November 13, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

NEOCONS AND FALSE NARRATIVES

Several years ago there was a movie called "Capricorn One." The movie's premise was that a manned Mars landing was faked. It looked real on television, but it wasn't really happening. Neocons who have sold the American public on things like trickle down economics, the dangers of "big government," and huge and costly military adventures have been running their own version of "Capricorn One" for a long time. Even as the Soviet Union was tottering, the neocons constructed another reality about the danger of the Soviet Union and the need for a huge military buildup. Robert Parry talks about it at www.consortiumnews.com:

As the Soviet Union continued its decline through the 1980s, the Reagan administration kept its eyes wide shut. The housebroken CIA analytical division knew better than to continue challenging the Soviet-juggernaut narrative.

Ironically, when the Soviet empire broke apart from 1989 to 1991, the CIA analysts came in for ridicule for “missing” the Soviet collapse.

But the neocons simply adjusted the narrative: Rather than accept that the Nixon-Ford détente-ists had been right about signs of Soviet weakness in the 1970s, the narrative became that Ronald Reagan had “won” the Cold War by supporting brush-fire wars, lavishing money on the Pentagon, and telling Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.”

An accurate narrative might have suggested that Reagan and the neocons had unnecessarily extended the Cold War, enriched military contractors, inflicted needless bloodshed, and strengthened future enemies like bin Laden. But the accepted narrative essentially justified all the carnage and corruption as essential to victory.

IS "DISAPPROVAL" STRONG ENOUGH?

New polls show that Americans are increasingly fed up with George W. Bush. Pollsters like to use a nice word like "disapprove." "Disapprove" is when someone talks a little loudly at dinner. It's not nearly strong enough to describe my feelings about this creep and the people who have supported him. They have the unmitigated gall to preach "morality" to us, or talk about U. S. sovereignty, or to claim that the war against al-Qaeda is the apocalypse. In the meantime, they rake in their war profits and they and their families don't risk a thing in fighting this "clash of civilizations." This commentary by Eugene Robinson is at www.thenewstribune.com:

It’s official: Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.

That should be a pretty good indicator of where Bush will rank when historians get their hands on his shameful record – in the cellar, alongside the only president who ever had to resign in disgrace.

A new Gallup Poll released last week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough – nearly two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush’s abysmal report card – only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he’s doing – actually overstates our regard for his performance.

According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who “strongly” approve of Bush as president with those who only “moderately” feel one way or the other about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full 50 percent who “strongly disapprove” of Bush – as high a level of intense repudiation as Gallup has ever seen in its decades of polling.