The 4-B Plan: Banality, Bullshit, Bullets, and Blood.

[Guest guest]

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

 

 

 

Dark Pearl

 

“We don’t torture.”—George W. Bush (Straussian ‘ignoble lie’)

 

“We don’t do body counts.”—Gen. Tommy Franks (Straussian ignoble truth)

 

By John S. Hatch

 

03/20/06 " ICH " -- -- I don’t believe in Jesus, but I’m starting to

believe in the devil. What is it about neo-con, Reptile-Republican

Fundamentalist Christian politicians in particular, that accounts for

such breath-taking, sadistic, self-indulgent, unnecessary cruelty? How

to explain it? Florida Governor Jeb Bush wants to trim the state budget

so he can deliver $1.5 in tax cuts to his wealthy friends. How to go

about it—auction off some Diebold voting machines? Execute fewer blacks

(perhaps just temporarily exclude kids, the mentally handicapped, the

mentally ill, or the demonstrably innocent)? No. He is actually denying

high-nutrient formula to high-need, high-risk children, such as those

with CP or those on dialysis who need to be fed through a stomach tube.

Medicaid went from a more expensive version to one which cost $15 for

six cans, to nothing. It was suggested that parents and caregivers

‘blenderize’ food and insert that down their sick kids’ tubes, something

which most doctors argue is ineffective and dangerous. Maybe just send

the kids to Guantanamo, where they know how to deal with picky eaters.

 

But really. Why would a Governor, a filthy rich guy, a member of the

Bush Dynasty, perhaps the next American emperor, a Christian who wears

his love o’ Jesus on his sleeve, why would such a man want to deny

life-saving nutrients to sick and dying children at a real savings

amounting to a virtual nullity, that is a negative number because as

they get sicker as a result of his policy, children need more and more

expensive medical intervention. Is this the same governor who became

girlie-man hysterical over the case of the unfortunate Terri Schiavo who

turned out to be deathly impervious to all his incantations and

invocations and pious pronouncements about the sanctity of life? Turns

out she was as brain dead as the last guy he ushered to the electric

chair, just as all the not-so-girlie doctors said. It’s funny the

life-and-death distinctions that the reptile republicans draw with such

ease. Did I mention that the milk-denied feeding-tube kids happen to be

dirt-Katrina poor? Maybe that’s a clue. At the same time as the Schiavo

fiasco was unfolding, the exact opposite was taking place with regard to

a little girl on a ventilator in another hospital. The insurance company

wanted it shut off. The mother did not. Guess who won? And do you think

the little girl was white, or black? Seems in Bushland if you’re white

(with money) you have a right to life (even if you’re dead). If you’re

black, and poor, you have a right to die. Harsh? Katrina, kachink.

 

What is it with these Bushes? Granddaddy Prescott, not content to run a

bank and get stinking rich and enjoy what passes for ‘refinement’ in

America, instead found it necessary to help bankroll Hitler at a time

when such otherwise laudable high finance couldn’t quite be overlooked

in America. Jeb’s brother Neil bankrupted a bank (very well, a Savings

and Loan) that he ran, leaving taxpayers on the hook for maybe a couple

of billion. But praise the Lord of miracles! Jesus kept him out of jail.

 

Poppy Bush after being chief CIA spook and authorizing who knows what

cloak-and-dagger mayhem and (illegal) murder around the world, claimed

to be ‘out of the loop’ when it came to Rapacious Ronnie Reagan’s arms

dealing with hostage holding Iran (and as part of that dirty deal the

captives were held far longer than they would otherwise have been) and

his resulting loving aid to his nun-raping, Archbishop murdering,

exploders of children’s heads, Reagan’s darling ‘Freedom-fighters’ in

Nicaragua (sound familiar?). You’d think a former head of the CIA would

at least have learned to lie convincingly, but for that perhaps one must

first understand basic syntax. But looped or not, George H. W. got lots

of unnecessary blood on his hands during Gulf War I. Whole oases of the

stuff while his brave military men and women used bulldozers to bury

surrendering conscripts—kids buried alive in the desert, or

systematically picked off, one by one, from low-hovering helicopters,

unarmed and unresisting. And then let’s not forget the piece de

resistance, the mother of all massacres, the so-called Highway of Death,

in which not even dogs and goats were spared. But Jesus must’ve been

looking over somebody’s shoulder, because Poppy never got charged with

war crimes. Jesus kept him out of jail too.

 

It’s quite normal for a son to want to follow in his Daddy’s career

footsteps and to dream of exceeding the accomplishments of the old

geezer. But what if you’re Genghis Jr., or Attila Jr., or George II?

That can complicate matters a little. How to outdo Daddy’s deeds when he

was so devilishly good at what he did? How many people can a Vlad Jr.

impale? You almost have to have a plan. In modern times you need a PNAC.

And with the help of people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul

Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Jeb Bush, Eliot Abrams, and others, including

the ultra-nasty Karl Rove. George Jr. got one. Or maybe it got him.

 

PNAC (Project for a New American Century), was think tank whose deep

ruminations and profound ponderings had been bubbling and percolating

and sending up sulfurous fumes since even before the time of that other

profound thinker Ronald Reagan (‘Ideas are stupid things.’), and which

had advocated, amongst other items, a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the

Soviet Union. Now it just needed the right leader to come along, plus,

please, please, please, a ‘new Pearl Harbor event’ to galvanize citizens

into stupefied compliance, a PNAC panic, and their gift to the world

could be wrapped in just the right colorful tissues of patriotism,

freedom, democracy, and Christian values. A flag-wrapped American

Crusade for global domination. And George was just the guy to deliver

the package, which actually contained those usual staples of American

domestic and foreign polity: Banality, Bullshit, Bullets, and Blood.

That was the real 4-B Plan for the New American Century that its patient

proponents had waited so long to implement.

 

And they didn’t have to wait much longer. In George they had their man

at last. Already plans were in place to invade Iraq, Syria, Iran, plans

George liked very much, especially that first destination. ‘They tried

to kill my Daddy!’ Bastards!

 

Karl Rove especially would have loved Operation Northwoods. That was the

plan, advocated by Commie-obsessed dumbass maniac General Lyman L.

Lemnitzer, and approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time (and

perhaps even inspired by outgoing General Eisenhower), to murder an

unspecified number of Americans on American soil (the number would have

to have been sufficiently large to get everyone’s attention—bombs and

shootings in Washington and Miami and elsewhere) and plant evidence

pointing to Cuba, thus ‘justifying’ an invasion to rid the island of

that meddlesome Castro and make it safe once again for democracy, or at

least for Batista/Mafia types like in the good old days before the

long-winded Generalissimo stole the place and closed the crooked

casinos. President Kennedy put a stop to the madness, but one can

visualize the PNAC people, and especially Karl grow all knock-kneed and

girlie-man faint at the pure Straussian beauty of the plan. It had

everything—death, deception, plausible deniability—and perhaps sweetest

of all, the knowledge that only the boys in the secret tree house held

the power. Sweet secret terrorism for freedom and Jesus. And Jesus would

keep them out of jail.

 

Now PNAC had George, but they still needed their Straussian artifice,

their own cloak-and-dagger Op Northwoods, their own private Pearl. It

had to be big, and spectacular. It had to have the power to anesthetize

the people into allowing their Straussian masters to implement the plans

so carefully drawn and so patiently waited upon. It had to scare the

crap out of everybody so that they would remain complacent and allow the

newly proclaimed ‘wartime leader’ to defend them. And to seek revenge in

their name, of course. Against whom didn’t so much matter.

 

It worked. 9-II was the perfect, prayed-to-Jesus-for PNAC Pearl. Well,

the pearl wasn’t quite faultless; it was lumpy, it was discolored, it

was fake, that is, manufactured, but for the purposes of the PNAC people

it was precious nonetheless. It was a pure Rovian rapture. When World

Trade Center buildings one, two and seven came down in ways consistent

with controlled demolition and in defiance of any other scientific

explanation (the odds of even one building collapsing naturally in that

manner even after such an attack have been calculated at billions to

one), at a time when New York and Washington airspace was left unguarded

(that the White House, Pentagon, Washington Monument, and millions of

people in Washington and New York would accidentally be left unprotected

only on that coincidental occasion simply defies logic), there was no

turning back. It was show-time. It was blow time. Did you notice

perchance how quickly evidence from crime scene ‘Ground Zero’ was

removed and destroyed? How the White House resisted every reasonable

call for an inquiry into the disaster, and when that proved impossible

because of public opinion, how did its best to strangle it by denying

personnel and funds and by so narrowly defining its mandate that it

doesn’t even answer to the fate of Building 7? Anyway, it was time for

Shock and Awe, American style, without delay. First an ugly orgy of pure

destruction in Afghanistan as if to bomb an unfortunate stone-age

country back to, well—the First Neolithic age, one supposes.

Five-hundred pound bombs and cluster bombs cannot distinguish between

the innocent and the guilty, and nor can bullets in the control of those

who don’t care who gets hurt and for whom everyone is a ‘Raghead’

anyway. And of course the use of depleted uranium (half-life: 4.5

billion years) is a crime against humanity in itself. There would be

many such crimes amid empty talk of freedom and democracy. Death and

lies. Lies and death. Banality, Bullshit, Bullets and Blood. And it was

as if despite the tough cowboy rhetoric, Osama bin Laden was worth a lot

more alive than dead to the Bush administration after all, and soon the

President couldn’t stifle a yawn whenever the ‘Evildoer’ was mentioned.

His real ambitions lay elsewhere, where the bastards had tried to kill

his Daddy, who killed a heck of a lot of other peoples’ Daddies.

 

The incipient further slide into American Barbarism might have been

predicted by that term—shock ‘n awe—as if blowing up Iraqi families (in

the name of freedom and democracy, and liberation, of course) were no

more consequential than providing a fireworks display for the amusement

of Amerikaner Ubermenschen on the ground and those lapping it up on Fox

or CNN. And a rapid slide it was. And in America, even before 9-11

occurred, even as put options were being taken on United and American

Airlines stock and that of Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch, that is,

individuals with inside knowledge were betting massively that those

companies’ shares would soon lose value, plans had been made to invade

Iraq—massive lies had been invented (as Goebbels taught, the bigger the

lie, the better its chances of being believed), a propaganda machine

greased, Jesus was bonked on the head and snatched on board by the

Christian far-right Falwellian loonies and other ‘good-doers’, Iraqi oil

assets were tentatively divided up on paper, and it was show time.

 

When Donald Rumsfeld says that the gloves are coming off, you had better

believe him, especially if you suspect he had itchy knuckle syndrome all

along. Soon there was blood on cell walls—mostly Muslim blood, but no

less red—in New York and Los Angeles and Boston and Chicago, amid a de

facto suspension of domestic habeas corpus because the Justice

Department used all kinds of tricks and loopholes to deny due process,

or simply disregarded the law. Hey, everything changed, remember? Well

it sure did. And if you thought that torture doesn’t exist in a domestic

gulag system that has swallowed up more prisoners than any other nation

on earth, mostly non-violent underprivileged and undereducated Black and

Hispanic males, you would be quite mistaken. Muslim ‘terrorist suspects’

were routinely subjected to denial of civil rights, to beatings,

threats, sleep and food deprivation, and what other perverted torments

might occur to their racist and sadistic guards. No charges were laid,

but many detainees were deported on spurious or real, if minor,

immigration infractions. Others left in disgust.

 

As President Bush moved inexorably toward the concept of a ‘Unitary

Executive’ Presidency, that is, the notion that a ‘wartime’ president is

above the law, the Constitution and any constraints upon his behavior

whatsoever including any impediment regarding the imprisonment without

charge or trial, torture—or even the ex-judicial killing—of anyone he

perceived to be a threat to National Security, as defined by himself,

the United States was slipping into the greatest crisis of her history.

Never mind that Bush was/is no more a wartime President than any other

President conducting un- undeclared war whether on drugs, crime, or

Vietnam. This one was based on deception and lies from the beginning,

and thus was and remains illegal, and therefore criminal. Furthermore,

the concept of ‘Unitary Executive’ is as hollow as the legal-weasel

justifications for torture or the treatment of the Constitution, with

its sacred guarantees of civil rights—which Bush swore to uphold—as

‘…just a goddam piece of paper.’ And presumably the rights of American

citizens—previously thought by some to be ‘God-given’—are just goddam

paragraphs on that goddam piece of paper, to be ignored at the pleasure

of the Unitary Executive, who as we know all too well doesn’t like to

read. Except for the Presidential ‘findings’ he likes to write allowing

himself to ignore any and all laws, and a concept as meaningless legally

as ‘Unitary Executive’, unless you’re the torture-enabling,

Constitution-suspending, ass-licking Attorney General. But he’s

Hispanic! And Jesus has kept him out of jail.

 

They caught Saddam and put him on show-trial, quite illegally. Charge:

killing 114 innocent Iraqis. American Post Gulf War I sanctions killed

one million innocent Iraqis, half of whom were children under the age of

five. Gulf War II has so far killed between 50,000-100,000 innocent

Iraqis, many of them women and children. There is no evidence that

Saddam tortured children, although perhaps he did. There is videotaped

evidence that Americans have tortured and even raped young children,

sometimes in front of their parents. Chaney and Bush are adamant that

such practices will continue. Is a sense of irony lacking? Outrage? Why

aren’t the streets full of vomit?

 

So just six years into the new century, and five into the disastrous

Bush Imperium, with ever patient PNAC having finally had its chance to

implement its bold policies, and already it could take a century or two

for America to regain a semblance of honor and respect in the world. If

that’s even within the realm of possibility. That is, if Americans

recover the vision and courage to recognize that the America they

thought they knew is gone, dead—stolen in two elections, democracy’s red

blood bled out of her, her veins filled with the stinking formaldehyde

of fascism. America the torturer. America the denier of justice and due

process. America as brutal, illegal warrior and plunderer of the world.

America the paranoid, spying illegally on its own citizens. America,

gulag master to the globe. America in the thrall of a Jesus myth as

crazy and vicious as PNAC’s own impending Armageddon. America, nuclear

first-striker. America, failed state.

 

The danger is that the PNAC peanuts and their Divinely Inspired Protégé

have committed such crimes on such a massive scale that there is now

nothing to lose in moving forward even further. Having embarked on a

great criminal scheme with all the bravado and machismo of the average

stupid criminal, they are now left with no choice but to bluff their way

through, to go down shooting, or to go to jail. Two elections have been

stolen, why not attempt a third? Or cancel elections altogether? Or,

having been complicit (at the very least) in 9-11, why not go for 9-11

The Sequel and hope for even a fraction of the original’s success? When

you have as much innocent blood on your hands as these people do, a

little more won’t make much difference. Look for a sequel sometime

around late September ‘06. It might even happen in Canada, just for the

touch of Straussian finesse that would offer—it would show that the

Evildoers are still at work, and it would teach those uppity Canadians a

lesson for not joining the Coalition of the Killing. Straussians love to

kill two or even three quail with one stone while sending secret decoder

messages.

 

I began with the bizarre decision on the part of Florida Governor Jeb

Bush to spend extra medical dollars in the Sunshine State by denying

seriously sick children adequate nutritional sustenance. It’s not as if

they were ‘bad’ children, refusing to say their prayers while demanding

chocolates and ice-cream; they have to be fed formula through a tube

directly into their stomachs. Many of them probably don’t have long to

live. Gov. Jeb’s State government tried to present this as a

money-saving measure. Those tax breaks, you know…

 

It turns out that his big Presidential bro indulged a similar

incomprehensible mean streak (as if we didn’t know). Before passing the

despised Patriot Act II, he had some tame Gonzalez or other slip in a

clause giving the President authority to put any state on the so-called

fast-track for carrying out the death penalty. For all the body parts,

and blood, and torture, and insanity and sadness and death he is

responsible for in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems that George just can’t

get enough of the stuff. So in spite of recent DNA proof that many

American death row inmates are innocent, or had terrible representation,

or are mentally handicapped or were children at the time of their

alleged crimes, George trumped Jeb by removing what few safeguards which

might remain against wrongful death. Why? There is speculation that as

Governor of Texas just such a plan was denied because of that state’s

demonstrably abysmal record of judicial oversight. (Supreme Court

Justice Rehnquist, now mercifully departed, found that even innocence is

not necessarily a defense against execution, make that black execution

of course.) As governor, even with the enthusiastic help of the Ghoulish

Gonzalez, George was only able to execute 151 individuals (including the

virtually undefended, mentally handicapped, children). Still a record,

but imagine what he might have accomplished without such artificial

constraints!

 

Sometimes the devil you know is the worst possible scenario.

 

America at the crossbones. If it’s already too late—bon soir et adieu!

 

John S. Hatch is a Vancouver writer and film-maker. Currently he is

Associate Producer of ‘Windup’, a Dave Coté film entered at this year’s

Cannes Film Festival.

 

Click below to read or post comment's on this article

 

Comments (15) | Trackback (0)