Plenty of commentators have discounted George W. Bush's inaugural speech as mere rhetoric. But was it just a speech? Or is something more sinister afoot?
If you wanted to accomplish the complete take-over of the United States, if you wanted to institute a police state in America, how would you go about it? A simple two step process would do it without a single shot being fired. First, adopting a plain spoken manner, you'd tell the folks what ever they wanted to hear in order to win their confidence and their votes. Then, once you're in, you'd scare the bejeebers out of them so they hush up. And Americans would enthusiastically line up to surrender their cherished liberties and, yes, their freedom, to "our" president.
But it couldn't happen here, right? Last Thursday was just a speech, right? George was just riffing a bit for the crowd when he said he had authority from "a power beyond the stars" to take America to war with any nation that doesn't see things our way, wasn't he?
No, he wasn't just playing to the audience. And he wasn't kidding. It was the next step in yet another sleight-of-hand maneuver by Bush to hoodwink the American people. Suddenly gone were the moderated and somewhat reasonable tones of his campaign, no longer useful having served their purpose in getting the 51% vote required to put him in office for another four years. Now that he's been sworn in he's announcing his true ambitions which, as in the past, are quite different than those for which most Americans voted.
In other words, the man who controls the most powerful and violent military force in the history of human kind is willing to routinely lie in order to get his way.
In his inaugural address Bush proclaimed that the central purpose of his second term would be the promotion of democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." At confirmation hearings earlier in the week Condoleezza Rice named Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe as "outposts of tyranny" and the primary targets for the Bush administration. On Friday, a senior official said the administration also would demand that even "friendly" governments like Russia, China, Pakistan and Egypt institute democratic reforms to our liking, noting that some of the pressure to change would be "private" (read: "clandestine special operations") rather than public since the administration would want to be careful to avoid undermining a leader like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whom it counts as a democratic reformer.
Another senior official, a leading neoconservative who refused to be named, said that one of the chief "lessons learned" is an argument that neoconservatives have long made: a central goal of the United States should be "systemic change" - changing hostile states' regimes, not merely their policies.
In other words, now the U.S. policy is to proactively overthrow the governments of those with whom we disagree and to do so through any means at our disposal.
This turn in U.S. policy is so radical that it's even rattled many Republicans. "If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that reveres the less idealistic policies of Richard Nixon. "I hope and pray that he didn't mean it ... [and] that it was merely an inspirational speech, not practical guidance for the conduct of foreign policy."
But make no mistake: he did mean it. Every word of it. Why would anyone think otherwise? It's a strategy that's worked well for him before. Next will come even more bellicose rhetoric in the State of the Union Address soon followed by loud and urgent proclamations of some new threat, one that could put at risk our very way of life. Inevitably all of the threatening and bluster will lead to an attack killing Americans some where in the world (if Bush is really lucky he'll again "hit the trifecta," as he once described 9/11, and it will happen on American soil).
And then the neoconservatives will get what they really want: an expanded PATRIOT Act; "Homeland Security" modeled after the Gestapo; preemptive mass arrests of whomever they want to arrest and however they want to arrest them, taken where ever they want to take them and kept for as long as they want to keep them; phone conversations, computers and e-mail, tax returns, census information, and body cavities all subject to close examination ... the enforcers will have exactly what they want, just like in a police state.
Los Angeles Times - Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows
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