Killing Time

Read the Whole Thing

No, but really.

Like some 'best of bukkake' video, the article seems to drown the reader with money shots, but some amongst many.

'Since September 11, 2001, George W. Bush and his top officials have aggressively advanced into the world under the banner of spreading not stability, but democracy (at cruise-missile point). But they defined the freedom to vote (as the recent Palestinian elections showed) only as the freedom to vote as they wished the vote to go -- and it generally didn't. Meanwhile, at home, the Republican Party was practicing an advanced form of gerrymandering, election financing, smear advertising, and voter-suppression tactics that made a mockery of the electoral process. Everyone was to vote gloriously, but matters were to be prepared -- geographically, financially, and in terms of public opinion -- so that the vote would be nothing but a confirmation of what already was. What, after all, do you call it when, in what is considered the most wide-open election for the House of Representatives in more than a decade, only perhaps 40-50 of 435 seats are actually competitive (and that's considered extraordinary). Since 1998, 98% of House incumbents have won reelection, while in the last "open" election in 1994, when a Republican "revolution" took the House in what the New York Times calls "a seismic realignment," 91% of incumbents were nonetheless reelected. '

'Unitary Executive Theory: This isn't a theory, but a long-planned grab for tyrannical control under the President's "commander-in-chief" powers in a carefully redefined "wartime" situation that will not stop being so in our lifetimes. This "theory" was meant to give a gloss of Constitutional legality to any conceivable presidential act. What the "unitary" meant was "no room for you" when it came to Congress and the courts. The "executive" was, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Larry Wilkinson put it, rule by a "cabal," a cult of true believers inside the presidential bubble, impermeable to outside opinion or pressure. They were eager -- when it came to torture, unlimited forms of surveillance, and the ability to define reality -- to invest individuals secretly with something like the powers of gods.'

'Regime Change, Shock and Awe, Decapitation, Cakewalk: Ah, Iraq. What a field of linguistic fantasy play for Bush administration officials. "Regime change" was the global order of the day, if that "axis of evil" (and perhaps 60 other nations rumored to harbor terrorists) didn't attend to us. "Shock and awe" was what we would bring to Iraq, thereby humbling the whole "axis of evil" in a single awesome rain of destruction from the skies. As the planet's most dazzling military power, we would then go on a "cakewalk" (a high-strutting dance) to Baghdad and beyond, reorganizing the whole Middle East to our taste. "Decapitation" would be what would happen to Saddam's regime.
Behind such words lay inside-the-Beltway dreams of absolute global domination, of imposing a planetary Pax Americana by force of arms. It was the sort of scheme that once would have been the property of some "evil empire" we stood against. Behind it all, for an administration deeply linked to the energy business, lay control over the oil heartlands of the planet, known to this administration as "the arc of instability." Oil, or what George Bush referred to before launching his invasion as "Iraq's patrimony," was of such interest that the only places our troops guarded in those first "post-war" days of looting were oil fields and the Oil Ministry building in Baghdad. Of course, what Bush and his friends succeeded in visiting on the region was ever-spreading chaos. Since 2001, in its own version of the rectification of names, the Bush administration has actually been creating a genuine "arc of instability" stretching from Central Asia to Lebanon. The grenades are indeed now in the cockpit.'

And so on.

posted by Brendan @ 1:24 PM