The White House Strikes Back
In an interview last week, the man in the White House said "There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth. I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
Now, of course, Bush was referring to the critical press coverage of his adventure in Iraq and, of course, Bush knows that what he is saying just isn't true. Bush knows that he and the senior members of his advisors lied through their teeth through the second half of last year and the first quarter of this year to sell the war in Iraq to the American people. And the American people, from Congress, through the press, down to the people on the street believed it. The evidence that has surfaced over the last six months or so has made it evident that the reasons we went to war had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, had nothing to do with 9/11. The plan to invade Iraq had been on the drawing boards months and years before 9/11, waiting for a trigger. In addition to the bad news concerning our reconstructing and rehabilitating Iraq, the press is starting to report on the real motives behind this war. It is part of the neo-conservative dream to establish an overseas American empire, to create a world in which America's supremacy is not only unchallenged but unchallengeable. These are facts.
Senior members of this administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz believe in this whole heartedly and they have exerted their considerable influence over Bush to have them allow them to put their radical plan for American world domination into play.
Does this mean Bush is being played by these people? Not likely. As he demonstrated in 2000, when he repeatedly lied about the impact of his tax cuts on "average" Americans, as he has demonstrated again and again since being installed in the White House, Bush is not above lying, not above subverting the principal of open and honest public debate that is a cornerstone of our democracy in order to advance his own radical agenda. Bush, supported by radical conservatives in and out of government and served by members in Congress of a docile Democratic party that has not understood what has hit and continues to hit them, has already undermined the ability of our Federal government to in the future provide to our citizens the basic services to which we have become accustomed and many have unquestioningly accepted as the proper roll of the government. Since the New Deal our Federal Government has established and strengthened a safety net to keep inividuals from falling out of the economy, from entering an economic despair not seen on a massive level since the early days of the industrial revolution. There have been periodic assaults on this safety net, most significantly before now during the Reagan Adminstration. But Bush and his ilk have gone beyond the tinkering with the system that has proceeded him. Bush has deliberately, in fairly large increments and a relatively short time, redistributed the tax burden in this country from those most able to afford it and who most benefit from it, the richest segment of society, to those far more vulnerable and with far less power to protect themselve, the working masses. In so doing, he has run up a debt that is simply unprecedented in this country.
It is hard to believe that as Bush took office the question was whether and how to distribute the surplus revenues the country was accumulating at the tail end of the Clinton boom years. Now, fewer than three years later we are looking at a budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars for this fiscal year alone. The next few years will offer more of the same. When Bush is done, our Federal Government may not be able to provide Social Security, or Medicare, or any of the other social programs that affect average citizens most directly. Bush and his kind do not believe in such things and they want to ensure not only that they are severely pared while Bush is in office, but that the country will be unable to restore them after he has left office.
Am I a nut, hallucinating and ranting into the night? No, I don't think so. The blue prints for this plan have been published for the last 10 to 15 years. The people in charge of the government now have spoken out over the years in favor of such a change. This is so foreign to what Americans expect of their government, so far from the hope and vision of a fair and successful America that most of us harbor in our hearts that Bush knows that we won't believe that this is what he is doing. And so we believe his lies, although the numbers show them clearly to be lies, because it allows us to sleep at night, without having to contemplate that our government has been hijacked by radicals.
And when snippets of the truth sneak out here and there in the press, Bush says that the American people aren't getting the truth. He's right of course. We aren't getting it.
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