Paranoia

Missed the boy king's speechifying last night (for the record, took my first trip to NOLA since the storm: more on that in another post), but just finished watching this morning's press conference (AmericaBlog has some live reactions).

Aside from--well, a few asides--the nations number one domestic priority, recovery from the storms, was mostly ignored...this alone should be enough to throw the bastard out on his ear...and the press corpse, um, I mean...no, actually I do mean press corpse (or press whores, if you prefer)--and the press corpse too.

Instead, this morning's focus was on spying and the war in Iraq. I wasn't expecting much by way of enlightenment, and I can't say I was disappointed in that regard.

But insight into the Rove/Bush, um, method, is, in some sense, useful...and my own take is that they're not really doing anything new, but recycling good old fashioned techniques of dictatorship, focusing particularly on one thing: fear.

I'll look for a transcript of the Q and A as soon as it's available; however, last night's transcript and other recent pronouncements clearly show a pattern, and not a particularly pleasant one: Bush makes ominous reference to "the enemy," which justifies...pretty much anything and everything he decides to do.

Lie? No problem. Break the law? Bring it on. The otherwise anonymous "enemy" presumably shits bullets, possesses superhuman stamina and cunning, and benefits from any mention of Team Bushian tactics--in other words, they've morphed into a bigger, meaner Soviet Union. Pretty amazing, eh?

The body language and demeanor of this gang speaks volumes: Bush himself reveals a combination of massive ego and unbelievable insecurity, which might explain some of his more tortured--no pun intended--attempts at phraseology. Last week's Nightline interview with Torquemada Gonzalez--who like his nominal boss, refuses to speak about particulars--showed, more than anything, his inner Adolf Eichmann: perfectly willing to torture and kill for the fatherland, without the slightest measure of human guilt, while at the same time possessing the dullest, most ordinary of personal character. Big Time's scowl tells you all you need to know about him.

Fear is certainly a useful tool for the aspiring politician seeking to circumvent the democratic process, and I'll give Rove some credit: he knows how to push all sorts of buttons to incite rubber-kneed, blubbering reactions from the public. Shrub's learned enough to keep from grinding his teeth long enough to recite the message--and both know, if successful, they never have to actually justify their actions, because a cowering public doesn't demand answers.

Answers like a breakdown on terrorist organizations--numbers, goals, tactics, areas of operation, and so on. Indeed, Shrub proudly refused to answer a question today about this: the questioner wanted to know how many attempted terrorist acts were thwarted by his lawbreaking on domestic spying sans warrants (of course, we all know the answer is "none"). By keeping the public afraid and in the dark, all sorts of THEIR goals can be accomplished (like, for example, restoring Halliburton's fiscal solvency via massive infusions of public cash).

The downside, though, to pressing the paranoia button is that eventually you can only announce the imminent falling of the sky so many times before folks finally have enough. I think we might be seeing a little bit of that now--Shrub's rant about needing the Patriot Act, particularly in light of his insistance that, as preznit, he can do anything he wants anyway--could be a sign he's feeling the strain. And as Iraq sinks into greater anarchy, it's gonna take a lot more than yet-another-election to convince folks that it't "getting better" over there...while, at the same time, the Gulf Coast is left to its own devices.

You know, if I had ANY confidence in the Democratic Party, I'd be looking to the off-year elections as the chance to finally smack the smirk of the Chimperor's face...but I don't. Instead, we're likely to see the Dems insisting they can implement Chimp's policies better than he can. Alas, the same stance was one reason why they lost last year. It's too bad they can't see what John Murtha points out: the public is WAY ahead of the government on all sorts of issues.

But no one's there to ride that particular wave.