05/19/2002 Archived Entry: "So, what's going on here? The Chickens are crying Hawk, Hawk!"

So, what's going on here?

...Overall, always left off-balance, with a sense of instability and anxiety, people cannot process all the information that comes stumbling on them repetitively and are more than happy to let the 'authorities' deal with the problems.

But there is something more profound going on, something to do with a general dissatisfaction with the status quo, a sort of uneasiness on the part of the population. Remember Abraham Lincoln, "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." There's been a flurry of ideas and activities disseminated and organized on the Internet for the past decade that are essentially threatening to the elites. There is a larger segment of the population being more informed on the State of the World (disparity in revenues, abject poverty, etc.). Perhaps, more importantly, the worldwide economy is a basket case and the complexity of the many predicaments are such that any rational solutions (they do exist) would inherently be detrimental to the immense privileges of these elites -- or so they are convinced. At a more personal level, a lot of people have been negatively affected by layoffs and all the financial swindles of the expansion-without-end 90s that began to come to roost last year. Lots of people, ever deeper in debt in the pursuit of happiness, have seen their savings dwindle in a calamitous turn of the market when at the very same time the top executives bowed away smelling like a rose with huge financial compensations... Gilles d'Aymery is Swans' publisher and co-editor.

When you can utter such meaningless drivel as "We must protect our vital interests in the region," without having the faintest idea what it means, you have arrived.

Hawk! Hawk!

The possibility of another attack against the United States is "almost certain," Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday. He said it was "not a matter of if, but when."

Yes, and it is 99.99% certain that Cheney is using the War on Terror to deflect criticism away from the Bush Administration. Well, I must admit, I'm having trouble making a case for that .01%




But come on, this shouldn't surprise anyone. Bush smells politics in the air, and that's his own BO he's smellin'. The GOP intends to wage this election on the War on Terror. To this date, they have been unable to make its' support a wedge issue. To do this, they need the Democrats to fight against their actions, so that the Republicans, saying, ``The president and his foreign policy team are focused on uniting the country, winning the war on terrorism and defending the United States interests,'' can then accuse the Democrats of not supporting the President's War on Terror, and not supporting the United States interests. What issues are the Republicans going to win on? The economy tanking? Their inaction on health-care reform? Their aim to partially privatize SS? No, no, no, those are the last things they want to talk about. The War on Terror is numbers 1,2, and 3 on the list. They know if the debate is about anything else other than Terrorism, they will lose, and so, do not be surprised to the extent they will go toward politicizing this War, towards using it to wedge patriotism against the Democrats, and toward winning an election. The means matter not in the game of power when you know you are right. "The point is we're on a razor-thin margin and, for all the right reasons, people are interested in regaining power," said Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a key Bush ally.