If I Were A Terrorist… August 6, 2007

If I were an Islamic terrorist, not just a common street bomber, but a leader, a strategist, what would I be thinking  these days?

My strategic goals:

• Islamic states throughout the Middle East and South Asia.
• Weakening, if not destroying, United States military power
• Enfeebling, if not destroying, democracy in the U.S. and Europe, but primarily in the U.S.

To establish Islamic states, I would need an enemy common to all Islamic people.

That’s simple enough. There is A) the West, and B) America.

The U.S. is a major military power, relying on high tech, highly organized armies. These can be bled into impotence by guerrilla forces. Draw them into a battle where they will suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

How? A major attack on one of their cities would likely work, and would be guaranteed to work if a right-wing government is in power. Conservatives historically seek power and destroy democracy. The further right the better. And the weaker the leader the better. A weak leader is easy prey for power-hungry subordinates.

If I were a terrorist, I would now consider myself successful.

I brought down a major symbol of American power, the World Trade Center. I was lucky enough to have an incredibly weak and poor American leader in George W. Bush, and have come to consider him almost an equal partner in my plan to bring down the United States – he and his party of morally and ethically corrupt Republicans, who seek permanent power and thus contribute to the coming collapse of their country.

I have drawn their armies, with virtually no effort on my part thanks to the megalomaniac arrogance of Bush, into a war they cannot win, a war which  bleeds them to collapse, which tears apart the United States politically, which drains it economically.

I have partners working closely with me to destroy civil liberties in the United States. They have already suspended one of the most powerful tools of democracy, one of the foundational tools of Western liberty, the right of habeas corpus. They have effectively suspended provisions of their vaunted Bill of Rights, the latest effort being the revised wiretap law. Bush has aggregated to himself dictatorial powers in executive orders and in signing statements that deny the validity of laws passed by Congress. Bush and the Republicans, aided by weak Democrats, have given me all this, and they have, by practicing torture, by imprisoning without cause or justice thousands of innocent people, by slaughtering other thousands of innocents, given me recruits and recruiters in vast numbers.

And I have tens of millions more partners in the United States. I have all those citizens who blithely go on shopping while ignoring the rise of tyranny; citizens who have decided that ignorance is bliss, that biased news is real news, not that they can tell the difference anymore. I have all those citizens who don’t vote, and those who stupidly accept that voting machines proven to be easily compromised are okay because the people in power say so. I have all those citizens who can’t be bothered to read a book, who can’t be bothered to question what they see on television news, who think people shouting over each other is news, who believe everything they see and hear in political commercials. America is populated by herds of humans who fail the simplest tests of knowledge, who have no ability to think critically, who want only to be led, to be told what to think, what to buy, where to go, and where to stand while the ax comes down. 

Let me not forget those citizens who cheer their blind, thoughtless, arrogant right-wing politicians who offer, as a solution to the problems I create, the nuclear bombing of my holy cities; who offer as a solution to the flood of illegal immigrants seeking escape from problems created in part by the United States the wholesale arrest and repatriation of these millions of people; who offer as a solution to terrorism the constant drumbeat of fear and the wholesale repression of dissent and criticism.

These citizens, and the Republican party, and the cabal headed by Bush and his puppetmaster Cheney, are my greatest weapons, my most powerful allies. If I can keep them in power, I can destroy the United States.

One more attack should do it, should drive the final nail in the coffin. One more major catastrophe. Perhaps exploding a major dam. Perhaps a suicide squad melting down a nuclear power plant. Perhaps a chemical refinery near a major population center. Perhaps assassinating some Supreme Court Justices or Cabinet officers.

The Republicans and the Bush Administration have given me the power that will allow the Americans to bring themselves to their knees. I barely have to do anything more.

And if they capture me, or kill me, so what? I will be with my God, and another will take my place. And another will take his place if God calls him. I know in my heart that the United States will not stop destroying itself, will not stop its policies of destruction and slaughter in the world, will not rein in its corporations as they despoil the world and ravage populations and create more hatred. The United States is like a blind, enraged elephant loose in a village. Its only weapon is rage and massive power. It will destroy all around it in the stupidity of rage, and then it will fall as the villagers rise up and reclaim their home.

The villagers will feel some pity for such a beast, but the people of the world will feel none for the blind, ugly thing that the United States has chosen to become.

If I were a terrorist, the United States would be my best friend, my greatest helper, and when it has exhausted itself and lies helpless before the world, I will feel no pity, no compassion, no sympathy. One does not pity evil.

But I am not a terrorist. I am a citizen of the United States watching my government and my people destroy what was once the hope of freedom, of liberty, of democracy in the world, watching them follow blindly, stupidly, the plan for their destruction laid out by brutal, calculating men in far lands and in Washington.

I no longer weep.

I vote. I watch. I read. I write.

I wait.

In time, if the time comes, if I am able, I will rise up to reclaim my country from fascism, or whatever -ism the tyranny will be named. My comrades will call me a patriot. The powers in Washington will call me a terrorist. They will fail to understand that dissent is patriotism in its highest form, and that fighting a tyranny on one’s home soil is the highest form of dissent.

And in time, in time, they will fall.

It is my deepest hope that from that fall will rise the America that is in my heart, that lies in the heart of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the America the world needs, the America that the world looked to for so long as a sane harbor of reason, of democracy, of liberty.

But for now America is a long way from sanity, from reason, from democracy, from liberty. A long way.

Giuliani Says It’s All Clinton’s Fault June 27, 2007

According to the Associated Press, old Rudy says all this terror stuff is Bill Clinton’s fault. Here’s the dope:

“Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before September 11. Many people think the first attack on America was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993,” said the former New York mayor.

Giuliani argued that Clinton treated the World Trade Center bombing as a criminal act instead of a terrorist strike, and said it incited other attacks.

The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond,” Giuliani said. Osama “bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it.”

Rudy conveniently leaves out that the people who carried out the 1993 attack are in prison, having been hunted down and captured by the Clinton administration.

And Rudy, a terrorist attack is a criminal act. It is not an act of war.

And as long as we’re toting up dead Americans, perhaps we should add up all the dead people around the world that Americans and American policies have killed, including the half-million or so dead Iraqi children who died as a direct result of the sanctions following the first Gulf War, sanctions that the US fought to keep in place. And let’s not forget the immortal Madeleine Albright claiming that those dead kids were a reasonable price to pay to contain Iraq – a toothless Iraq at that. And you wonder why a lot of people wish us ill, including some with the ability to return some of the pain we’ve caused?

And finally, Mr. 911, you conveniently forget that the Bush administration was warned, time and time again, by its own intelligence agencies and counterterror experts, that it was likely that an attack on US soil was imminent. Remember Ms. Condo Rice, reputed to be the National Security Advisor, saying there was no warning, and then having to read, before the Iraq investigative committee, the security document title that was an actual warning?

Giuliani has nothing to run on but fear and 9/11. That’s his whole game. And when you look close at him you find he didn’t really do squat about 9/11, that his actions and decisions before then were part of the reason the death toll was so horrific among firefighters and police, and that his judgment since then has been, to say the least, questionable. Remember, this is the guy who supported Bernard Kerik, a man with proven ethical failures, for Secretary of Homeland Security. And his state chairman, Thomas Ravenel, in South Carolina was just indicted on federal cocaine charges. Rudy, smart guy that he is, replaced him with Ravenel’s father, who wants to fly the Confederate flag at the State House and who called the NAACP the “National Association for Retarded People”.

Real Presidential timber there, aren’t you, Rudy?

More like a splinter festering in the body politic.

Romney Channels Teddy Roosevelt, Accepts Boat Anchor, Will Likely Drown June 17, 2007

Mitt Romney is now casting himself as Teddy Roosevelt. He says he wants to ‘carry a big stick’ by puffing up the size of the United States military, according to an AP article in today’s Globe.

One could ask why, but he’s a Republican fearmonger, liar, and hypocrite, so there’s really no point in asking. But he answers anyway:

“If you look across the world you can recognize that there is terror going on,” Romney said. “…There is a worldwide effort of different people all intent on bringing down modernity and replacing it, in some respects, with barbarism.”

Well, Mitt, yeah, some terrorists want to take their countries back to the Dark Ages, just as some of our fundo religious troglodyte groups want to do to the United States. But you know what, Mitt, most of those we call terrorists just want the United States to get its fat, lying, ugly, violent ass out of their countries and out of their affairs.

And then there’s this:

Romney defended President Bush’s performance, noting his policies extend beyond Iraq. He called Bush a statesman who has shored up the nation’s economy, expanded renewable energy capabilities, and chosen appropriate Supreme Court justices.

“Everything he does, he does from the standpoint of what is best for the American people,” Romney said.

That’s Mitt showing how ignorant of reality he is, and putting the boat anchor that is the Little Psychopath around his neck and jumping out of the boat of reality.

If you want more Bush, put Mitt Romney in the Oval Office.