Fwd: One of the most important articles I have read in years --

[Guest guest]

In Grannies against George -

 

Leigh Saavedra <saavedra1979@.com> wrote:

 

This is no ordinary good article. It is one of those

rare pieces that physically affect some of us, inject

adrenalin into the frustrations we've felt in the past

few years. It is, frighteningly, a bit of a

now-or-never paper, but it's time we have things like

this. Following on the heels of the Cindy Sheehan

encouragement, maybe, MAYBE, we can believe that we

can stop them. Please read and pass on.

 

Lisa, quoting Roger Morris, from Counterpunch:

 

Stopping the Dying and the Lying

The War for the Future

By ROGER MORRIS

Former NSC Staffer

 

Over the dying summer. I have known

No truce with Time nor Time's accomplice, Death.

 

--Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

 

What a surreal moment-this faded end-of-summer 2005.

 

We are locked in an evil lost war of staggering costs.

Some flail at the atrocity in a cause that seems

equally lost. Most play on in the ebbing season's sun,

oblivious to reckonings.

 

In Washington rules the worst regime in memory. Yet it

falls to a fiercely bereaved 48-year-old mother,

camping beside a dusty ditch in Texas, to embody the

conscience of the culture, at least until the media

move on.

 

The regime in its outrage struts essentially unopposed

in our supposed democracy. Protest rises powerless.

The oblivious go uninformed, unled.

 

Ignorant of the issues, cravenly afraid of risking

privilege for principle, hostage to corrupt advisors

and a corrupted calculus of national interest,

Democrats not only mistake the public mood and fail

the minimal duty of opposition, but join the folly.

From Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, Capitol Hill

barons to camp-following bloggers, they stand bravely

for more fodder more efficiently fed to the calamity,

huddling earnestly to the right of the most egregious

right-wing aggression in our history. Add to the Iraqi

disaster the defining debacle of our second

intellectually and morally derelict party.

 

Even if Democrats poll to find courage convenient, as

some surely will, it will do us little good. Like the

odd rebel Republicans (Senator Hagel & Co., who

exhibit, ironically, what conservatives always said

about enlisting more integrity than the other side of

the aisle), they will find this Presidency peculiarly,

frighteningly immune to advice and consent.

 

There is quixotic talk about George W. Bush reprising

Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, variously undone by

intra-party revolt, demonstrations, defection of the

Establishment, scandal. I was in the White House when

the " Wise Men " of postwar American foreign policy told

LBJ that Wall Street as well as Main Street had

deserted the Vietnam War. I was there later as Nixon

sullenly, anxiously watched a million protesters

engulf Pennsylvania Avenue. I saw those politicians,

however grudgingly, however slowly, respond to

reality.

 

We must be clear. Bush is no Johnson or Nixon. This

president is not simply the least competent ever

thrown up. He is also the most pathological. Every

shred of evidence of the man and his rule, every

witness, leak, and gesture reek of it. Freshman

psychology students and amateur therapists smell it

instantly. To quote a distinguished analyst who'll

remain anonymous for the sake of his Republican

patients:

 

George W. is a narcissistic personality. He is self

referent. He sees things only from his point of

view--and by extension sees and represents the America

that reflects it. He is able to create a seamless ball

into which nothing else can penetrate. As with other

narcissistic personalities, he lives his entitlement

and grandiosity--in his case even seeing himself as

fulfilling God's wishes on earth. He does not need to

check any other reality. He knows that what feels

right to him is right for everyone. The rules do not

apply to him (college, the reserves, etc)--only to

those who need rules to do what is right. Unlike

Senator Frist, I tend not to diagnose in absentia, but

with George W., all of us could go on and on.

 

On and on is how the pathology will be manifest in the

torment of Iraq. It hardly matters how vested Cheney,

Rumsfeld, Rice, the Generals, corporations, media

claque, complicit Democrats. Bush is enough. The

cowardice and blindness, craftiness and stupidity of

the war policy, and of the whole myth-encrusted and

corrupt mentality around it, will persist so long as

Bush and all who used and accepted him remain in

office.

 

Despite the seeming death of politics, we have never

known a crisis and opportunity more political. The

moment cries out for politics fought as never before.

 

Not for more wailing at how venally awful it all is,

marveling at how the reactionaries did it, as if

Churchill's British spent the autumn of 1940 shaking

their heads and endlessly writing one another about

how it happened Nazis were at the gate. There is no

time for that. The poet is right. For this generation

of progressives, time's accomplice is death-senseless,

generations-haunting death in Iraq, and all the other

deaths of body and spirit inflicted by America's

misrule at home and abroad. What to do is plain.

 

Fight now. Fight everywhere. Take the battle first and

foremost to where power lives.

 

Progressives must contest all 435 House seats and all

33 Senate seats up in 2006, along with every governor,

legislator and local official not unequivocally

against the war and more, everywhere a Republican or a

compromised Democrat presumes to govern.

 

Never mind Beltway braying that it's not practical and

a waste, the myth of non-competitive races reinforcing

the one-party system. The point is to stop playing by

the old rules. Like the RAF in 1940, we must take on

even the impossible. In the underlying volatility of

the American electorate, every challenge is a threat,

every spark a potential burn clear. Politicians know

this. No Democrat will face a primary challenge on the

war, no Republican will face it in the general,

without risk. No progressive will run without gain. No

lesson will be lost.

 

The campaign everywhere is simple. Stop the dying.

Stop the lying. In Iraq and beyond. About foreign

policy, energy, jobs, and so much, much more.

 

To carry that message progressives have never been

stronger, never so mobilized, conscious, savvy. If

they are serious about spending their money to save

the century, the new progressive donors will add to

the strength by funding genuinely new policy thinking

and answers to arm candidates. From dealing at last

with the scandal of our health care system to

conducting at last a civilized foreign policy. From

finding the tipping point in lifting the root

oppression of campaign money to adopting non lethal

alternatives to guzzling away as if there's no energy

or environmental crisis, as if a global

warming-unleashed hurricane were not now pounding away

to ravage 25% of the nation's oil supply off

Louisiana, with more disasters like it to follow.

 

None of this will happen in old ways and institutions

under yesterday's men. We will never have a chance to

stop the dying and lying until we stop the irrelevant

and self-indulgent, the jockeying and empty debating.

Winning means unity, and unifying means ready

sacrifice of credit, precedence, postage-stamp domains

of power and prestige we substitute for serious

politics. It is an ancient adage. We cannot lead

without humility, govern a nation without governing

ourselves.

 

Most important, our fatal attraction, we must go

unseduced by the Democrats, who have made seduction

and abandonment of progressives a lucrative career.

 

We can, of course, stand by wringing as the Democrats

nominate Hillary Clinton and the Republicans Giuliani,

McCain or some more transparent throw-back. We can

easily go on blogging and bandaging in this half-mad

twilight.

 

Or we can act as the free people our soldiers in the

deadly sun of Mesopotamia, however deluded, misused or

misled, think they are defending. We can take up the

fight for them and more, street to street, door to

door, with $20 bills or $20 million. We can turn

weakness into strength, retreat into advance, defeat

into victory.

 

We lost the invasion of Iraq and the election of 2004,

not our souls. We lost battles. The war for the

future-America's and the world's-is only beginning.

But there can be no more waiting to fight. No truce

with time nor its accomplice.

 

Roger Morris, an award-winning historian and

investigative journalist who served on the National

Security Council Staff under Presidents Johnson and

Nixon, has just completed Shadows of the Eagle, a

history of American policy and covert interventions in

the Middle East and South Asia, to be published early

next year by Alfred Knopf. Morris is the author of

Partners in Power: the Clintons and Their America and

with Sally Denton The Money and the Power: the Making

of Las Vegas. He serves as a Senior Fellow of the

Green Institute, where this column appears originally,

along with his previous and ongoing work on American

politics, on the Institute's world affairs web site,

www.eGP360.net.

 

He may be reached at RPMBook.

 

 

 

" We need a common enemy to unite us. " - Condoleeza Rice,

March 2000

 

" When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over

generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving

lunatic. " - Dresden James

 

" Who says I am not under the special protection of God? "

- Adolf Hitler

 

 

http://BuzzardsRoost.aimoo.com

http://www.GranniesAgainstGeorge.us

 

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix