The Dick Cheneys, the Bushes, the American Dominionists deserve one another. None of them believes in America and none of them would find success in the ideology that made America. All of them believe in abusing fear, running truth out of the room, and semantically twisting law, legislation, or language that pose potential barriers in achieving their desired ends.**
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Before I get more serious, I’ll give you this:
The Ps in GOP: Power over Pelf. Pelf over Politics. Politics over Party. Party over Policy. Policy to PerPetuate Power via ProPaganda Provided by Pelf for Paid Pundits*
The Ps in People or Public are severed from this perpetual loop.
Onwards...
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. – James Madison
The Bush family, and their ilk in the American aristocracy, believe that the inequality they privately espouse and publicly legislate (or mandate in the case of W), and which makes them more equal than their national compatriots, is a birthright. This is why the rail against government, in general, and regulation and taxes, most specifically. Government has proved a very useful tool, for example, in:
- leveling the playing field
- equal application of laws
- mass educational opportunities
- public access to government proceedings
- enforcement of the recognition of rights, inter alia
- thwarting short-term schemes to enrich the few for the long term
- penalties for environmental degradation
- setting aside parks and preserves
- restricting enhanced profit schemes in times of war
- securing open financial records of public firms
- monetary and economic management
- product safety enforcement, inter alia
- progressively taxing wealth to pay for
- the protection of retirement plans, deposit balances, etc.
- enforcement and regulatory mechanisms
- education and research
- product safety testing
- national defense, and
- everything else listed above, inter alia
This is why they must rail against it. It punishes their sense of supremacy to have to compete equally with others or be judged by others not of their station. They loathe the idea that they may owe just as much to the system in place as anyone else because their arrogance insists that they are owed by the system since they are the ones to maintain it through their inherently supreme rule. They detest being called to account by a government representing all the people because they believe that any harm they may cause is done to lessers and, therefore, must be trivialized & they believe that any harm they may cause, e.g., placing a faulty product on the market, is nothing more than a need for correction on the next attempt. They abhor intellectuals because the aristocrats don’t want rational imposition into what they feed as reality to the rest.
The Dick Cheneys are more dangerous than any of them because they are the wannabes, the apologists, the excusers. They want to be like the aristocrats but know they won’t be accepted as they are. So, they establish themselves as tools. They are the hidden bureaucrats who work within the system to advantage the advantaged and thus curry favor into their world so that they a/o their progeny can claim the high birthright. They are so dangerous because they come from the rolls of the masses and are too often overlooked as they subvert the system from a perch which is above suspicion until their work is completed.
The Dominionists spend the better part of their free time seeking ways to be afraid of the chaos that our reality entails and finding shelter under a strong-armed skirt, whether real or imagined. Their willful blindness (the skirt) and inherent fear preclude them from asking the necessary questions about whether the strong arm is making things better, i.e., destroying reasons to fear, or worse, i.e., in the process of destroying one fear, stirring up more things than have been put down. In doing these things, they serve as the cheerleaders from the wider population for the privileged in exchange for promises of protection (encouraging god’s protection, threatening to destroy any in opposition to their beliefs, providing optimism that an end to the fear is near).
The key to all of this is that fear is a part of all of us and thus we are willing to offer benefit of the doubt, even if only initially, which buys enough silence for the Tools to do their work. Also, since fear is a part of all of us, optimism is an easy pacifier which means, of course, that fear is a permanent feature. Fear is the Tools’ lever to ensure the Privileged are properly placed to issue the words of assuagement.
Now, going back to the James Madison quote above, all three of these representatives have had success chipping away at rational government for a century or more but have never been able to finalize the permanence of their desires. It is something akin to a game of whack-a-virus. We can’t kill the virus but we have kept it contained as rational forces have continuously asserted themselves. But, as in nature, the viruses have evolved. They have learned that Madison’s "gradual and silent" do not really work and have instead opted for "violent and sudden" and rational actors have been caught completely unaware. I think also that the virus has found another enabler beyond the Cheneys. The Cheneys have settled on "violent and sudden" but have been given a "gradual and silent" assist in the form of compromised rationality. I refer here to the leadership of what should be the rational actors who have been compromised through:
corruption (directly or indirectly);
the temptation of their own limited privileges;
an intelligence that necessarily entails doubt that too often translates into inaction; and,
an overly long record of overlooking "gradual and silent" and from that a guilt born of complicity (a guilt that would require too much a gulp of pride to admit and force corrective action).
So, I will leave you with another quote known to many here. In the face of a press that has been too long, slow and lazy in privileging actual truth over partisan truths:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. – Thomas Jefferson
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* paid pundits here can mean either editors and op/ed writers, other hacks & shills, or it can mean the press in general which has been bought by the ruling class and is thus controlled by the same
** I admit that there are few specific details provided in support of the thesis I lay out; however, most readers here are well aware of the supporting facts these assumptions. I do not pretend to be so conspiratorial as to believe this is the design of some grand master plan for world domination. I do believe that 9/11, occurring in a period when the actual Dick Cheney and an actual Bush supported very vocally by an actual Dominionist movement and not-so-marginal sympathizers, very fortuitously occurred in 2001. While my insistence on a lack of conspiracy among the listed representative interests precludes me from claiming they were somehow behind 9/11, I am not so naïve to ignore the possibility that Administration apathy towards terrorism prior to 9/11 was intentional with a hopeful eye on something, anything happening that could give them clearance with the public following their more than questionable ascension to the head of the Executive branch...