|
Part I of "Bombing His Way Into the Jaws of Armageddon"
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Introduction:
Of all the Bush Cartel lies and betrayals, of all the breaches of faith, Bush's usurpation of God to advance his political agenda is perhaps the most heinous of his sins. By asserting that he can better discern God's will than the leaders of his own faith (Methodist), his father's faith (Episcopalian), his brother's faith (Catholic), and the leaders of virtually every denomination in the United States, short of the Southern Baptists and Evangelicals, Bush is committing the ultimate arrogance. They all oppose the war that Bush claims is being committed in the name of God and Jesus. Bush stands virtually alone in claiming that God is on the side of his little war.
Bush's betrayal of the public trust through the manipulation of Americans by the use of fear and lies is a betrayal of men and women. His attempts to use God as an advocate for his pending Guernica bombing of Iraq -- with the resultant deaths of civilian Iraqis -- is a betrayal of the almighty.
It is unforgivable to hijack the government through a rigged Supreme Court vote. It is unforgivable to split the world of nations apart -- to pit ally against ally through threats, intimidation and bribery like a mob enforcer -- in the pursuit of a self-serving war. It is another thing altogether to use God as if he were your personal servant. For that sin, Bush will be held accountable in the hereafter.
The issue of Bush's alleged God and faith are so intertwined with every aspect of his horrifying presidency that BuzzFlash.Com will be running a multi-part series over the next week entitled, "Bombing His Way Into the Jaws of Armageddon."
Part commentary and part reflection, we hope to offer some insight into the disastrous reign we call the Madness of King George.
We hope you learn a bit from this series; we certainly are in writing it.
* * *
Part I: "Shock and Awe"
We've already experienced the Bush Cartel "Shock and Awe" here in the homeland. No we haven't been hit with 3,000 missiles and bombs in 48 hours. That's not the kind of "Shock and Awe" inflicted upon us.
No, the "Shock and Awe" that has rained down upon Americans is a bombardment of lies and propaganda that has become so commonplace that is now banal to hear another Bush Cartel politically motivated mistruth.
It is hard to keep track of the morally repugnant use of ginned up terror alerts and the manipulative use of fear to achieve political goals. It is hard to keep track of the ever-changing public relations explanations Bush uses to justify bombing Iraq and setting up a neo-colonial American outpost there. It is hard to keep track of the Grand Canyon gap between Bush's public image of "compassionate conservative" and his actual gutting of the social service support system for the elderly, children, the poor and the middle class in America.
We have been "Shocked and Awed" by the daily avalanche of big and little lies. The administration is the ultimate Hollywood production, where nothing you see or hear represents the reality of what is going on behind the set.
As we said, the very naming of the inferno that will be created by the Bush Cartel in Baghdad -- "Shock and Awe" -- symbolizes how the Bush Cartel is, in its own mind, assuming God like powers.
The claim of "moral clarity" by the likes of Bush, Ashcroft, and Tom DeLay is perhaps the most hypocritical of the hypocrisies of the Republican Party. There is no "moral clarity" to the Bush Cartel: only the assertion of a mandate from what clearly must be a renegade God, who appears closer to the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by the deeds of Bush, than to the God of the Bible.
If this is, as Bush and Blair proclaim, a "just war," then why does the Bush Cartel have to intimidate, threaten, bully and bribe national leaders to support it? This is, as they say in the "juice loan" enforcement racket, a muscle job, not a mission mandated by God. (See "The Muscle Beach Party" at http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/03/01/23.html)
So it is not surprising that the actual Guernica-style bombing of Iraq is meant to intimidate more than Iraqis and more than Muslim countries. It is meant to be a warning sign to our allies that there's a made-in-the-White-House vehicle loaded with enough firepower to destroy the earth careening down the highway of the world. A dry drunk (GWB) is at the wheel, with a car full of passengers besotted by absolute power shouting instructions into his ear. The display of "Shock and Awe" in Iraq is meant to signal to anybody who might think about crossing Fredo and the Corleone/Bush family that the Bush Cartel truck loaded with nuclear and conventional explosives might speed into any independent-minded country at any time.
The perverse assumption of God-like powers in the "Shock and Awe" attack is also meant to send a chill of fear down the spines of dissenters in America. The Bush Cartel will stop at nothing, the pulverizing attack on Iraq is meant to tell us. "We will assert power absolutely. We will roll over you. We will do what it takes to stay in power." That is what it is meant to show us here in the homeland. When Richard Perle called investigative journalist Seymour Hersh a terrorist on CNN, as he did on March 9th, you know that the arrest of U.S. citizens in the name of fighting terrorism is not far behind. As Daniel Ellsberg warned BuzzFlash.com in our interview with him, we are just one terrorist attack away from a dictatorship-like government being written into law. With its attack on Iraq, the Bush Cartel knows that it will probably provoke at least one or more terrorist attacks in the U.S.
In the election of 2000, the mantra of the Bush post-election Florida team was "bring it on home" no matter what tactics were required -- legal or illegal, ethical or unethical, honest or dishonest. There wasn't a thought about morality or democracy.
Most of us worship a God of justice, a God who urges honesty and compassion.
But in the case of the Bush Cartel, given its Orwellian underpinnings, everything about the war on Iraq is the opposite of what is preached by Jesus. In the world of the Bush Cartel truth is translated into lies; humility is translated into arrogance; compassion for the poor is translated into contempt; peace is translated into war.
One of the great ironies of the Iraq war buildup is that the Bush Cartel is betting that Saddam does not actually have any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Yes, the Bush Cartel sell-job to the American public and the world is to claim Saddam is busting his gut with WMD's. But it is one of the great farces of modern times that the U.S. intelligence agencies can't prove or find the location of what they claim exists. So they are banking on the fact that their real intelligence is correct: the madman of Iraq has no or little WMD inventory left. In that case, American casualties will be "minimal" and the Bush Cartel is counting on a decisive victory drowning out any other concerns about the war (such as civilian casualties).
We know that references to Nazi Germany tend to marginalize arguments against Bush among most Americans. But read these quotes and deny that they have relevance to the current Bush Cartel propaganda strategy about the Iraq war:
"I shall give a propaganda reason for starting the war. Never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.
"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out....The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly."
This was what Hitler said in 1939 prior to invading Poland and his words from Chapter Six of "Mein Kampf." That is not to say that the Bush administration is morally equivalent to the Third Reich, but the fact remains that they utilize similar propaganda strategies.
The Bush Cartel is counting on a "successful" outcome of this war to smash any opposition abroad or domestically to the permanent rule of a right wing government. All of this will be accomplished in the name of "God," of course. But this particular "God" is known only unto George W. Bush and his fundamentalist pals, like John Ashcroft.
Our brilliant Constitution and Bill of Rights was set up to prevent a crisis like the one that we are now experiencing. Our forefathers separated church and state so that we wouldn't be at the mercy of leaders who felt that they were on a mission on behalf of their own personally interpreted God. The Constitution was framed to keep us from a Jim Jones-style of government, replete with Armageddon overtones and fatalism.
We were founded by patriots who believed in God, but a God that existed as the image each American has of the Lord, a universal God. George W. Bush has blurred the lines of church and state. He would have us all worship in the church of the God of George W. Bush -- and have us believe that all other interpretations of God aid and abet terrorism. To be against George W. Bush's personal God is to be for terrorism, which means most of the nation's religious leaders must be aiding terrorism.
Bush's outlook is a betrayal of the Constitution and of America.
What a telling contrast Bush's calculated religious posturing is to the true faith embodied by Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter. Carter uses belief in a God as a motivating force to build homes for families in need through Habitat for Humanity. Carter is a creator, a humble nurturer.
Bush, in contrast, uses his God in a showy way as a justification for destroying women and children, cities and democracy. He pits ally against ally. He divides the world in order to pursue war.
In the name of his alleged God, Bush has become a destroyer.
BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
* * *
Also see these BuzzFlash editorial and commentary archives:
Can Bush Play Chess?
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/2001/09/24_Bush_Chess.html
Is the Pope Aiding and Abetting Terrorism?
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/03/02/21.html
Profiles in Prophecy: Which Armageddon Angle is Right for You?
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/03/07_armageddon.html
