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lapsedmodernistSo Bushithead went to Africa. And, apparently said some incredible statements that pretty much fulfilled my weekly quota of the kind of input that makes me feel like I am living in The Onion.
"God called us," he said. "America has decided to act."
I feel like there should be some sort of mathematical formula, like post "end-of-history" (up yours, Fukuyama) late-globalization "noblesse oblige" + (neofundamentalism - any sort of metaphorical level in using the Lord's name and His close connection to the Shrub, the extended Shrubbery and his neocon Greenhouse) + hubris X hamartia (although that's hard, like, how do you answer the question of what constitutes Dubya's "tragic flaw"?) = Bush's old in-and-out of Africa (and yes, I am importing the expression from The Clockwork Orange consciously, because, let's face it, any time Bush somehow engages with a foreign country, some form of international rape commences). let's just hope it all ends House-of-Atreus style for Bush, being pursued by The Furies. Even an Oedipus Rex recreation would hold some satisfaction for me. Perhaps he can go blind himself and then, once he has perished, Jenna Bush can risk ostricism and, eventually her life, to bury him? Or, alternately, I also think it would be very cool if he ended up in the kind of behavioral modification treatment program that the protagonist of The Clockwork Orange undergoes. Imagine The Shrub affixed to a chair, unable to turn his head or lower his eyelids, while he is bombarded with image upon image of military violence--from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Viet Kong villages doused with Napalm to The Killing Fields in Kampuchia (yes, I buy the argument that the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War devastated and destabilized the country enough to propel the Khmere Rouge into power) to Iraqi children dying from wounds, cholera and malnutrition, the footage that sometimes airs very very late on our Time Warner Cable's "Syrian" (as in, for an hour a day, between 3 and 4 AM) channel, and that we used to catch glimpses of on BBC until about a week into the war, Time Warner took our BBC away. Anyway, I can't even say anything about the next excerpt from the article, because, well, here it is:
"Meanwhile, US First Lady Laura Bush gave a few dozen Uganda school kids a taste of Americana when she read them a classic American children's book.
She took about a half-hour out of her four-hour visit to Uganda to read from "Clifford the Big Red Dog" to children - some HIV-positive.
"This is a very popular book in the United States, boys and girls love Clifford," she told the few dozen kids who gathered at the Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel for the reading. "
And again, this reminds me of my childhood stories about Lenin's great kindness (see the entry about cognitive dissonance from a few weeks ago), and the whole genre of jokes that they spawned. The one I am going to share today is one of the "anecdots"/parodies of the appalling little parables that reified how Lenin was the paragon of Loki-like acumen and unwavering committment to the Revolution, full of love for all Soviet Children. So the joke/parody goes like this:
"Once upon a time, Lenin was trimming his beard with a razor, and a little girl came up to him and asked to sing him a song, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin listened to the girl singing a song to him, holding his razor in his hand the entire time, and you know what? He did not slash her. And he could have!"
And on the domestic front, Route Orwell, Exit 1984, The CIA has taken the fall for the Uranium fiasco. Yes, that will resolve the issue for everyone WHO DOES NOT REMEMBER ALL THE ARTICLES ABOUT CIA BEING PRESSURED TO DELIVER A CERTAIN KIND OF INFO BY RUMSFIELD AND FURTHERMORE LETTING THE WHITE HOUSE KNOW THE DAY BEFORE THE NIGER/URANIUM CASE WAS PRESENTED THAT THE INFORMATION WAS FALSIFIED. yeah, the CIA really fucked up here. But hey, Dubya has the utmost confidence in Tenet. and I am sure Tenet has the utmost confidence in Bushco's total disregard of every single warning that had surfaced about 9/11 in the YEARS prior, not to mention months. Because without 9/11 we would not be where we are today. It can all be broken down very easily:
2 airplanes: $ 4 million
The Twin Towers: $ 5 billion
3,000 lives lost: collateral damage
The amount paid out to Bin Ladin while he was on CIA's payroll during the war in Afghanistan: classified
Aid package to NYC post WTC attacks: BIG FAT ZERO, in pratice
Being able to turn the country into an authoritarian, fascist theocracy, obliterating habeas corpus, procedure, privacy and civil liberties: priceless.
"God called us," he said. "America has decided to act."
I feel like there should be some sort of mathematical formula, like post "end-of-history" (up yours, Fukuyama) late-globalization "noblesse oblige" + (neofundamentalism - any sort of metaphorical level in using the Lord's name and His close connection to the Shrub, the extended Shrubbery and his neocon Greenhouse) + hubris X hamartia (although that's hard, like, how do you answer the question of what constitutes Dubya's "tragic flaw"?) = Bush's old in-and-out of Africa (and yes, I am importing the expression from The Clockwork Orange consciously, because, let's face it, any time Bush somehow engages with a foreign country, some form of international rape commences). let's just hope it all ends House-of-Atreus style for Bush, being pursued by The Furies. Even an Oedipus Rex recreation would hold some satisfaction for me. Perhaps he can go blind himself and then, once he has perished, Jenna Bush can risk ostricism and, eventually her life, to bury him? Or, alternately, I also think it would be very cool if he ended up in the kind of behavioral modification treatment program that the protagonist of The Clockwork Orange undergoes. Imagine The Shrub affixed to a chair, unable to turn his head or lower his eyelids, while he is bombarded with image upon image of military violence--from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Viet Kong villages doused with Napalm to The Killing Fields in Kampuchia (yes, I buy the argument that the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War devastated and destabilized the country enough to propel the Khmere Rouge into power) to Iraqi children dying from wounds, cholera and malnutrition, the footage that sometimes airs very very late on our Time Warner Cable's "Syrian" (as in, for an hour a day, between 3 and 4 AM) channel, and that we used to catch glimpses of on BBC until about a week into the war, Time Warner took our BBC away. Anyway, I can't even say anything about the next excerpt from the article, because, well, here it is:
"Meanwhile, US First Lady Laura Bush gave a few dozen Uganda school kids a taste of Americana when she read them a classic American children's book.
She took about a half-hour out of her four-hour visit to Uganda to read from "Clifford the Big Red Dog" to children - some HIV-positive.
"This is a very popular book in the United States, boys and girls love Clifford," she told the few dozen kids who gathered at the Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel for the reading. "
And again, this reminds me of my childhood stories about Lenin's great kindness (see the entry about cognitive dissonance from a few weeks ago), and the whole genre of jokes that they spawned. The one I am going to share today is one of the "anecdots"/parodies of the appalling little parables that reified how Lenin was the paragon of Loki-like acumen and unwavering committment to the Revolution, full of love for all Soviet Children. So the joke/parody goes like this:
"Once upon a time, Lenin was trimming his beard with a razor, and a little girl came up to him and asked to sing him a song, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin listened to the girl singing a song to him, holding his razor in his hand the entire time, and you know what? He did not slash her. And he could have!"
And on the domestic front, Route Orwell, Exit 1984, The CIA has taken the fall for the Uranium fiasco. Yes, that will resolve the issue for everyone WHO DOES NOT REMEMBER ALL THE ARTICLES ABOUT CIA BEING PRESSURED TO DELIVER A CERTAIN KIND OF INFO BY RUMSFIELD AND FURTHERMORE LETTING THE WHITE HOUSE KNOW THE DAY BEFORE THE NIGER/URANIUM CASE WAS PRESENTED THAT THE INFORMATION WAS FALSIFIED. yeah, the CIA really fucked up here. But hey, Dubya has the utmost confidence in Tenet. and I am sure Tenet has the utmost confidence in Bushco's total disregard of every single warning that had surfaced about 9/11 in the YEARS prior, not to mention months. Because without 9/11 we would not be where we are today. It can all be broken down very easily:
2 airplanes: $ 4 million
The Twin Towers: $ 5 billion
3,000 lives lost: collateral damage
The amount paid out to Bin Ladin while he was on CIA's payroll during the war in Afghanistan: classified
Aid package to NYC post WTC attacks: BIG FAT ZERO, in pratice
Being able to turn the country into an authoritarian, fascist theocracy, obliterating habeas corpus, procedure, privacy and civil liberties: priceless.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 12:12 pm (UTC)"God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." -- your fearless "leader", shrub
haaretz quoting Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas quoting shrub.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=310788&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
1) why did haaretz put this as the last paragraph in the news item instead of the first paragraph IN ALL CAPS?
2) why were there ZERO news items about this in the u.s. media? the day after this appeared in haaretz, the headline in every u.s. newspaper should have been "Shrub thinks that he gets orders from God; 25th Amendment invoked removing him from office".
3) funny how god's orders don't interfere with elections. how convenient.
and to think that at one time, people in this country (meaning Repubs worried about losing a presidential election) were worried about having a roman catholic (kennedy) in office because he would have to take orders from the pope. how quaint.
we're being "led" by a religious wacko.
-mjm
no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 01:03 pm (UTC)shrub/cheney/powell/rice knew exactly what they were doing when they put that sentence into the speech. they knew that it had been disproved by the CIA and they also knew that they needed it in order to get the country to approve of the assault that they wanted. everything they've been doing since has been lying to cover up what they did, which was to leave out the fact that the CIA had told them there was no Niger uranium connection. if the state of the union speech had been truthful it would have said: "the british have published a report that hussein attempted to purchase uranium ore from Niger, but our investigation of the so-called evidence has disproved it beyond any doubt. the documents were fake, our investigation found. still, we want to attack for other reasons that you wouldn't support and so we're going to."
this is all a HUGE crime and we're witnesses to it.
-mjm
p.s., a few days ago shrub repeated the lie that iraqi children had been held in a "children's prison", completely ignoring the fact that it had been widely reported (nytimes, among others) nearly a week ago that the "prison" was, in fact, an orphanage. this ranks up there with the lie that iraqi soldiers had removed kuwaiti infants from incubators and left them to die on the floors of the hospitals, a lie which shrub's dad repeated during the lead up to the gulf war.
more on "taking the fall"
Date: 2003-07-18 08:35 pm (UTC)-mjm
no subject
Date: 2003-07-13 08:02 pm (UTC)"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light, through the prism of our experience on 9/11." -- rumsfeld, testifying last week before a senate committee
and yet...
"There's no doubt in my mind but that they [the Iraqi government] currently have chemical and biological weapons." -- rumsfeld in january
(He was seconded in March by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.")
we've all seen this tactic before: when caught in one lie, change the lie. we've all seen it before because it's practiced by many four and five-year old children.
Mr. Rumsfeld said he found out "within recent days" that the information had been discredited.
another LIE. it was front-page news in march before the invasion began that the Niger uranium documents were fakes, and agreed to as such by the state dept. (of course, they had to agree since u.s. ambassador wilson had reported that to them in March 2002, a year earlier.)
Questioned for the first time about the uranium, Rumsfeld said: "There's going to be a lot of attempts to rewrite history."
yes, there are going to be attempts. by you, rumsfeld, and the rest of shrub&co.
-mjm
p.s., if you've ever seen a rumsfeld news conference, you might find this funny:
http://newyorker.com/shouts/content/?030609sh_shouts
and we all need some humor at these times.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 10:31 pm (UTC)you know of Donald Rumsfield's "poetry," of course? available on the DOD website.
unknowns
Date: 2003-07-18 07:16 pm (UTC)-mjm
p.s., about your BBC access: have you checked your PBS stations' listings? two of my local PBS stations run BBC World on weeknights.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-14 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-14 05:05 pm (UTC)how did you come across my journal?
Re:
Date: 2003-07-14 07:50 pm (UTC)I luuuuuuuuv mysteryfood.