[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

OUCH! THIS IS SO ON TARGET IT IS PAINFUL.....MD> 
>  Ideological Prozac, American Style 
> By William Rivers Pitt 
> t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
> 
> Tuesday 11 October 2005 
> 
> 
> >> While one who sings with his tongue on fire 
>> Gargles in the rat race choir 
>> Bent out of shape from society's pliers 
>> Cares not to come up any higher 
>> But rather get you down in the hole 
>> That he's in. -- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma"
>> 
>> 
>  
> My goodness, but I have been out of it these last several days. I've been in 
> this tiny log cabin, see, at the end of five miles of dirt road up here in 
> New Hampshire. There is a lake and a kayak and dogs and a fireplace and a 
> television that gets one channel filled with little beyond cooking shows. I 
> finally got a glacially slow dialup connection to the internet going, and decided 
> to get caught up on the doings of the world beyond these woods. It seems 
> things are moving briskly. 
> Mr. Bush has been tattooed about the head and shoulders for suggesting that 
> God told him to invade Iraq. I can't imagine why anyone is surprised by this. 
> George is the putative head of the fundamentalist evangelical wing of 
> Protestant Christianity here in America, and has been for years. They are the 
> source of his now-waning political strength. Pretending to be on 
> armchair-to-armchair relations with the Almighty is the best way to keep the 
> Christo-Talibanical wind at his back. It's either that or he is literally hearing voices in 
> his head. Let us pray it is the former, as bad as that may be. The alternative 
> is that the man with the finger on the button needs to be fitted with one of 
> those coats that button up in the back. 
> It seems the horrifying threats of mass bombings and death in the New York 
> subways were, in fact, a big fat hoax. I'm shocked, shocked, that a bogus yet 
> spectacular warning was broadbanded the same day as word came down that 
> Fitzgerald was about to drop the hammer. Funny how the worst possible terrors 
> always seem to pop up on the grid whenever George and the boys get themselves 
> into hot water. The individual who provided this false information is in the 
> hands of Pakistani officials. Mayhap the false threat information came about 
> after a round of torture? Perish the thought. 
> However the false threat came to be, it hasn't deflected the hard rain about 
> to fall on the White House. New York Times reporter Judy Miller, once 
> lionized by defenders of journalistic ethics for refusing to divulge a source under 
> duress, now appears to be simply another dirty player in a filthy game. As 
> if by magic, a notebook of hers filled with crucial information has suddenly 
> materialized out of the ether. The notebook details a conversation between 
> Miller and Cheney's right-hand man Scooter Libby, and indicates that Libby may 
> well be the original source of the leak that put Valerie Plame on the public 
> shelf. Simultaneously, an email from Karl Rove that puts him on the spot for 
> outing a CIA agent likewise sprouted from nothingness. The walls are indeed 
> closing in on these rotters. 
> Fitzgerald's investigative ticket expires at the end of the month, so if 
> something is going to happen, it will happen soon. It is all-important, as the 
> Byzantine details unspool, to remember the main point. 
> Rove, Libby, along with others within the administration as well as the 
> now-compromised Ms. Miller, were involved in one thing and one thing only: 
> selling the American public a budget of lies to justify the now-catastrophic 
> invasion and occupation of Iraq. Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed Bush's 
> "Uranium-from-Niger-in-Iraq" nonsense in the public prints back in the summer of 2003, 
> and the attack on his wife was meant to deflect and destroy that criticism. 
> Ultimately, the purpose behind this was to maintain the rationale for war. 
> It isn't about perjury, or contempt, or any other low-rent charge. These 
> people are responsible for nearly 2,000 American military deaths, thousands of 
> American military wounded, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, and the 
> looting of the American treasury to the tune of several hundred billion 
> dollars. In other words, they have committed premeditated first-degree murder on 
> a massive scale, assault, conspiracy to commit same, with grand larceny 
> thrown in to boot. In Texas, you get a spike in your arm for that, and a quick 
> trip to Somewhere Else. 
> The larger picture developing here was captured by, of all publications, the 
> London Daily Mirror over the weekend. "Americans are the planet's biggest 
> flag wavers," wrote veteran Mirror correspondent Dermot Purgavie. "They are 
> reared on the conceit that theirs is the world's best and most enviable country, 
> born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, 
> opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures. They rejoice 
> that 'We are No.1,' and in many ways they are. But events have revealed a 
> creeping mildew of pain and privation, graft and injustice and much incompetence 
> lurking beneath the glow of star-spangled superiority." 
> "America's sense of itself - its pride in its power and authority, its faith 
> in its institutions and its belief in its leaders - has been profoundly 
> damaged," continued Purgavie. "And now the talking heads in Washington predict 
> dramatic political change and the death of the Republicans' hope of becoming 
> the permanent government." This sentiment was echoed in a Washington Post 
> article from Monday by Charles Babington and Chris Cillizza, who wrote, 
> "Republican politicians in multiple states have recently decided not to run for Senate 
> next year, stirring anxiety among Washington operatives about the 
> effectiveness of the party's recruiting efforts and whether this signals a broader 
> decline in GOP congressional prospects." 
> An epic electoral reversal for the GOP in 2006 may be in the offing, but 
> there is a larger game afoot. We are sliding back into the kind of ideological 
> malaise endured during the late 1970s. The end days of the Carter 
> administration saw skyrocketing gas prices, economic stagnation, the humiliating hostage 
> crisis in Iran, the shock and disgust derived from the crimes of Watergate 
> and the resignation of a sitting President, and let's not forget the lingering 
> sting of a lost war in Vietnam. All of that balled together left the country 
> at a loss. The belief that we were special took a furious beating, and only 
> the superlative shyster salesmanship of Ronald Reagan was able to restore 
> faith in the desiccated mythology. 
> Americans, by and large, have a fundamental need to feel like they are part 
> of something great, above the fray and beyond the rest of the world. They are 
> fed American exceptionalism with mother's milk, and will fight like rabid 
> wolverines to avoid being forced to believe otherwise. Anyone mystified by the 
> public support Bush has enjoyed until very recently, despite the endless 
> litany of disasters that have befallen us, can look to this bone-deep need as the 
> main reason for that support. It isn't just about 9/11. Americans need to 
> feel good about America in the same way fish need water. Americans need to 
> believe, and will thrash around like boated marlin if that belief is undercut. 
> That belief serves as a kind of ideological Prozac, shoving bad thoughts to the 
> background. 
> Iraq. Afghanistan. The continued freedom enjoyed by Osama bin Laden. 
> Katrina. Abu Ghraib. Frist and insider stock trading. DeLay and a handful of 
> indictments. Rove and Libby staring down the barrel of more indictments. Bush's 
> approval ratings are plummeting, and the entire country is beginning to wilt 
> under the depressing reality that we are, in fact, getting screwed with our pants 
> on. Any conceits of moral authority being put forth by the White House and 
> the Republican Party have been washed away in a flood of graft, death, lies 
> and corruption. 
> Our supply of Prozac is running short. The belief in American excellence so 
> desperately necessary to the mental balance of the populace is being eroded 
> by the hour, and there will be hell to pay because of it. 
> William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling 
> author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The 
> Greatest Sedition Is Silence. 
> 
> ------- 
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