Reply #296: Horsepuckey

[Jack Rabbit]

True, this is far from the Neocons last gasp. It would be a more positive sign if it were.

The Neocons are claiming a mandate to do as they please. You'll find that mandate in the same place you'll find Saddam's biochemical arsenal. It's a lot of hooey made up by the Neocons to justify past, present and future crimes.

No doubt the new conventional wisdom will be that the longer Bush sticks to his hawkish course, the more disastrous his second term will become. But that prediction may prove just as false as the conviction that the neocons were headed for the ash heap of history.

The writer of this piece, Mr. Heilbrunn, appears to be granting Bush his dubious claim of a mandate and says "ah, ha! it proves he was right!" Bush may have won this election -- perhaps even honestly, but we'll never know for sure -- but that doesn't prove that invading Iraq was a good idea any more than it proves the earth is flat.

Indeed, it should be the conventional wisdom that things will grow more disastrous in Bush's second terms. I certainly share that wisdom. He's already celebrating his "re-election" and his "mandate" by committing fresh war crimes in Fallujah and appointing fellow war criminals to head the Justice and State Departments. Mr Heilbrunn even names Elliott Abrams as a second-generation Neocon, omitting that he was convicted of lying about the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan years. Perhaps he's also a second-generation war criminal. Lying to achieve foreign policy aims seems to be Bush's modus operandi.

In fact, the administration is in the process of creating the most harmonious foreign policy team in decades. Rice, who will be a formidable secretary of State, has a golden opportunity to insist on competence, not just utopian dreams, in implementing the president's pro-democracy vision.

Where does Heilbrunn get off calling Bush's vision "pro-democracy"? He stole one election (at least), pushes a law that makes public librarians into unwilling agents of a secret police and wants to strengthen it with legislation that will allow him or the AG to strip an American of his citizenship, operates the government in a veil of secrecy and lies to drum up support for a war of aggression. Is this how one promotes democracy? Give me a break.

Of course, he's promoting democracy the best way he knows how. Torturing prisoners in Abu Grhaib and Guantanamo and murdering the residents of Fallujah.

And competence? Talking about Bush or Dr. Rice and competence in the same sentence is risible. Yes, these two are so competent that they can look at a briefing entitled "Bin Laden plans to attack inside the US" that even talks about how (hijacked airplanes) and where (New York) and still not see anything specific. Again, give me a break.

There is only one problem with the critics' scenario: The opposite of what they predicted is actually occurring. Bush hasn't retreated an inch rhetorically and is stepping up the battle in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney is ensuring that the neocons are being promoted everywhere in the administration.

Bush hasn't retreated because he is a fool. Iraq is still a quagmire and it will still require brutality on a massive scale, such as we have witnessed in Fallujah, in order to "win."

Of course, the whore media, personified here by Mr. Heilbrunn, will tell us that it was all worthwhile and that Bush won a mandate. And Saddam really was a threat who had a vast biochemical arsenal and the world is flat after all.

Yes, I'm weeping as I read this nonsense. You should be, too.