Existential Terror ... The Rethug Playbook on Amphetimines

amphetamine noun. A colorless, volatile liquid, C₉H₁₃N, used as a central nervous system stimulant in the treatment of certain conditions, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, and narcolepsy, and abused illegally as a stimulant.

"I like the idea of people running for office. There's a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don't know, I don't know if that will be their platform or not. But it's -- I don't think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table."
- Dubya brings us his favorite local political issue (potholes) of representative government, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005

"The only way to look at a politician is down."
- H.L. Mencken

We are still too caught up in the collateral damage now to consider all the ramifications and understand what truly has taken place in these last four frenzied years ... or to consider for a moment that the Real Intendment of what our current corporate oligarchy calls the "The Post 9/11 World" and what historians will forever term as "Shock and Awe Democracy" which will surface not so much from the day-to-day events of Iraqi self-determination and America's new role in shaping geopolitical borders - or even from our own terminal destiny with the unpaid purchase order - but mostly from what the survivors will inevitably accept as what all of this madness really cost us in the end.

Here, to take the Lord's name in vain, is a Jesus Christ-sized mini-series right out of The Sopranos: tragedy, conspiracy, dark and off-the-wall humor, and the unending suspense of never really knowing who was lying or who was running his mouth to the bank of corrupt feds or who was telling the truth all along ... These days it hardly seems to matter much to the vast wasteland of political greenhorns who find themselves ensnared by a 24-hour Orwellian dysinformation campaign - as it is being played out in the duplicitous morass known as "organized media" - like it was another summer rerun of Desperate Housewives or American Idol with tanks, humvees, jets and missles as the teen heartthrobs. Not even hardcore libertarians or your garden variety moderates quite know what to make of this direction we have chosen or have even a remote clue as to whether we have reached the other end of this phase or whether we're trapped in a constant state of bizarre transmutation.

The massive downstream fallout from this exercise, the raw and sometimes petty drama of the daily malfeasance and the deceptively played ignorance from Our Preznut, "Chimpy McFlightsuit," comes together in a multi-tiered plot that appeals to almost every form of curious mind - from the bleeding heart activist and peacenik demonstrator to the tightly packed constituency of Barnaby Jones aficionados and the millions of silent voices whose sole interest in these proceedings is the inevitable spectacle of envisioning once-dominant and self-righteous men brought down to their knees like Jimmy Swaggart whimpering for our forgiveness.

Consider Donald "Redrum" Rumsfeld and Paul "Dopey" Wolfowitz, as examples - a pair of career bureaucrats and close allies of every Rethug chief executive since Gerald Ford - who, if they were Romans back in the ribald days of Tiberius and Claudius, would have purchased only the best gladiators by loaning Caesar the cash at triple the going rate. They are the ideological toxic waste from the Reagan Revolution as it then played out in the penetralia of the Defense Department, who rationalized and supported Saddam's brutal existence in one instance and then both signed the infamous PNAC letter faxed off to Bubba in 1998, by simply stating that "the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction" and advocated for the "[removal of] Saddam Hussein and his regime from power" ... Here were two career insiders with enough camouflage to erase even the faintest heat signature and so much power that they considered it a normal day's work to treat the CIA, the Department of Defense and every federal agency with a diplomatic or intelligence mission statement like brainless minions in their own private agenda ... and who could summon battalions, clandestine forces, covert paymasters or even a few well-placed assets in the so-called liberal media establishment by simply punching the "homeland security" buzzer under their desks.

And suddenly, just at that wonderful moment when the Saddam statues fell, they casually put their initials on some benign memo proposing that the use of torture leading into an election year would fall to the back pages of The Nation or Salon with hardly a bit of outrage or even probing questions during the weekly Pentagon press briefings - and several months later while basking in the adoring glare of Neo-Con power-players at Cafe Milano, both get a call from some administration flunkie that could take the heat if the message got mangled, whom neither of them really knows from the daily cabinet briefings, saying that the press got a hold of some photos showing a group of the detainees being dragged around like anesthetized chihuahuas to a water dish filled with lava rocks ...

It all seems like a bad atavistic dream, at first, like it first did when Dutch got hit with that little scandal called "Iran-Contra," because Ollie North couldn't keep his business "off the farm" - as it was first theorized back then - but when they get back to the White House to see their old buddy Dubya, it seems that something has gone terribly wrong. Both Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney are in the Oval Office with the preznut; Dubya welcomes Redrum and Dopey with that waxy smile and chimpish expression when he get his nuts in a vise, but otherwise he says nothing because little Alberto advised him that it was in his best interest to keep quiet. A queer tension hangs in the air like a lead cloud and Redrum is the first to flinch. How will this play out in the press? Wolfowitz starts to shift himself to the couch and motion for a drink but Cheney cuts this off at the pass: "We're working out the details on this, Paul. Scooter will give you the run down later tonight at home ... from a pay phone."

Redrum stares back at the room, realizing that he's just been handed the murder weapon, then he reaches for his swollen leather briefcase and barks out his best subordinate good afternoon. Mother of fucking Christ! What the hell was that all about? During his clipped march back to the Secret Service Escalade, he sees Scooter and Scottie reading an early morning edition of The Washington Post and he angrily shoots off a nice morning to you as they stroll by ... Less than thirty minutes later, Redrum descends upon the Pentagon Situation Room like Count Dracula overcome by a major league bloodlust, along with a carton of Cubans, the Sy Hersh story and the best and the brightest serfs to be found among the recent graduation classes at West Point and Annapolis; some of the lesser known cowboys in the Department are already rounding up their personal effects and trading in their bathroom keys for an extended stint in the Near East Division, which means it will take another Rethug administration before they can trade spit with another hot Air Force captain. Things couldn't be worse for the boys and girls on Redrum's team - and mixing it up with Dick Cheney is like asking a Medellin loan shark for an extension and eating the interest.

That was his last good day in Washington in a harsh nutshell. We will probably never know what he and Dubya talk about these days, nor how they actually communicate, because Alberto and Dubya's Number Two know what happened to Nixon when he made a couple of calls from one of the White House phones that fed into the tape-recording system ... Redrum was not relegated to Fredo status - officially - but when your boss can't be seen in the same room with you for an extended period of time ... let's just say that the Secret Service will duck in the event that shots are fired in your direction and your virtues will be fabricated to such a layer of deception that Congress may actually name a highway in your behalf, albeit posthumously.

Indeed ... and now we have drifted off into some dangerous compound equation. And it's beginning to mushroom into some unmanageable entity, much like our obsessive soiree in Iraq ... But before we zoom off into the panoramic camera shot just above the horizon, it would be unfair not to dig deeper into the mothership of our current discontent further, a reacherous cabal so ruthless it was called the "California Mafia" by its detractors and responded in kind with gnarled fangs, angry threats to just about anyone who opposed them and subpoenaed enough dissidents to the point of begging for a poorhouse deep in the mean streets of Calcutta. Dubya is - in the same instance - the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater, a vile and noxious combination of planned dementia and social carcinogen, armed with the same level of acute psychosis that absolves the master when he blasts the hell out of the enemy to prove that God was still protecting them ... which in the case of Ronald Reagan was manifest during a microphone check before one of his Saturday radio broadcasts: "My fellow Americans. I'm pleased to announce that I've signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes." Without becoming too obviously unfair with this point, the administration certainly could not send a diplomatic envoy to Al-Qaeda to smooth down the feathers, so to speak, nor could it ask Muslims to question Islamic views of reality without questioning their own religious motives ... because for many untold Americans, it would unleash its own brand of soul-wrenching terror about the very terror we have unleashed.

But at least Rethugs and Democrats can agree on one thing tonight: Dubya is no Ronald Reagan. But ironically, both Dubya and Reagan draped themselves in the shrouds of religious conservatism at home and openly pushed for religious moderates or even liberals abroad - seeing foreign religious conservatives as constituting huge threats to America's interests. Yet even Reagan's unburdened view of the world has now proven very costly in the new century, on many wide and synergistic fronts, his decision to destroy communism at any cost meant that we funded terrorists in Central America and that our hard-earned tax dollars were used by dictatorships worse than even Uday and Qusay and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Under his watch, Dutch also provided intelligence and supplies to Saddam Hussein and gave Stinger missles and paramilitary training to the same band of Islamic fascists who eventually became the Taliban and now have retreated back to Afghanistan's other disturbing legacy - by doing for the heroin marketplace what the Cali cartel did for cocaine. Dubya, as well, has shown that not considering the complexity of the world is costly on many fronts - placing it in a constant state of existential terror that plagued the late 20th Century and endures even today - because his approach on the threat of global terrorism will only feed the very forces that want to kill us all.

In the end, when considering the tragic and compounding costs, perhaps Dubya, too, shares the same fiscal sense as his master, Ronald Reagan, who once remarked about the government's ability to outspend its means, "I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself."

Jesus, Lord Almighty, those were the days, eh?