with things in this period. No. They wanted to debilitate it forever, if possible. Kill those departments by politicizing them and alienating those who made them function, to the point of quitting – leaving even more positions to be filled by former Young Republicans who were brainwashed in the philosophy of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society – but who had no capacity to fulfill the duties of their offices. Enablers, enablers, enablers.
Just as the Third Reich produced the proof that buried them, in the form of millions of forms filled out documenting their heinous actions, the Turd Reich produced the weenie non-functionaries who would squeal when they faced years in prison, to save their hides by turning state’s evidence against their übers. We haven’t seen that quite yet, but Bush’s own Monica – this one not Lewinsky, but Goodling – will produce her own blue stained dress of a sort.
When government is seen as something to kill, the vultures circle and land, wanting their share of the spoils, before the carcass gets cold. That is where the Jack Abramoffs and Duke Cunninghams come in: “Get while the getting is good, Boys! When we are on the brink of a permanent majority, we don’t have to worry about such incidentals like laws! Hell no! And when we’ve got our men in place at DOJ, all the rulings comeing down will say ‘It’s okay!’ So, go for it! Besides, we all know that the Democrats were doin’ it for all those years, so it is just our turn to get in on the feast!”
Pundit he may be, but Joe Galloway just doesn’t get it: They did so much damage because they intended to do so much damage. When they wanted to do damage, they needed people in place who would look the other way – ones who didn’t even believe that they SHOULD be looking for crimes and misdemeanors. And ones who would look on such behavior as acceptable because it dovetailed with their philosophical training – training aimed at just this point in time: Get ’em young and keep ’em stupid, and make them happy to be petted or to have their ears scratched. So they hired unqualified people, ones untrained to fill the offices, but ones that made nice “ordinary-looking” pets.
And by doing it on such a massive scale – and with a GOP Congress that would not oversee, anyway – they made it impossible to catch them all, or even very many of them. For every scandal the press or bloggers have uncovered, those were only the tip of a very big iceberg, and one that the ship of state was INTENDED to be on a collision course with.
Until Galloway understands that this was not an accidental course of events, he won’t be able to grasp the whole picture. One does not emplace so many incapables and expect the organization to survive. This is like the movie Major League, where the owner wanted the team to come in last.
Joe, Bush’s handlers’ bosses wanted the government to come in last. Understand that and all the pieces make sense.
The proof is in the numbers; it was supposed to be government-wide failure – failure of function, which the rest of the country would label a failure of duty. Look at the number of actually qualified people they put in place . . . not very many was it? Joe, do you think that was an accident?
As to why, there is an answer to that, but this diary is long enough already…
. . . . TD
