So we have fictional footage being broadcast across America, showing the results of a made-up attack that never happened, all to support an illegal domestic spying program backed by a President that wasn't even properly elected.
Suddenly, the new Bush war mongering strategy comes to light. Each month, we'll be shown images of a horrendous attack that COULD have happened, if we as Americans hadn't been willing to give up all our civil liberties in the name of security. And then every once in a while, they'll let an actual attack slip through (just like Bush knew the levies in New Orleans were going to fail, yet did nothing) just to remind people how much they need to live in constant fear.
That people continue to fall for this simplistic terrormongering is perhaps more shocking than the fact that a U.S. president would rely on it as his primary source of political support. I suppose at this point, Bush can just make up anything he wants and a certain portion of U.S. voters will blindly go along. His presidency is more a chain of lies than anything resembling actual leadership.
"I never met Jack Abramoff," he says, just weeks before multiple photos showing Bush meeting Abramoff flood the internet. "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," he claims. And now the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell has declared on national television, "I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." The hoax to which he is referring, of course, is the hoax of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (upon which the entire justification for war was based).
The greater hoax, of course, is the idea that we live in a free nation, and that other nations "hate us" because of our freedom. These other nations, the thinking goes, want our form of "free" government so badly that we must actually invade them, kidnap their leaders, kill their armed rebels, and install our own form of government at gunpoint. And then they're all supposed to thank us for being such nice neighbors.
Case in point: 1st Lt. William Rebrook was recently forced to repay the Army $700 for damage caused to his body armor by a roadside bomb. As you may have guessed, he was wearing it at the time, meaning that he not only absorbed the blow of the bomb, he also had to absorb the financial losses caused to his gear.
His right arm was shattered in the explosion, but the Pentagon apparently wanted an arm AND a leg as it forced him to cough up the cash (which he had to borrow from his Army buddies to pay).
This must be Bush's new plan to finance the war in Iraq. Make the soldiers pay with not only their lives, but their checkbooks, too. Now, perhaps, soldiers will have to take out loans for whatever protective gear they wish to wear. I wonder, if an Apache pilot gets shot down and killed, will the Pentagon bill his family for the helicopter?
Does anyone else get the feeling that the events in this war have become increasingly ludicrous?
Nowhere on the agenda was new funding for teaching ethics, by the way. Ethics courses are nowhere to be seen in the U.S. education agenda, which is one reason why U.S. schools keep churning out a few really smart people with really bad ethics. People like the guys who ran Enron, who still don't admit they did anything wrong.
Bush has promised that if spending $136 billion over ten years to boost the quality of education in American schools doesn't do the trick, he's ready to slash achievement standards across the nation (just like with the "No Child Left Behind" fiasco), instantly transforming all schoolchildren into A+ students. If that doesn't work, Bush is ready to bomb China, India, Korea and Japan during study hours, just to make sure their students can't concentrate (thereby making U.S. students relatively more competitive). "We have to create a competitive advantage here at home," explained Bush, "even is that means bringing freedom to China, India, Korea and Japan."