Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1883 Editor's Choice: 20
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Fear.
[Read the article: Attention Democrats: GOP fear-mongering does not work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain."
- Anatole France
Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well for Bushite neoconservatives very well any more. It's been overdone. Which is why they employ other tactics in conjunction with fearmongering, like intimidation and repression:
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
- Josef Goebbels
Bushites have failed to "shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie," mostly because they can't. Not all Americans are sheeple, and fewer of them are susceptible to Bushite lying every day.
And fewer are still susceptible to their fearmongering:
"What will become of us — of me?"
"Like all fear, you eventually . . . vanish."
"I'm afraid."
"I know."
- The Thaw
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Anonymous
[Read the article: Attention Democrats: GOP fear-mongering does not work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]what could Bush have done to prevent 9/11 with only a month's "warning" in the form of a vague intel briefing.
-- Anonymous
You've misrepresented the circumstances immensely.
On May 29, White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that when these attacks [on Israeli or U.S. facilities] occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them. At the end of June, the commission wrote, "the intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level." In early July, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was told "that preparations for multiple attacks [by Al Qaeda] were in late stages or already complete and that little additional warning could be expected." By month's end, "the system was blinking red" and could not "get any worse," then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 commission.
It was at this point, of course, that George W. Bush began the longest presidential vacation in 32 years.
"Vague intel briefing" indeed. It should be obvious to anybody, on the basis of this evidence in addition to overwhelming quantities of other evidence, that Bush deliberately permitted the 9/11 attacks to occur.
9/11 was Bush's Reichstag Fire, and everybody in the White House knows it.
And that's treason for sure.
It's also conspiracy to commit mass murder.
Neocons did promise they would do this, after all. They planned for it, and then they made it happen:
"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5428.htm
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The Why of it, reprised.
[Read the article: Attention Democrats: GOP fear-mongering does not work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why does Bush feel the need to subvert Constitutional rights, basic human rights, and the rule of law generally?
I'll give you a hint: it's not to 'fight terrorism'. Much less aggressive tactics than overt imperial militarism would be far more effective in doing that, and an easy argument from the evidence proves that Bush's corporatist imperialism encourages and even causes 'terrorism', and does not mitigate it. Attacking countries not involved in 'terrorism' would not have stopped 9/11. So why is he so wedded to his approach?
It's to create a right-wing police state, a neoconservative totalitarianism. Bush isn't "destroying democracy in order to save it". He's destroying democracy to complete the process of turning the US into a fascist empire for the benefit of power-mad corporate greedheads in Big Oil and the Military-Industrial Complex. If you look closely, you can see that the US is already most of the way there, not in the people, but in how the power structures have been organized in the last twenty or thirty years.
Clinton didn't need these extraordinary Police Powers to prevent eight 9/11-level "terrorist attacks". Bush doesn't need them to prevent "terrorist attacks" either, but he does need them to establish a totalitarian police state. He also needs enormous concentration camps and a string of overseas gulags to deal with people who disagree with him. Those he already has. What did you think they were for? Fighting "terrorism"? Come on.
That's what the facts say. There can be no other explanation.
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Bush thinks Americans need a prison. Therefore he's turning the country into a prison, on the pretext of keeping us 'safe'.
Democracy, which has grown up in the last three hundred years, represents, with its emphasis upon individual responsibility and individual actions, the most difficult societal system, requiring a definite human maturity.
Totalitarianism and especially fascism can in many ways be regarded as an escape from this difficulty into the irresponsibility of following a leader who deprives the people of their liberty and their maturity but promises them 'security' and 'economic progress'.To that end, personal immaturity and self-gratification are celebrated and promoted by corporate America in particular, and in U.S. culture in general, because it prepares the electorate to give up its responsibility to maintain democracy in favor of totalitarian leadership.
- Neoconservative TotalitarianismJoe Conason understands these things: it can happen here. It is happening here.
You need to be more afraid of Bush than of 'terrorism'. A lot more.