Let Them Eat Fear

Yesterday’s appearance of Al Quaeda honcho Ayman Al-Zawahiri (Robin to Bin Laden’s Batman) in a yet to be authenticated video clip aired on Al Jazeera had all of the usual trademarks: the backdrop of rock cave or canyon, Islamic fundamentalist religious garb, an assault weapon at his side as a prop and fortuitous timing. The clip just happened to pop up at a time when the Bush administration hydra was regenerating, riding high coming off of a week of fawning mainstream press coverage over the pork laden horsetrading of a corrupt one party legislature that brutally rammed through Bush priority legislation including gun industry friendly immunity from product liability, baseball steroidgate news, resurgent missing Aruba teen coverage, giant panda bear news and space shuttle stories that completely knocked traitors Karl Rove and Scooter Libby out of the headlines. Now suddenly more bad news from Bush’s war threatened to slow the momentum. American marines in Iraq were becoming corpses in an increasingly bloody quagmire. 44 officially announced dead in the last 10 days was taking a bit of the bloom off of the chaff blossom that King George disappeared into on his way to yet another extended vacation on the phony Crawford, TX ranch where he spends more time on the taxpayer dole than any other chief executive in history.

Enter Al-Zawahiri. These Quaeda dudes just happen to pop up at the darndest of times, all fortuitously beneficial to periods of public discontent with the administration or ugly news that it considers inconvenient to the political agenda. Didn’t Osama himself just happen to emerge from the batcave looking tanned and rested only four days prior to last years election? Such coincidence may cause people to talk. Dubya was certainly using the occasion to talk, albeit mostly in a rambling and unintelligible manner (which he typically does whenever not reading from a teleprompter or taking audio cues from a back mounted communication device) from Crawford Ranch where he launched into a belicose diatribe to remind Americans that we are in a war to the death with the terrorists, after all, these are the guys who attacked us on 9-11 because they hate our prosperous lifestyle and the egalatarian democratic system in which we live. Strong Daddy, the protector was back!

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”

-Hermann Goering

Recent terror attacks in London and Egypt had the administration frantically trying to find an Al Quaeda connection, anything to resuscitate the specter of terror that has worked so well in using as a bludgeon of the American spirit so as to impose their radical fascist doctrine upon society, as Herr Goering said, “It works the same in any country”. The Bushie ship was taking on water due to the exposure of Rove, Libby and still to be named others in the treasonous Plame outing and terrorism has always been the ace in the hole to be played as the ultimate trump card at the most critical moment. The Al-Zawahiri video, while lacking the ability to send the nation into a much desired total lockdown where dissent would be quashed through extreme enforcement of the USAPATRIOT act certainly buys a bit of time for a workable strategy to be mapped out to distract attention for the looting of the treasury, the gutting of the constitution, the ascent of the ruling class and the rise of the theocracy.

Perhaps one day history will look upon the criminal Bush administration for its infamous crowning achievement, turning the United States of America (formerly known as the land of the free and home of the brave) into a nation of quivering, quaking, craven cowards and flag waving leg pissers. A free floating dread is maintained by melding entertainment with propaganda as evident by the popular FOX series 24 where there is always a loose nuke or other WMD in the hands of Islamic extremists seeking to destroy the American way of life. Phantom menaces the like of the all powerul Al-Zarquawi plot to turn the Iraq charnel pit into a staging ground for a war against ‘democracy’ drawing ‘terrorists’ from across the middle east to wage jihad against U.S. forces (giving the right wing media another great canard: we are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here) and to pull off daring escapes the likes of which belong in cliffhanger action movies just as his imminent capture looms, and he is free to loose his malevolence another day. I am increasingly suspicious that the dreaded Al-Zarquawi does not even exist and is just another ficticious super villian created by pentagon propaganda mills bent on peddling their illicit war to tv nation as though it another season of 24.

These days people jump at shadows and see ‘terrorists’ seeking to destroy the holy sanctimony of the American way of life in every dark skinned person and facilitators of the enemy in every citizenwho dares to question the morality of Bush’s war or the fanatic zeal of his rubber stamp congress and bureaucrats who seek to repudiate over two hundred years of constitutional freedoms. These are freedoms that have been paid for on the installment plan by each generation whose young died in a foreign war, shedding their precious blood for ‘democracy’. Now for political expedience and the advancement of a fascist agenda the sacrifices of the brave ones are not only ignored but in an ultimate disgrace to their legacy, are cynically used by those usurpers of democracy who cower behind the stars and stripes and use bill of rights as a shield from which to launch attacks on others seeking to utilize their own civil liberties by standing up to the domestic terrorists in our own government and corporate America who relentlessly attack the patriotism of those questioniong any that are not a part of their particular militant status quo, be it the elitists at the top of the oligarchy, the Wall Street investment bankers, the insane, doomsday cult ‘christian’ fundamentalists or the corporate masters of energy and the military industrial complex.

Americans have for the most part been brainwashed by incessant nationalist propaganda distributed by a compliant state controlled media, rendered ignorant by those seeking to misrepresent our national history and heritage, pitted against each other so the uber-capitalists and free market fanatics can continue to wage relentless class warfare against the working people through the exportation of our jobs to low cost third world cesspools for the maximization of shareholder wealth, mortgage the future of our children by amassing unprecedented levels of foreign debt, money that will one day have to be paid back at a time when the scoundrels who have used abortion and gay marriage as a ruse to dupe people into putting their children to bed cold and hungry in order to empower those who would seek to further lay waste to the prosperity for all that was at one time, not long ago an American birthright. These people have crippled what was once the American Dream, a concept that is now on life support, they are coming to pull the plug now, hiding under the guise of phantoms and seeking to exploit FEAR in order to finish the job.

Nothing is a more useful tool than fear. Fear will distract the American sheeple from both the increasingly unpopular move to defraud the public on our nation’s longtime, successful retirement programs as well as from the news that Video News Releases (VNR’s) which are slickly produced pieces of advocacy ads produced by public relations firms that resemble actual news broadcasts are being utilized with increasing frequency by the criminally dishonest Bush administration in foisting their radical agenda off on a terrified and dumbed down public and that the usage of these slick infomercials have been decried by the GAO (Government Accounting Office) as the misuse of taxpayer dollars to fund illicit propaganda which is prohibited. If Tom Ridge’s kindergarten level homeland security color threat level chart were still in use it would likely be blinking red today.

Goering was right. It is our national shame that the GOP party strategists are so cynical and ruthlessly calculating that they freely use the techiques of his Nazi regime’s playbook and nothing is more shameful than a populace that is so ignorant of history and terrifed of the present that they allow it to happen.