Certainly not at the horror the American Empire has caused; the horror, the horror....... and not only by its military, but by it's many corporations, who, collectively, behave badly and criminally all over the world, including right here at home.
* Disclaimer: We certainly do not accuse every corporation of bad behavior, let alone criminal behavior. There are CEOs and other corporate officers who are good, decent, responsible citizens of this planet. They will be the commercial stars of this century, as the sociopaths and other criminally insane, money-sucking, bottom-line feeders flame out, as they surely will.
No, we do not find that funny in the least. We find it heart-rending and psychically painful in a way that is, frankly, indescribable. We have been fighting the forces of economic/corporate empire over here, in this country, most of our adult lives and we are gray-hairs, now.
Perhaps, we should revive the Gray Panthers.....
Perhaps, what is most hysterical, in a purely cosmic sense of things, is that it took George Walker Bush (the scion of America's number one family of shady/criminal business and politics), Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, themselves, to do what we couldn't do alone.
Stop this Empire!
It took three average to failed CEOs, to bring to the sight of the many what the few have known for years; Bush, Cheney and Rummy, the caricatures of American Empire. From "Wanted: Dead or Alive" to shaking the hand of a sick, ruthless dictator, when it was in American corporate interests and killing him when it no longer was.
Had it not been for 9/11, these men would have been a footnote in history; one-termers, whose only war would have been on the American poor and lower middle class, like all other Republicans administrations since Reagan.
But there was a 9/11, and whatever one might believe about who all was responsible for that horrific day and the anthrax attacks which followed, it is clear that that day was the beginning of the Bush administration as we know it.
What seemed like such a "gift from heaven" for the Neocons, given their PNAC visions, simply gave them enough rope to hang themselves.
What the Theocons saw as the beginning of the end of the world, may well be the end for them, as far as political power in this country. They have been exposed as cranks, crackpots, hypocrites and dangerous. Americans who had paid them little attention, now see them as insane.
For the first time in my lifetime, serious people are beginning to question Israeli influence on American government foreign policy.
There are times when I just cannot help but fall in the floor laughing, at the absurdity of it all.
From scorn to laughingstock in 48 hours
More than anything, these days it's the rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration that fascinates, for it's an unintended verbal portrait of a world power self-wounded, self-marginalized, self-doubting, self-eviscerated and self-eclipsed.
It's a bit too soon to hold a wake, but for us geopolitical junkies, we are likely witnessing the accelerated death of an empire. The Bush administration has managed to execute in six years what most withering empires took decades or centuries to accomplish. And you can hear the American Century's essence expiring in the administration's own words.
The last 48 hours, I think, will be more than a comma in history books; they'll go down as an empirical turning point of note -- again, prominently noted by no other than the administration itself.
Most recently was its Cheneyesque "big-time" failure to wow anyone with its almost pathetic pleading about official Iranian rudeness in Iraq. No one any longer believes. And even worse for the administration, its once fear-stoking claims of threatening evil have become a laughingstock.
That assessment derives in part from a five-word news characterization of the immediate prehistory of the administration's intended momentous, weekend announcement regarding
Iran: Even Bush's own propagandists, the news report understated with unintended comic effect, "anticipated resistance to their claims." One need not ask why.
What's more -- less comical but just as profoundly damaging -- the administration's very own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff openly questioned his empire's civilian leadership, telling reporters "I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit" in funneling instruments of American deaths into Iraq.
That's the military equivalent of saying enough is enough -- you guys are idiots.
At roughly the same time, in a second ring of the imperial circus, the administration's defense secretary was rhetorically displaying his empire's teetering fragility. On Saturday, the reemerging Bear had performed a geopolitical pre-autopsy on American power, and by Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates still hadn't composed even a remotely persuasive rejoinder.
Mr. Gates' response was, rather pitiably, a mere pea shooter against an intellectual howitzer. "One cold war was quite enough ... Russia is a partner in endeavors, but we wonder, too, about some Russian policies that seem to work against international stability ... All of these characterizations belong in the past. The free world versus those behind the Iron Curtain. North versus South. East versus West."
But they don't -- not any more, anyway -- and it was the U.S. that single-handedly brought the harmful past upon itself.
Conceding that recent "abuses" -- another understatement -- "have negatively impacted the reputation of the United States" -- yet another understatement -- Mr. Gates also said American leaders hold firmly a "belief in political and economic freedom, religious toleration, human rights, representative government and the rule of law."
If that weren't so monumentally empirically disprovable, well, gee, he might have a point. But his emporer is unclothed, and all the world can see it.
Once a world power is met with unprecedented incredulity, once it is neither believed nor respected, once it moves to laughingstock from scorn, once, as a result, it becomes utterly friendless, the next logical but not unavoidable steps are rapid decline followed by internal decay.
Which is indeed avoidable, but such avoidance requires leadership with an upticked learning curve, which is sorely, staggeringly absent. And that is what depresses and makes decline seem, in fact, unavoidable. (Thank God!)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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