Fanatics in the White House :
Two other pages on Good Works On Earth's web site are worth sharing here :
https://www.goodworksonearth.org/georgewalkerbush.html
Please follow the directions upon arrival at that Name Art.
.
This note added 20070425 :
The Drumbeat of Impeachment is Resonating Across America.
Impeach Bush : Impeach Cheney : Arrest Karl Rove
Crimes Against Humanity and Treason to Americans and the World Family.
The other link is from our email message sharing Arianna's article, and more.
https://www.goodworksonearth.org/message20030521whitehousefanatics.html
Subject: Fanatics In The White House
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 08:53:16 -0700
From: arianna@ariannaonline, now at the huffingtonpost.com
To: lexigram@goodworksonearth.org
A White House Fluent In Language Of Fanatics
By : Arianna Huffington
Maybe Karl Rove has moved his office into the "Matrix." Maybe Laurence
Fishburne is auditioning for Ari Fleischer's job. Maybe it's
all just a
bad dream: "The White House Reloaded."
I've been racking my brain, trying to reconcile the ever-widening chasm
between what the White House claims to be true and what is actually
true.
After all, we know the president and his men are not stupid.
And despite
the tidal wave of misinformation pouring out of their mouths, I don't
believe they are consciously lying.
The best explanation I can come up with for the growing gap between
their
rhetoric and reality is that we are being governed by a gang of out
and
out fanatics.
The defining trait of the fanatic -- be it a Marxist, a fascist, or,
gulp,
a Wolfowitz -- is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as
evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief. Bush and
his fellow
fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis who can hold their
breath and go without air for hours. Such is their mental control,
they
can go without truth for, well, years. Because, in their minds,
they're
always right. Oopso facto.
That pretty much sums up the White House m.o. on everything, from the
status of al-Qaeda to the condition of post-war Iraq to the magical
job-producing virtues of the latest round of tax cuts.
Who else but a fanatic would have made the outrageous claim, as the
president did last Friday, just four days after the deadly reemergence
of
al-Qaeda in Riyadh, that "the United States people are more secure,
the
world is going to be more peaceful?" More peaceful than what?
The West
Bank?
In the weeks before the attacks in Riyadh, the president had repeatedly
maintained that "we are winning the war on terror," and that al-Qaeda
was
"on the run... slowly, but surely, being decimated." So he clearly
wasn't
going to let a little fact like 34 dead bodies -- the result of three
closely coordinated suicide bomb attacks -- change his mind.
He was similarly unperturbed by that troubling new report from the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential and
non-partisan British think tank -- released a day after the Riyadh
bombings and three days before the president proclaimed us "more secure"
-- which found that al-Qaeda was "just as dangerous" and "even harder
to
identify and neutralize" than it was prior to 9/11.
And just 4 hours after the president strapped on his trusty blinders
and
delivered his rosy vision of a more peaceful world, the tranquility
was
shattered by the five simultaneous suicide blasts in Casablanca.
Oh well,
at least we still have the upcoming Jessica Lynch TV movie to make
us feel
good about ourselves -- give or take a few last minute rewrites by
the
BBC.
The president's evidence-be-damned fanaticism is equally apparent when
it
comes to the state of post-war Iraq. "Life is returning to normal,"q
he
proclaimed just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad. "Things
have settled
down inside the country."
Really? Just who is preparing his morning briefing papers?
Pollyandy
Card? Little Condoleezza Sunshine? Did he bother consulting
any Iraqis
about "normal life" there? Probably not. One of the keys
to being a
flourishing fanatic is to surround yourself with those of a shared
-- and
equally deluded -- mindset.
And according to that mindset, the definition of "settling down" can
be
expanded to include rampant looting, sporadic water and electrical
service, hospitals in disastrous condition, outbreaks of cholera and
dysentery, streets filled with uncollected garbage and raw sewage,
half a
dozen ransacked nuclear facilities, missing barrels of radioactive
material, growing anti-American sentiment, and disparate ethnic and
religious groups arming themselves. No wonder Don Rumsfeld called
the
media's reporting of all this "an overstatement." It's just another
"normal" weekend at Camp David.
And don't bother trying to make the case that everything isn't hunky-dory
in Baghdad to rabid acolytes such as Jay Garner. Like the president,
the
demoted viceroy doesn't care what the facts indicate -- to him even
a
looted and punctured glass can be half-full. "We ought to be
beating our
chests every day," he said, dismissing the notion that any of us should
feel bad about the problems besetting Iraq. "We ought to look
in a mirror
and get proud. We ought to stick out our chests and suck in our bellies
and say, 'Damn, we're Americans.'" That's sure to win us some
more
goodwill around the world. Hoo-rah, and pass the Kool-Aid, General
Jay!
And if you think the president is saving his fanaticism only for the
international sector, think again. His dogged devotion to selling
his
latest round of tax cuts for the wealthy as a "jobs creation plan"
--
despite an avalanche of evidence that it will do nothing of the sort
--
proves that he can be just as fervent on the home front.
"Jobs are on the line," said Bush after the Senate passed its version
of
the tax cut. "I call on Congress to resolve their differences
quickly so
I can sign a bill that will help create jobs, boost take home pay and
spur
economic growth." And for those with "...illionaire" as part
of their
economic description, it probably will.
It obviously makes no difference to the president that 10 Nobel Prize
winning economists have condemned his tax cuts as "not the answer"
to high
unemployment, or that a new Congressional Budget Office study found
that
the "jobs and growth package" will actually have very little effect
on
long-term growth. Not interested. Not listening.
The 1.4 million jobs
the White House repeatedly says the tax cuts will create are more a
matter
of a fanatic's faith than of dispassionate forecasting.
The fact is there are now 2.1 million more unemployed Americans than
when
Bush took office -- the vast majority of them having lost their jobs
after
the president's initial $1.3 trillion tax cut was passed in 2001.
Difficult evidence to ignore -- unless "ignore the evidence" is your
eleventh commandment.
A popular definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over
and over
again while expecting a different result. Well, that seems to
be the
White House theory on the power of tax cuts to produce new jobs:
It
didn't work before; let's try it again.
Welcome to the D.C. Matrix.
---
Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America."
Note added 2007 : To see the current writings of Arianna, and her blogger's sharings, visit the Huff Post : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
We invite you to read, A Cornucopia of Death, Arianna's article of April 12th, 2005, a fabulous Pope commentary.
We invite you to read Arianna's article of April 6, 2005, Bushes in the Hood.
We invite you to read Arianna's article entitled, A
Tale of Two Leadership Styles, dated 2 March, 2005.
"And so that's exactly what he (Andy Stearn) does, shaking
things up with his reform-or-else threat to break up the AFL-CIO;
with a campaign to bring Wal-Mart to its knees;
and with his pledge to "pay back" politicians, "no matter who they are
or what party they come from ... who looked us in
the eye and said they were for us--but then went out and betrayed us."
We invite you to read Arianna's Article entitled, Rummy TV, dated 23 February, 2005.
We invite you to read another article by Arianna, regarding the book, Disney War and more, dated 16 February, 2005.
We invite you to read Arianna's words on the Enronization of American Corporations, and our Corporate Executives.
We invite you to read an older article of Arianna's, dated March 12th, 2003 : Tax Havens: Are You With Us Or Against Us?
Yeshua ben Joseph is reported to
have said, "The power of life and death are in the tongue."
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