Iran War Moves

If you wish to understand how Bush and Company got away with the atrocity of Iraq, observe how the administration's moves against Iran are portrayed on the cover of the London Independent versus your local newspaper, nevermind the network news channels.

We live in a depoliticized, dumbed-down, corporate media society spawning an American public that can believe still that Saddam caused 9/11 (one out of three), and accept its government's statements unquestioningly, with merely a muttered comment.

A vibrant democracy would be alive with indignant cries of: They're doing it again, let's stop them.

But the depoliticalization of the American public, along with its related susceptibility to emotion and image, is an aspect that Bush and Cheney and the whole despicable lot of them know so well.

As Bush took a projected long-term $5-trillion surplus and turned it into projected multi-trillion dollar debt within five years while slashing social service spending, the Cheneys and Roves made a political calculation that they could get away with it without economic dislocations and political costs to the people who matter.

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Cheney said, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (Suskind. The Price of Loyality, p. 291). And Bush proved an all-out looting of the U.S. Treasury doesn't matter.

So now as tax cuts for the super-wealthy, public money directed at the high-tech sectors as never before, and war without end is waged, the burden of war falls on a small number of Americans in the armed forces and their families, while profiteering and crony contractor capitalism's fraud remains protected by the Bush administration, as it continues to insist that war is necessary to protect America as a society.

But Cheney is right, you get away with quite a bit; it's up to each American to draw the line at how much squandering the treasury, lying, and killing and maiming our young does matter.

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