For the last four years, the Bush Administration has succeeded in getting Americans to accept war without end, intrusions into the most private areas of their lives, and debts so huge to finance his nascent dictatorship that every baby born today comes into the world in the hole for over $100,000. They have done this by using an "They're all alike" stragegy, fabricating an alliance between Osama Bin Laden and Osama Bin Laden that never existed, painting a picture of Scary Brown People from Arab Countries; and all the while sending President My Government out to cover their tracks by saying that we musn't generalize about Muslims.
So their shocked demeanor at finding out that Americans don't want even a so-called "friendly" Arab country operating our ports seems disingenuous at best.
Paul Krugman:
The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.
So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.
Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. "Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]," read an aide's handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. "Hard to get a good case," the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.
But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn't.
The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what's the difference?
Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
[snip]
But more to the point, after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs."
Finally, the ports affair plays in a subliminal way into the public's awareness — vague but widespread — that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed deliverer of democracy to the Middle East, and his family have close personal and financial ties to Middle Eastern rulers. Mr. Bush was photographed holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (now King Abdullah), not the emir of Dubai. But an administration that has spent years ridiculing people who try to make such distinctions isn't going to have an easy time explaining the difference.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is trying mightily to find a way to fit the "good Arabs" meme into the fearmongering that has been so successful for them. Yesterday, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England played the "aid and comfort" card, relying on the time-tested Bush Administration tactic of branding everyone who doesn't march in lockstep with them as being traitorous terrorist sympathizers:
If the furor over the port deal should go on, Mr. England said, it would give enemies of the United States aid and comfort: "They want us to become distrustful, they want us to become paranoid and isolationist."
Well, folks, there's your proof that the Bush Administration really IS in cahoots with Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden -- because it is the Bush Administration that's been fostering distrust for the last four years.
This last attempt to reframe the Bush Administration policy is the straw that finally caused the passionate but always controlled John Aravosis to go postal. I'm posting it here in its entirety, because he is absolutely right, and I only wish I'd said it first:
Now, my mom reads this blog. And I don't like gratuitous profanity because it's the easy way to evoke emotion when you don't have the right words. But Gordon England, you're a total asshole.
How fucking dare you invoke Osama and September 11 in order to get us to support an administration policy that is in fact CONTRARY to our national security interests? Just because Bush is in bed with the Middle Eastern oil producers we're supposed to roll over and play dead while you guys just give away that store to your petro-buddies?
How fucking dare you preach to us about being distrustful and paranoid?
You son of a bitches have raised distrust and fear to a high art. You have repeatedly violated the legitimate shock and horror Americans felt after September 11, abused our collective grief and pain and psychosis in order to push your own petty, personal political goals, and now that we catch you red handed, you have the balls to invoke September 11 again?
Gordon England, how fucking dare you, you un-American piece of shit.
You want to talk about giving aid and comfort to our enemies? How about your boss single handedly ripping the US Constitution to shreds, spying on American citizens, lying to the American public in order to get us to support his failed wars of convenience that have now so overstrapped our military we're unable to defend ourselves where and when it really matters?
How many World Trade Centers do you think Osama would have been more than willing to bomb in order to achieve all that? You people fucking handed Osama the dismantling of our entire democracy, and he didn't even need to fire another shot. And you lecture us about aiding and comforting the enemy?
How fucking dare you even have the nerve to speak to us about what's best for American ports when your God damn administration still hasn't secured container traffic coming into those very same American ports from abroad? What's the latest figure of the percentage of foreign containers shipped into the US that are actually screened (you know, for innocent little things like nukes)? Is it 5% max that gets searched, all the rest just go merrily on their way into our country containing God knows what?
And you have the nerve to lecture us about port safety and paranoia?
When the president of the United States is so out of touch that he goes on vacation for three days while a hurricane is wiping an entire American city off the map, you better believe I get paranoid.
When the president of the United States is so out of touch that he doesn't even know until the next day that his own vice president nearly killed a man, you better believe I get paranoid.
And when the president of the United States runs and hides for the entire day on September 11 while millions of us are forced to turn to Peter Jennings and Rudy Giuliani to be our presidents-by-proxy because George Bush is too much of a chicken shit to show his face for 12 fucking hours while we thought the world was ending, you better believe I get paranoid.
Gordon England. Go fuck yourself.
Amen, brother.
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