Letters to the Editor
MereMortal
Published Letters: 150 Editor's Choice: 19
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it's all heading for a crash anytime soon.
[Read the article: The Republicans who would've impeached Bush?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wouldn't underestimate the psychopathic level of bullying of members of the senate and congress by the GOP, they have ways of keeping you in line, helping you to put your nose in the troth or killing your reputation with their media cronies[exposing your financial misdeeds/peccadilloes] either that or they send you letter with American-sourced military grade Anthrax in it.
It's really not that complicated when you plot it on a curve, bullies everywhere succeed wildly at first by spreading intense fear of 'consequences to any defiance' until they make too many enemies and are then themselves deposed, sooner or later, the GOP will implode, no entity in the universe can contain so many contradictions and prosper.
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it's the money stupid
[Read the article: Bringing Iran in from the cold]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]America's demonisation of Iran is a sham.
The US way of doing things is capitalism on steroids. The US economy (and plenty of others now) is lead by financiers and debt.
War is the perfect way for financiers to get rich as governments print bonds and borrow money from the world's financiers, generating an awful lot of business in the process.
Cheney won't talk to Iran because that would stand in the way of using war as an economic tool, also they keep threatening to undermine the dollar by redenominating their sales in Euros.
A country as vast and as powerful as the US cannot reasonably be at the whim of a maniac like Cheney who says "we don't talk to evil", he is backed up by plenty of nice business men in suits who say "say you don't talk to evil, but in the background carry out the plan to eliminate the troublesome Iranians as we have already discussed"
I mean, even if Cheney is so ethical that he cannot bring himself to negotiate with the Iranians, surely the real power-brokers in the country would talk him round if they thought that his policy was against the interests of the USA. They haven't
it's the intelligence services who cut his legs from under him by refusing to have Iraq redux.
The GOP have been demonising one enemy after another for the last 100 years (at least) as a way to not deal with domsetic issues. They love a good world crisis and war so that the US government doesn't have to have any useful plan or view on how to conduct home affairs. They tell you another story.
The Bush 2000 election was the last-ditch effort by the GOP to realign the world to their view. Then you get 9/11 then they fit up the intelligence services twice (they didn't see it coming, they sold us a pup on Iraq)
The intelligence services believe that Cheney and his 'handlers' are maniacs and that their mistaken world-view is a menace to the US, they have finally had enough. The NIE was their answer.
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two ways to interpret terrorism
[Read the article: GOP to voters: Be afraid, be very afraid]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]way 1:
a genuine threat from outsider extermists designed to exploit the soft underbelly of democracies and force the political elites (via pressure by their electorates) to change thier policies vis a vis a particular issue
way 2:
a manufactured threat by the political/military/financial elites to terrify the electorate into giving up their freedoms and for bypassing constitutionality and therefore checks and balances. Very useful for competing interests in goverment to get their agendas through - military, more spending, corporates, less oversight, after all what could be more urgent than fighting amorphous pervasive and ubiquitous 'terror'
it could very easily be argued that Bush's reaction to 9/11 pointed irrationaly to way 2 rather than way 1. After all, if your genuine concern is citizen safety, you wouldn't try to create a police state mentality and use it as a stick to beat your opponents.
I'm inclined to Webster Tarpley's view that wherever there is terrorism look for covert activity and assistance by governmental secret services. This is well know and well documented. The fact that the MSM doesn't like to point it out, is really besides the point.
I'd like to finally point out, that even on the surface of things the government narrative of the War on Terror (which has been a colossal flop politically but not for the military industrial complex) makes no sense at all.
let's get the Taliban, let's get Saddam...ah but where were the hijakers from =>Saudi, an ally.
where is alleged evil mastermind Bin Laden? => Pakistan, an ally.
so GOP where is the groundswell from your base for an invasion of Pakistan to rout out Bin Laden, the fact that they're not even suggesting it, shows that GOP policy has nothing whatever to do with US security given even the highly flawed internal logic of the government story and everything to do with using terror for domestic political advantage, hence these adverts.
I do get a sense however that the public (even the GOP supporters) are tired and bored of all this, it's been very grim, it's 7 years old and Guiliani the King of 9/11 show-one-upmanship [famouse words of Ralph Nader] is doing abysmally, Obama and huckabee have sensed this mood and they're doing rather better because of it.