roachboy

jesus--so now every thread posted by a conservative here has to work from deep within the vacuum created by conservative talking points on a given issue?

feel your politics crumbling, support leaking away, the sense of coherence imploding, the quasi-divien status of the Leader tarnished?
had a bad year at the political office?

well, pretend it isnt happening----try to control damage in the tiny spaces where you imagine it possible by working to frame problems away at the level of terms of debate. maybe if you repeat conservative talking points often enough you might even be able to convince yourself that there is some degree of legitimacy--intellectual, political, ethical--in them.
but, of course, you'd be wrong.

the explanations for this kind of thing are more obviously psychological than anything else.

the new move, trotted out over the weekend by both cowboy george and his vp. is so thoroughly bankrupt, even by the low standards one would normally apply to rightwing ideology, as to almost defy belief. the administration "shapes" or "structures" intel in a directions wholly consistent with neocon political aspirations articulated repeatedly since the first gulf war and not in a direction consistent with actual facts---they give this information to a wholly spineless congress (our "representatives" in this farce of a pseudo-democracy) which, as a body, chooses to not interrogate the material but rather to go along with the bush agenda. this in direct contradiction of the clinton administrations general view of the situation in iraq--that sanctions were working--and despite the unsc rejection of the pile of falsehoods that colin powell had to elaborate before them---there is plenty of blame to go around in this one--the iraq war could engdanger the entire political class, both rightwing parties, etc.

but whatever, at this point, there is no doubt about how this happened. the distortions of information that was assumed to provide an adequate view of the situation in iraq by a bizarrely credulous congress--these distortions were generated within the administration, by the administration--congress fell for it in a context that even in 2001 provided that body with no excuse to do so--now the administration is trying to argue that the fault lay not with the information but with congress and that critics of this entire charade are simply trying to undermine troop morale. this line is so wholly based in denial that it is hard to know where to even start taking it apart--that is is seen as compelling by anyone, anywhere is a sad sad commentary on the ways in which the folk who swim about in conservativeland deal with the conflict between reality and their preferred fantasies about reality.

if the american system were anything like a democracy, the bush administration would undoubtedly already have fallen to a vote of no confidence. but this is amurica and so all of us are stuck with these people for another 3 years. i am not sure how they are going to manage to undo the damage that their actions have inflicted upon themselves, upon the american state, upon the country. i am not sure how they plan to actually govern from such a position. i frankly do not see how it is possible. which is not good.

but let's assume that somehow, through the various layers of denial, that some kind of problems are actually registering in bushworld--what could be the function of attacking the legislature? what is being defended--the integrity of executive as over against representative power? the positing of a "strong Leader" that has no need for the messiness of actual democratic process? how else to even begin to make sense, from the tactical viewpoint, of the administration's new line on the war in iraq?

since this tack cannot be understood as rational on its own terms, maybe the way to think about it is as a tactic. what are the bushpeople doing?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite