It was always that those powers were going to be given to the likes of a Bible-thumping, anti-abortionist, right wing, gay-hating, dumb-as-dogsqueeze George W. Bush, and his would-be Reichsfuhrer, John Ashcroft, first.
Oh, I imagine that this whole regime of Orwellian surveillance could be worse:
The American People could have been really stupid and elected Hillary Clinton. Can you imagine what She and Bill would have done with this sort of power?
We might as well face it: The Terrorists have won. Actually, they won a long time ago, but we just hadn't realized it. We thought we could fight back via a public relations campaign with guns in Iraq, alternatively bomb Afghanistan with High Explosives and Lunchables, maybe take a few swipes at some really bad men in Yemen, perhaps one day shoot Usama Bin Laden in his fucking face, and it would all be over. America would prevail, freedom would ring, democracy would be brought to the Middle East, and we could all go back to being September-10th-fat-dumb-and-happy.
But it was not to be. We did not have the proper tools in our toolkit to engineer a victory from the very beginning.
The first deficiency in the plan was to fail to identify this war in unmistakable terms. It was not, and never was, a war against a tactic (Terrorism), nor was it a war against an ideology (Radical Islam): it was, and always has been, a war between two incompatible civilizations, both in a similar state of decay -- one from rank stupidity, the other from the rot of it's institutions -- which are currently circling the bowl while maintaining a death grip on the other's neck.
Take your pick as to which side is stupid and the other rotten. The adjectives apply to both more or less equally.
The fight against "Radical Islam" (redundant) has always been a War of existential survival. It will continue to be so long after the main players of our day, Bush or Obama, Al'Qaeda or Hamas, are dead and buried. They hate us for our modernity and secularism which have provided us with wealth, power and a level of comfort unknown in human history. They want us dead, or just as good, alive as their slaves. They work on what they believe is an imperative from God, one which absolves of them of all sins in the completion of their holy mission. They will make no distinction -- they never do -- between guilty and innocent, combatant and non-combatant. Victory can only be assured when one side ceases to exist.
The jihadis know this. We used to know this (one only need to know what the United States did to Hitler and Japan in the Second World War. the Plains Indians, the Philippine Moros), but somehow we lost both the stomach and heart to fight wars in that fashion. Maybe it is the specter of Vietnam, perhaps the fact that our generals and political leaders are flaming retards who believe you can win elegantly without having to destroy things and kill people, a philosophy they have probably held dear ever since kindergarten through their time at the Kennedy School. In any case, they have forgotten that wars, once entered upon, need to be fought viciously and without mercy.
And speaking of those so-called 'leaders', they are our second weakness.
We have been saddled with a political class that, on the whole, is about at intelligent as the people who have elected them. Which is to say, not very smart at all. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the average American can't muster up enough intellectual firepower to burn calories, therefore, they manage to elect politicians who while just smart enough to avoid sticking hat pins in their own eyes, are also dumb enough to tweet dick pictures to anonymous underage girls (allegedly) and then run for Mayor of New York City.. This is probably why Neanderthal Man is no longer here, too, I figure.
Republican or democrat (small 'd' intentional), it does not matter; they were all educated in the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, (mostly) come from similar backgrounds, and have roughly equal levels of relative, just-above-animal) intelligence. One almost remembers, fondly, the days when we were debating who was the more intelligent man and, therefore, the better leader -- One side questioned Ronald Reagan's intellectual capacity, while it trumpeted the I-know-my-husband-cheats-on-me-but-what-can-I-do-About-it Hillary Clinton as 'the smartest woman in the world'; we argued over the mental capacity of George W. Bush who got 'Gentleman's C's' at Harvard and likewise John Kerry, who's father made a big enough donation to Yale to see him graduate. The left celebrated Bill Clinton the Rhodes Scholar, who let bin Laden roam free, not to mention his privates, and who could only use force against Christians in Texas, and a little Cuban Boy in Florida. We find ourselves with the albatross of an Obama -- whose grades we cannot see, but whose intelligence we can observe through the quality of his choices (Michelle, Biden, Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, Healthcare-over-the-Economy, Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarret, Susan Rice, am I inspiring confidence in you yet?) -- who is so obviously stupid, and yet obviously still popular.
It is a political class that does not understand it's own democratic roots. For if it did we would not get asinine insistence and assumption that freedom can be 'given' to Iraqis. That America can install the equivalent of an organized crime leader as President of Afghanistan, and then keep him there under the protection of American guns, and still call it 'democracy' is a joke. Purple thumbs do not a democracy make. They tend to think of democracy, when they think of it at all, like a piece of software that can simply be downloaded into the host society, and boom!, next thing you know, there's a stock market, JCrew and a Middle East version of CNN telling the approximate truth to millions of interested and intelligent people employed in a vast array of entrepreneurial vocations.
This political class doesn't know it's history, therefore, it does not know from whence it's own democratic systems and traditions comes from, and furthermore, has been 'educated' in a holistic, relativistic fashion in which it is erroneously believed that inside every ________ is an American just dying to get out. If it did know these things, it would have realized a very long time ago that democracy cannot take root in a society that does not respect the individual and which cannot chuck it's superstitions for the rational without several millions being killed in the process.
We have a military hierarchy which is still obsessed with the Lost War of their youth, and despite protests to the contrary has seemingly learned all the wrong lessons from it. The War on Terror has been short on the 'War' part; there was no great great war of annihilation, which is the secret to winning wars, but rather a reliance on tactics and strategies that have proven wholly ineffective. Counter-insurgency, shows of force against an enemy that simply runs away and regroups to attack at a time of his own choosing, Special Forces turning indigenous people whose greatest aspiration in life is to be able to rape their livestock and pray to their phony God, while stealing whatever comforts and riches they can with a AK-47 and Koran into a Citizen's Army. The way to win this war, and I have said so from the very beginning on this very page, was to make the Other Side suffer horribly.
Instead, we kill a few fleas from a distance, give a few Afghans purple thumbs, invest huge sums in rebuilding countries that will never appreciate the effort, and insist that we are winning. There is no Dresden, no Hiroshima, no Paschendale, no Tenochtitlan, no Wounded Knee, that is, no all-out effort to destroy the enemy and his means or will to fight. We don't wish to be seen as 'invaders' and 'murderers' among a people who have been nothing but for the last 1,400 years. Instead, they fight under the Vietnam-era rubric that "if you've lost Cronkite, you've lost the war...", and they know that is all they have to do; just outlast us, and our media and our own own fears will eventually do us in.
The Military who claims to have 'learned the lessons of Vietnam' forgets the lessons of Thermopylae, Salamis, Lepanto, Cannae, Kursk, Midway, that the only way to beat back a barbarian hoard is to stand and fight, and to make certain the enemy knows that you're serious about it. That you will spill blood, that you will take the fight to them, that you are determined to engage in a war of annihilation until one side is either defeated or dead. Instead, we kill with kindness. We bomb a village and then rebuild it. We shoot Afghans and Iraqis and then give them jobs. We use drone strikes to kill Al'Qaeda dudes hiding in the rectal regions of the planet behind human shields of women and children, and then offer apologies for the collateral damage.
Instead of demanding victory, we have blindly followed a so-called leadership which has led us down a road to a self-inflicted, internal defeat, a slow death by a thousand cuts. Al'Qaeda and all the rest did not have to beat us on the battlefields, for they had a secret weapon all along; the idiocy of the American people, and the sheer mediocrity of their leading lights.
For what has been the sum of all this combat? All these lost limbs and lives? The trillion dollar price tags?
You can't go to the airport without being aggressively felt up by a unionized high school dropout who was probably one of the people who let Mohammed Atta on a plane in the first place.
You live in an Orwellian state in which cameras are ubiquitous; your electronic communications are under constant review; your financial transactions are tracked; the entire alphabet soup of government agencies needs but the flimsiest of pretexts to obtain search warrants in the name of 'counter-terrorism'; our courts are routinely abused or ignored in the name of providing enemies of this country with 'fair' trials that drag on for years; we self-censor -- we cannot even call terrorism terrorism for fear of offending the other, we cannot admit the evils of Islam without 'inflaming the Arab Street', we must insist that when it comes to all things Islamic, up is down, black is white, in is out; we tie ourselves up in political knots debating whether someone in Gitmo should be transferred to Joliet or Sing-Sing; we're broke, we're tired, the only advances in technology are those which are useful to the military and police state.
While we fight over whether illegal aliens can be 'forgiven' the crime of sneaking into the country --- and then living in plain sight while they steal our money -- we're importing thousands of Islamists who will one day plant bombs at the Boston Marathon. And we're paying them welfare, to boot!
While we argue over whether middle-class, professional students are to be immune from the hardship of having to pry $6.99 out of their wallets for condoms and contraceptive sponges, some douchebag from Cairo or Karachi entered this country on a 'student visa' and having found America not to his liking (mostly because the blond-haired, blue-eyed girls his Imam told him were so easy won't touch him with a 10' pole), is rigging his second-hand Suburban to explode in front of Madison Square Garden.
While The West inflicts ever more wounds upon itself questioning it's worthiness to exist and value as a culture, some asshole in Iran is building a nuclear weapon, itself the creation of the Western scientific method which is based upon intellectual freedom, and is planning to detonate it in Tel Aviv.
All that happened on September 12, 2001 is that the American people in their ignorance decided to trust the very people who had made September 11th possible to make it impossible, retroactively. And because in this country the main engine of such sweeping change is government -- because independent citizens exercising their own gumption, intelligence and moxy is bad juju -- they decided to let government do it, and then didn't watch what they were doing.
And what did government do?
It created a new bureaucracy (Homeland Security), stuffed it the rafters with boobs and incompetents (the TSA), and instituted a repressive regime against it's own citizens in which, gradually and under the cover of 'National Security', our civil rights have been steadily eroded, and finally, totally ignored.
In other words, Congress and successive administrations have done what has been done on Wall Street for decades when something goes tits up: they reshuffled the org chart, added a few sinecures with important-sounding titles but no actual responsibilities, added a few more layers of bureaucracy, invented a few more rules, all at great expense, and then pretended the problem was solved., but it never is; it always re-emerges at some point.
The problem on September 11, 2001 was that a government infected with stupidity and political correctness, that had information that an attack was imminent, had the prime suspect's (Mohammad Atta) name and address, had forewarning that it would involve aircraft (Zacharias Moussaui), and had at least half the hijackers on a No-Fly List, let them fucking fly, anyway. Instead, government has seemed to come to the conclusion that the problem on that day that lead to 3,000 deaths on American soil is that we're too open a society., and that our people have too much damned freedom. There's not a single American in a leadership position on or before 9/11 who involved in any way, shape or form, who has ever taken responsibility.
Instead, we let them investigate themselves, and then exonerate themselves. Right, Jamie Gorelick and Sandy Berger?
And because Government is always much better at hindsight than foresight (thinking beyond today is not the strong suit of most politicians; if that were true would there be a $16 trillion National Debt?), it did what it has historically always done: it over-reacted, and made a great show of slamming the barn door closed long after the horse had shit and run off.
So, America, you should not wake up this morning shocked and appalled that you now live in a Police State, where the IRS can do whatever it fucking wants, just because, or where the Press is under assault by a government determined to keep secrets and punish it's enemies, where American citizens can be killed and the people responsible go free and the officials charged with avoiding such a thing don't have to answer questions and can dissemble over facts. You shouldn't be caught off guard by the knowledge that your precious life --every nook and cranny of it -- is now an open book.
You did this all to yourselves.
You gave up your freedom for the illusion of security. Do you remember Janet Napolitano on television trumpeting the 'success' of Homeland Security when the Underwear Bomber fucked up the comparatively simple operation of lighting a match, and was subdued by fellow passengers, after the CIA and TSA let him on not just one but TWO planes? Remember the same Janet Napolitano similarly blowing her own horn when the Times Square Bomber failed -- leaving behind his keys, forensic evidence, even his cell phone and address book -- because he got his wires crossed, and because an alert citizen called a cop?
Remember all those 'foiled terror plots' where the FBI gave the 'terrorists' a fake bomb, and then arrested them like it was all a second-rate prostitution sting on Cops? That's how we fight terrorism, I guess: we set up complete morons and hand them the rope to hang themselves with, but heaven forbid we should drop masses of napalm on Taliban and Al'Qaeda fighters hiding in Pakistan. That would remind the Arab Street of the Crusaders.
Because that's what you got when you demanded that 'something be done' and then didn;t oversee the project. And then, you went and made it worse.
Because you panicked in the Fall of 2008 and elected a complete retard. Granted, you didn't have much of a choice then, did you? Still, what has he done to make your life safer, and to safeguard your Civil Liberties?
Oh, that's right: he instituted ObamaCare, and now your medical records belong to the government, too. Now they not only know who you've been talking to on the phone, they know (or soon will) the results of your last colonoscopy, PAP smear or AIDS test. And we all know Barack Obama is a trustworthy soul, who wouldn't demagogue anyone, take sides based on race, feel compelled to destroy people who disagree with him, shake hands with dictators, insist the Muslim Brotherhood is a force for good, who doesn't have an agenda that would have made Robert Mugabe gape in amazement at the brazenness of it all don't we?
It was bad enough that we gave this sort of power to bureaucrats (of any stripe) to begin with. We now have to deal with the problem of having a complete egomaniac with no talent or real intelligence with his hands on the levers of that power. We should not be surprised that such a tiny intellect, totally unprepared for both the job and the circumstances, probably fearing for his life every minute of every day, under the heavy burden of a failed economic policy, worried more about his place in history -- or his next vacation -- than his job, a failed war policy, the embarrassment of having to continue the policies of his predecessor that he so vocally and publicly repudiated as fascist, constantly living under the threat that one day he will be truly exposed for what he really is, that sort of person would NEVER use and abuse that power, would they?
You elected a weak person, twice, and trusted him to do the right thing. Then again, you have always trusted weak people -- the American political class -- to do the right thing, and watched them fail, and then re-elected them, anyway. You're all like the abused woman who keeps coming back for more. I think now the lesson is finally being learned, because now it cannot be ignored; this is even more frightening than some douchebag in a turban taking a swipe at us. I think we're beginning to realize the difference between self-defense and self-slaughter.
It's unfortunate that it took the events of the last five or so weeks to make this clear to the American public, but like I said, most of them couldn't pry themselves away from American Idol or HALO long enough to notice that they were being secretly raped by a man they once considered a Savior.
That public used to watch Big Brother on television, but now Big Brother is watching them, very closely. Why, it's almost as if we have been identified as the enemy by our political class who used the real enemy as cover!
More fool us...
No comments:
Post a Comment