All We See Are Nails, Part Two

To bring this article full circle, we must look at President Bush, who is trying to keep the spinning plates balancing on the pole like a circus clown. With the President’s poll numbers consistently in the low thirties, he lacks the finesse to maintain the act, so we know the “master architect” Karl Rove is behind the game, and he has a very full plate: maintain republican majorities in the House and Senate (if not gain seats), resuscitate the dismal Iraq war in the eye of the public, and stay one step ahead of Special Prosecuor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in his involvement in the Valerie Plame’ CIA leak case, all while crafting rhetorical verse aimed at selling the Iran war.

In a short time the news media has seen some interesting stories flow from the White House recently.

• Bush has admitted the CIA has been operating secret detention facilities in Europe. Too bad they didn’t realize the rest of us knew about the secret CIA flights and the prisons (at Guantanamo Bay) for quite awhile before letting us in on the secret.
• The White House is beginning to realize Americans have disconnected the war in Iraq from the larger “war on terror”. Most Americans know they’ve been lied to in regards to the intelligence between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. Are they really just getting around to taking the pulse on this long dead horse? Seems ironic that as I’m writing this, the Senate has just a bill banning the slaughter of horses for food. Guess this is “one that got away”.
• The party line laid down by the Bush administration is to strongly paint those who object to the war as being “disloyal” and “appeasers”, totally ignoring the fact it is a guaranteed right under the Constitution, which he wishes would evaporate into thin air. Bush is playing out a simple strategy: kill the messenger. Political dissenters have been under attack by the government for some time, including peaceful groups the government has no logical argument in which to accuse of subversion, but logic has no place in the White House.

The premise we started with (“when you’ve got a hammer, all you see are nails”) is ready to be honestly addressed. When one looks at the overall picture and asks, “are we better off today than we were on 9/11/01?” the answer is resoundingly no. We are much worse off than when this fight was started for a number of reasons.

1. The Bush White House has trained the average person into being afraid of Muslims with their constant bogus “foiled” terror plots. For the first three years of this war, we were conditioned like a Pavlovian dog to get scared when the Homeland Security Threat Level was raised, and learned to breathe again when it was lowered. There hasn’t been a single credible threat since the attacks, but that didn’t stop the government from emotionally manipulating us at will.
2. The “war on terror” is based up on the premise that 19 Arab Muslims hijacked four planes and flew three into their end targets. Considering nearly half of all Americans do not believe the government’s official story of this terrible day, there is sufficient reason to view it with great skepticism. For instance, six of the alleged hijackers as named by the FBI turned up alive and well, and proven not to be involved in the attacks. Mohammed Atta’s passport shows up in perfect condition two blocks away from the World Trade Center Towers while reports go on for months about a pool of molten metal burning on site.
3. The Bush White House has repeatedly tried to make the connection between Saddam Hussein and Iraq harboring Al Qaeda people, as well as manufacturing evidence to suggest Mohammed Atta had close ties to Iraqi officials. These were lies and Bush knew it.
4. If the official story and timelines have gaping holes in them, then the end conclusion cannot possibly support the original premise, and must call into question the reliability of the facts. The Bush White House allowed the attack to take place when they were repeatedly warned not only through domestic sources, but international ones.
5. Most Americans believe Bush allowed the attacks for the sole purpose of expanding the powers of his presidency. The general public would never allow for the expansion of presidential powers during peacetime. Knowing Vice President Cheney has vigorously sought to “restore” powers taken away from President Nixon by Congress due to his abuse of power, short of a national catastrophe, there was no hope of him realizing this dream. The neo-conservative think tanks agreed and said what the country needed was another “Pearl Harbor”. What kind of sick, demented, twisted freak of a person dreams up this brand of horror for his fellow citizens to achieve political dominance? This is nothing short of satanic!
6. There is absolutely no way to discuss the war on terror and separate oneself from the incredible abuses by war profiteers. Halliburton automatically comes to mind as the most egregious of the thieving lot, however, to ignore Cheney’s other holdings in a very well lobbied Lockheed Martin (ranked #1 on the Pentagon’s contractor list by dollar totals) or Donald Rumsfeld’s stock in the Tamiflu bird flu vaccine would let these two off the hook. This is insider information at its best! Rumsfeld made between $5-$18 million (depending on the sourced article and the date of it) on his, and Cheney’s Halliburton remaining 55,000 shares have increased a staggering 3,281%! Amazingly, no one seems to question him in regards to this astronomical growth, but everyone screamed to the high hills when Sen. Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 and achieved a $100,000 return.
7. In retrospect it is clear the neo-conservatives and the White House are after a cheap and plentiful source of oil in Iraq for personal profit as well as favorable poll numbers. In eight weeks we will go to the polls, and if you think the sudden strong drop of nearly sixty cents is mere coincidence, think again. Yes, the US government will deny it up and down, but even commentators like George Will have faced the ugly truth. The sad irony of this situation is under the current occupation of Iraq, this oil rich nation is forced to import oil to meet their basic energy needs. This is all on top of the Oil for Food scandal that the US had oversight on this program, allowed corruption to happen in direct dereliction of its duties, and then blamed the United Nations for mishandling, as outlined by a GAO (General Accounting Office) report.
8. To overlook the incalculable damage done to the Constitution and the basic rights of American citizens would be shoddy journalism. We cannot ignore the President’s use of signing statements or the 750 laws he broke , as calculated by the Boston Globe. Sen. Arlen Specter, considered by most republicans to be on the flaky fringe of the party, has surprised many and come out strongly and is preparing to sue the President in federal court in an attempt to force him to act in one of three constitutionally acceptable methods: sign, veto, or decline to act on a bill. Personal freedoms have been severely curtailed in many ways, especially in matters of privacy. Project Strikeback gave the FBI all personal information and demographics of students who applied for federal student loans, and the GAO filed a scathing report accusing the FBI of data mining. The National Security Administration (NSA) had its government pants yanked down around its ankles and left naked when it was revealed every American resident had their telephone conversations and the numbers logged “just in case”. The Department of Homeland Security has also been caught collecting information on peaceful groups like People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Quakers, Green Peace, and various Christian groups and then turning it over to the Department of Defense under the guise of “questionable subversives” that should be investigated. The most outrageous trampling of the First Amendment right to free speech resulted in the Secret Service arresting a couple who wore t-shirts that said, “Love America, Hate Bush” and “Regime change starts at home”. Another young man found out the hard way a “King George” bumper sticker can get you into hot water with the government. You can’t drive your car around without wondering if the white van next to you is just a white van, or if your carton of eggs and bottle of milk are getting x-rayed by DHS thanks to a new mobile lab on wheels. Of course public Islamic events are often subject to the over reaching, ever prying eyes of the intelligence community.
9. There’s no denying another obvious aspect as ugly and unfair as it gets: racial profiling. As a result of the government’s claims to the identities of the 9/11/01 hijackers, the world has become fearful and distrusting of Muslims and Arabs. After the thwarted London plane bombing, people became irrational and easily manipulated. There were incidents of planes that couldn’t take off until rowdy passengers got their way of having Muslims removed. In another story, an Iraqi man was harassed for wearing a t-shirt that upset passengers, and consequently, made to change. You’d think they’d be more upset over the college student who carried a stick of dynamite onboard a flight from Argentine to Houston or the Suspicious Behavior Police watching as you make your way through the RFID enabled airports. Here’s a tip: don’t look beady eyed or shifty and you might get past the “evil intent” detectors who are mixing it up to throw the terrorists off their game. Hey, it could be worse – you could be a European journalist flying to the United States.
10. In a horrifying turn of events, President Bush’s words are no longer carefully chosen with any thought – only with malice. In the beginning of the “war on terror”, he slipped by calling this a “crusade”, which made everyone cringe. His speech was adjusted to reflect not every Muslim or Arab was a problem, but a select few were labeled extremists. With caution thrown into the wind, he has embraced a last ditch effort to save his “war on terror” by claiming the war is being fought against “Islamofascism”; to anyone paying attention, his words now encompass an entire faith. How could such harsh rhetoric and faulty logic win hearts and minds? It can’t. There are two possibilities to account for the President’s drastic personality shift: his use of anti-depressant drugs , and possible mental illness.

If someone had told me before 9/11/01 that my government was going mass murder American citizens, blame it on the Arab world, and proceed in ethnically cleansing it for oil…I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s time for us to stop acting like a hammer and hallucinating the Middle East is one giant nail in need of pounding.