Closing time

Josh Marshall:

IT'S TIME FOR the closing argument. The issue of the day may be Iraq... Beyond the incompetence, the bungled policies and the lies (which are plenty bad enough), where the country finds itself is a situation in which the leadership of the country either can't see, or won't see, or most likely wants to pretend not to see what a growing majority of the country clearly can see... there's an overwhelming consensus among Americans today that Iraq has become a disaster for the United States and that it's not going to get better on the course we're now on.
But the president just says, No. Sure, there are a few bumps along the way. But fundamentally it was a good idea, we're doing the right thing and we're on the right track. No matter what however many people tell him, that's what his gut tells him so it's full speed ahead. He's going to stay the course right over the cliff.

Andrew Sullivan:

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

Josh Marshall may be the leading liberal pundit in the blogosphere. He speaks for many millions of folks whose political beliefs are somewhat left of center... and he still doesn't understand how Bush can be so blind, so stubborn, so foolish, so near sociopathically self-centered as to insist on staying a course that is costing him and his political party so much, because it's become so massively unpopular.

It never occurs to him that Bush has his marching orders too -- that the decisions Dubya makes aren't actually his decisions to make.

Andrew Sullivan asks the key question -- who is really giving our troops their orders? But he doesn't realize the importance; he thinks it's just rhetoric. It's not; if we could just find out who really is giving our troops -- including their Commander in Chief -- the orders, we'd be a long way towards figuring a way out of this shit storm we've somehow allowed ourselves to be led into.

I read stuff like this, and I realize my own personal belief system is badly non-integrated. Which is to say, I've come to deeply believe that our government is inimical and predatory, hopelessly corrupted and near-entirely controlled by powerrul cabals we never see and don't know and whose agendas would terrify and horrify and sicken and disgust us if we were presented with actual irrefutable evidence of same.

And yet, at the same time, I find myself believing that, if only Al Gore had put up more of a fight for the Presidency back in 2000, the world would be a better place today, because a Gore Administration would never have invaded Iraq, or waged such a comprehensive war on our own civil liberties, or loaded the Supreme Court with crazy ass corporate controlled conservative judges.

There's something incoherent about that picture. If our government is as thoroughly corrupted as it seems inarguable to me that it must be, given what I see all around me every day, then the figurehead we put 'in charge' every four or eight years is going to make very little difference to what actually happensto all of us out here in what we perhaps foolishly believe is the real world.

If, on the other hand, there really is a substantive difference between the two different parties and their candidates, then you'd expect that I wouldn't keep reading about currently active covert U.S. government programs like HAARP, MK ULTRA, chem-trail spraying, and, for the love of everything worth loving in the universe, Global Cleanse 2000.

(Follow any of those links to have the living shit scared out of you. I'm not playin'.)

So I've been thinking about it. And here's what I've come up with:

The darkness doesn't completely control us.

Not yet.

I think there is far more going on in this world than most of us are aware of, and I think a great deal of what goes on in the shadows is bad. And when I say 'bad', I mean, existential despair, living hell, souls in torment, hell on earth bad. And I really do believe that there are secret powers moving in those shadows, pulling the strings and pushing the buttons of overt political power to further covert agendas we have no real comprehension of -- and I believe these secret powers are evil, by the only real definition of evil I recognize -- they regard individual human beings as chattel, to be used and discarded, or consumed, as suits their whim. Where they are not mercilessly, viciously amoral in their procuration of power, they are actively, gratuitously cruel in their pursuit of pleasure.

But I don't think they are perfect, omniscient, or omnipotent. I think they have the game comprehensively rigged, absolutely... but I don't think they have complete and utter control over even as corrupt a political process as ours is.

Not yet.

I do think, however, that every second of every minute of every hour of every day, they are scheming and plotting and working to increase the already enormous control over the system that they do have.

I think that, in general, they find it slightly easier to manipulate conservative and Republican candidates, and, for that matter, voters, than they do liberal and Democratic. Maybe that's just a prejudice of mine. But conservatism tends to be selfish, and selfish people are easily bought off and then controlled. The tools of pure, raw power work well on people who are entirely concerned with their own comfort levels.

I also think, though, that people who cannot control their own addictions or vices are just as easily controlled by these forces in the shadows. As such, I suspect Bill Clinton was in the bag for these guys for his entire Presidency, and probably, long before.

Hillary, I can't be as certain of. But I suspect as much as fast and as often as Bill gets wood for poon-tang, Hillary gets wet for power. As such, she'd be a pretty easy catch for them, too.

I think that 2000 was a huge victory for them, even bigger than 1980. I think they were desperate to keep Al Gore out of the White House, because they badly needed a war in the Middle East, and Clinton, despite being pretty much bought and sold long before he ever took the oath of office, had a few scruples left (or maybe he was just smart enough not to want to kick off World War III) and straight up refused to do what they wanted, regardless of the casus belli they stage managed for him. (I suspect they let their tame news media have its head -- no pun intended -- on the Lewinksy scandal to punish ol' Bill; sexual blackmail is one of their favorite tools.)

I think they felt that time was running out; that Gore would not only continue to refuse to sow chaos in Arabia, but that he actually might go off the reservation enough to try and do something significant about things like global warming and peak oil. Things that might be good for the U.S., or for humanity, or for the entire globe and everything on it, but that wouldn't have been so great for the killer elite who had sprung an October Surprise in 1980 to get Carter out of the White House, and who had held onto power by any hook and every crook they could put their hands to since.

I think they pulled out all the stops. I think they brought out the big guns, went for broke, bet it all on roll of the dice. I think they were absolutely desperate to get George W. Bush into the White House, because for some reason, they were absolutely desperate to finally get the War in Iraq (prelude to the War in Iran) that they'd been planning for thirty years at that point, off of the chalkboards and into reality.

I don't think it was about the overt power. Oh, yeah, now that they've achieved a near total lockdown on the entire American government, they're certainly making the most of it, chipping away little by little at the Constitution until there's little or nothing left of it at all. But I think that's a sideshow. They've never much cared about the Constitution, or any other pretty document -- they've always been above the law. What they wanted -- what they desperately needed -- was the war in Iraq. And now that they've pretty much wrecked Iraq, they want to do the same thing to Iran. That's pretty clearly their plan -- take the two most socially and technologically advanced, most powerful nation states in the Middle East that they don't already control, and turn them into ashes.

Why? Why now? Why were they so frantic to get it done by... well... today... or sometime in the near future, anyway? Is there a deadline? Are they on a time limit? If they don't manage to completely destroy the Middle East as an organized political entity by... I don't know... 2008? 2010? 2012?... what's going to happen? Or what did they think was going to happen, anyway?

I've speculated in the past that if we could see the whole truth laid out in front of us, it might actually be kind of tawdry and trivial -- that the war in Iraq, scheduled to spread into Iran soon (and which has already ended up destroying Lebanon, although there the powers behind the thrones used their other gang of thugs, the Israelis, to accomplish their goals) might be nothing more than a vast, colossal turf war between rival criminal gangs. That in the end, it's all about what it's always been about -- drugs, and arms, and slaves.

And I still think that's a good hypothesis, but lately I'm starting to wonder if it isn't something bigger, or weirder. I mean, you can have a street fight over who sells what on which corner any time -- what's the rush?

It needn't be anything too far out. Maybe the powers behind the powers simply knew that someone in the Middle East -- maybe Saddam, maybe one of the Iranian ayatollahs -- was due to come into some serious nuclear power by, say, 2010. Once that happened, they might well unify the entire Arabic peninsula under one government. That might well be something that the people who control our government simply wouldn't want to happen at all.

Or it might be a little more X-Files than that. If some reports are to be believed, our own intelligence agencies routinely use psychics to gather intel. Clairvoyance will transcend space -- but can't it also transcend time?

Maybe someone somewhere saw a vision of a future that our secret masters simply couldn't tolerate? Something that had to be derailed at all costs? Something that would have inevitably have come about, had Al Gore gotten into the White House?

Obviously, this is nothing more than speculation -- barking mad, howling at the moon speculation, I'm sure most if not all of my very few readers are thinking right now, as they carefully edge towards the closest exit, pleasant, if somewhat glassy, smiles plastered on their faces.

Whatever the case may be, though, I don't think they control it all yet. I think it's still hard work for them to steal an election. I think they can still lose.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing --

I think they're afraid of us. Not of me. Not of you. Not of any one person, or even any two, or any three.

I think they're afraid of us. All of us. Collectively.

I think they're afraid of what might happen, if we ever wake up, and get a clue, and start to see them, and what they do, as they and it really are and is.

God knows they work hard enough to keep us asleep.

God knows, we could make them work a lot harder, though.