Bush Is Expendable

As my imaginary readers know, my conspecifics at work include a number of folks who get all their news from Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and right wing rant radio. They have begun to recognize Bush’s incompetence, but they still believe in the policies of the administration. “We can’t cut and run, but Bush is not the right man to be in charge of the war,” quoth one. The war, it is said, is necessary now even if it was a mistake in the first place because a) Iraq will become a terrorist breeding ground if we leave, and b) we have to “fight them over there to keep from fighting them here”, whatever that means. Even some of the Democrats claim that the war must be waged to a victorious conclusion but feel that a Democrat would do it better. Of course, my conspecifics have no more idea of how we will know we have “won” the war than Bush has.

If my conspecifics can be taken as evidence of what the right wing media wants them to believe, it appears that Bush has become expendable. It is the war that must be preserved and, with it, the idea that there is a huge threat from “Islamofascism” that cries out for a military solution and requires bigger and more intrusive government. A lot of phoney-baloney government jobs and defense contracts depend on keeping the war machine revved up. A lot of power is at stake.

It was pretty touch and go for the political-military-industrial complex after the Soviet Union collapsed. People were even talking about a “peace dividend” for a while. It was vitally important to find a replacement enemy, and “terror” fit the bill nicely. It even has the advantage of being an abstraction and all but nonexistent so there is no chance that the threat will ever be neutralized. There won’t be any talk about a peace dividend any time soon.

I do not know what is more breathtaking, the brilliance of concocting the big lie or the idiocy of the electorate in believing it.