The Art Of Magical Thinking

reprint

On April 30, I wrote in response to something the President (George W. Bush) said:  

The President has stated that there is no magic wand which he might wave to force back the price of fuel. Unfortunately, he is mistaken. 

He seems to have forgotten that he himself established the existence of such a magic wand. When did this President abandon the ways of magical thinking? He used to think magically. What else could you call his actions: talking to some sort of deity about launching a war, looking into the souls of Russians? Pure magic. 

The old magical wand he used to believe in was: Invade a Middle Eastern country and oil will be cheap! 
The War will pay for itself and supply will be assured for the future.

Now we must add Perry Como's take on invading foreign countries: (To the tune of Catch A Falling Star.)

 

Invade a foreign country, put it in your pocket, Never let it get away!  
Invade a foreign country, put it in your pocket, Save it for a rainy day!  
For times may change and gas become expensive, it can come and go;  
And if you try to make it more regressive, you'll have a pocket full of petrol!


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Bush Reunion

Top: Wolfowitz, Kristol, Perle, Feith

Bottom:   Libby,  Bolton,  Ledeen

A Mendacity of Neocon Republicans...


"Mendacity" is used as a term of venery:

Venery refers to hunting game animals such as wild boar, hares, wolves, bears and — especially — deer. A close relative to venery is venison, nowadays always meat from a deer but in earlier times the flesh of any hunted animal.

Venery dates from medieval England and is closely connected with the royal forests established by the Norman kings and nobles after the Conquest of 1066...

This led to the expression terms of venery, collective nouns for types of game and other wild animals, such as cete of badgers, murder of crows, parliament of rooks and paddling of ducks.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-ven1.htm

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The Reality Of ISIS

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”
Karl Rove, advisor to President George Bush 


If you ask yourself "who and what created ISIS?", recall this good article on the the deliberate lies that were used to destroy the balances of power in the Middle East:

Consortiumnews.com
The Phony ‘Bad Intel’ Defense on Iraq
May 15, 2015
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/05/15/the-phony-bad-intel-defense-on-iraq/

[...]

Just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld began promoting the notion that Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction and that “within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaeda.” This was an early articulation of the bogus “conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” now immortalized in what is the most damning, first-hand, documentary evidence of U.S./U.K. collusion in launching a war of aggression on false pretenses and how it was to be “justified.”

This evidence was contained in the “Downing Street Memorandum,” written on July 23, 2002, though not published until May 1, 2005, by The London Times (discussed in more detail below). The goal was to systematically conflate Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of WMD with al-Qaeda and 9/11, as a kind of subliminal fear/revenge message to the American public.

It was not long before the agile Rice did a demi-pirouette of 180 degrees, claiming that Saddam had suddenly become “a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” By the summer of 2002, the basic decision for war having been taken, something persuasive had to be conjured up to get Congress to authorize it. Weapons of mass deception, as one wag called them, together with warnings about “mushroom clouds” were just what the Doctor Rice ordered.



Sadly, CIA’s malleable director George Tenet followed orders to conjure up WMD in a deceitful National Intelligence Estimate issued on Oct. 1, 2002. The NIE’s main purpose was to deceive Congress into authorizing war on Iraq, which Congress did just ten days later.

[...]

We are still suffering the karma of bad intentions that flows from this cynical and debased deception.

We were all guilty, so we shall all be punished.

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The Bush Legacy

"We wuz robbed! Robbed by fate! O, unkind Fortune

that toys with us, and brings our plans to naught! "

My father has come around to thinking the Bush Administration has long overstayed its welcome. He was a Bush supporter for a long time. What changed his mind is an article in the National Geographic about the extinction of animal species, and the fact that even the National Geographic finally has to say how little the Bush Administration has done. Indeed, this administration has been an obstacle to progress. But what could one expect from an administration that saw fit to appoint religious hacks to important positions in Space and Science agencies? Science, Space, the Environment, all of these were nothing but fields in which to reap political benefits. We may ignore the fact that by impeding the progress of science, we effectively act against our continued leadership in science, and , by direct causality, our economic well-being. However, he did say that you have to give Bush one thing: there has not been another terrorist attack on American soil since 2001. Of course, I resisted giving Bush this, because the overall logic is fallacious, just like everything about the neoconservative right-wing and their lackeys. Everything is a fallacy. If I were to admit that it is true that Bush is responsible for the lack of further attacks, then I would be essentially giving some sort of validity to a process of "giving credit". This immediately implies an acceptance of the validity of "giving blame". So who is to blame for 9/11? If I give someone credit, I must logically assign blame somewhere also. If I assign blame on a Democrat, I immediately drop my mask of impartiality and am discovered for what I am, a partisan of a political view. Therefore, my observation that credit is due Bush is a rhetorical device, and cannot be held to be a proposition that may be true or false. If I assign blame to Bush, who was the President at the time, every nitwit eager to give Bush credit for the lack of further attacks would immediately disagree with me, and denounce me. Thus, there would be no possibility of agreeing on any of the credit/blame propositions. It is complex. If it is complex to assign blame, giving credit is equally complex. Remember that only a year or so ago, Bush wanted to take credit for the economy! On July 19, 2007, to be quite exact. Look it up. Now the silence of Bush on Gaza will threaten our future, not make it safer. They believed in Power and the Sword; they were defeated by greater Power, ironic reversal of arrogance. But then name one thing that the Bush bunch done to encourage our lives, our fortunes, and our pursuits of happiness?

Bush Destroys The Future 2

Of course, he is aided and abetted by his cronies; i.e., the rest of us miserable zombies, walking around looking for brains to eat and money to stick in our pockets.

Right about now, a little Goya is again is in order to show the Present age destroying the Future, eating it own offspring, as it were, a la some Greek myth or tragedy of a special nauseating quality.

So I shall do a Carl Denham and bring this monster to the New World and show it to the masses. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present The American People, the Eighth Wonder of the World!! Eating the Future!!!

 

Chronos Devouring His Children by Goya

Admiral Fallon Retires

Admiral Fallon has tendered his resignation. I believe that he will be sorely missed. I have paid some attention to him over the past 3 years, and have been impressed by his abilities. I also read the article in Esquire and realized he would be in Bush and Cheney's sights, even though the article's load of fustian was created by the writer, not the admiral. He resigned today. Sometime during the night or when I awoke, I had a structure in my head about how a very unpleasant situation would develop. I thought to myself, "At this point, when we see Admiral Fallon go, it will all fall apart." So when I saw a report on his resignation, I was not too surprised, although it seems I should have been. Things are what they are. The President speaks on his war, Cheney goes to Saudi to beg, violence is still the rule in Iraq; there is a bunker mentality taking over as the cannons come closer. We are walking into the eye of the storm...and we are clueless in Gaza. Admiral William Fallon knew that he would be forced to resign after the article appeared. Admiral William Fallon could not come out and tell each one of us what the administration was up to, so he planned the article and his resignation to send a message to us, if we shall only be smart enough to read it. There are many good people who are actively involved in the work of this administration who do not wish to see any further evil done.

Note: When we see the Admiral go, it means that Bush has sabotaged everything the Admiral had tried to accomplish, and things will fall apart. For a different perspective on it, read: The resignation of Admiral Fallon will provoke renewed fighting in Iraq by Thierry Meyssan http://www.voltairenet.org/article155950.html

Richard Cheney, The Kwantung Army, And The Gang Of Four

Iraq: A Gang of Four Production

At the BBC we read Cheney insists Iraq surge working in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6925368.stm

As we read through, we come across this:  

"The Petraeus-Crocker report is due to be presented before Congress on 15 September. Democrats, who are in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, want President George W Bush to come up with a military withdrawal plan from Iraq for 2008. But the man Mr Bush has nominated as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Michael Mullen, has predicted that the US will be in Iraq for years, not months, and he warned Congress against attempts to secure a rapid pull-out of troops. "  

This brings us to the point where we must stop and consider.

Surely the generals and the army know how to fight a war, at least some of the time. They did not seem to know how to fight this type of war. General Petraeus had to be rescued from oblivion and obloquy to head up the new and improved fourth generation warfare. We must ask ourselves whether the tail is wagging the dog. Are we still in control of our own destiny? Or has our blind devotion to things military led us to an impasse where war's events control all aspects of our lives?

Do the exigencies of the war in Iraq - as they are perceived by the military- take precedence over all other considerations? We might easily answer that if we had some sort of policy in place rather than the roughly cobbled mish-mosh used by the present administration, then we would follow our policy. You have to have a goal. Our goal in Iraq was elimate Weapons of Mass Destruction. There weren't any. So then we said it was all worth it so we might hang Saddam Hussein in a frightful execution scenario after a trial in a kangaroo court. And then we said we have to stop the mighty and powerful IRAN. And so on and so on.

There literally is no end to this, in case you haven't figured that out yet.
What does it mean to have no goal, no well defined policy to follow and judge one's actions? One result is that the tail tends to wag the dog, or the tiger. This means that events are no longer controlled by the decision makers in Washington D.C., rather the events in Iraq and the war are in controll and the people in Washington scurry about trying to address issues, cover their backsides, and generally try to create the illusion that they planned it all from the beginning.

Let us look back in history to 1905 when Japan sent the Kwangtung Army to Manchuria to guard Japanese interests.
Manchuria is a huge area and many in Jpana and in the Kwangtung Army thought it would be just what Japan needed to alleviate the overcrowding of the home islands, to be markets for their goods, and to be a source for raw materials for Japan's industry.
By the summer of 1931, elements within the Kwangtung Army were ready to take Manchuria from Chinese control. A charge of dynamite was planted on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden; its explosion was to be the excuse to "bring order" by sending troops to seize Mukden.

By the morning of September 19, 1931 Mukden was in Japanese hands, much to the dismay of the world and Tokyo. The Cabinet ordered the Army General Staff to limit the scope of hostilities, but individuals within the Kwangtung Army ignored this. The War Ministry finally radioed the Kwangtung Army a reproach:  
1. The Kwangtung Army is to refrain from any new project such as becoming independent from the Imperial Army and seizing control of Manchuria and Mongolia...


We do not mean to imply that the US Army is acting like the Kwangtung Army.
We do mean to imply that events in war sometimes shape policy rather than policy shaping the conduct of the war. If there is no strong, well defined policy -such as is the present case-then it is easier for the events and exigencies of war to define policy, effectively taking decision making from the hands of elected representatives. We are seeing indications of this already. Our representatives and those who wish to be our representatives clearly are divided into 2 camps: (1) those who see the WAR as a given and are determined to let it play out into whatever dead end it goes to, and (2) those who maintain the right and honor to choose whether or not they will commit themselves to this infamy.

The Gang of Four of the title are Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Ms. Rice. They have been aided and abetted in their actions by numerous neoconservatives. Neoconservatives now say that the Iraq War was a strategic blunder. I say that it was more than that; this War was a lie and a crime. It was conceived in iniquity and born in perfidy. March 19, 2003 is a Day that will truly live in infamy. We must take back the right to choose between good and evil. We must not assume a worldy-wise posture and shrug, saying that people will have wars anyway.

Our whole way of life is based on the premise that we are free to choose, so now you must choose.

Th-th-that's all, Folks !

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