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Warning: this is a bit long, but it's so damn great you ought to slog through it anyway. Or not.
Despite their shameful attempt to blame 9/11 on the usual objects of GOP hatred, I actually think the argument that we brought it on ourselves isn't as weird as it looks at first glance. It's just not quite the argument lard-ass Jerry and smarmy Pat made.
If 9/11 happened as the official conspiracy tells us it did, then we're guilty of setting things in motion by electing the Bush criminal enterprise to anything more important than city council (and as long as we're dealing with official stories, let's set aside the stolen elections for the time being for the sake of this argument).
This group of violent imperialist thieves presented such a clear and present military threat to the entire Middle East and its oil reserves that bin Laden, taking orders from his state sponsors, decided to try a little preemptive action. By that line of reasoning, the attacks were intended to delay or possibly prevent entirely what anybody who pays attention to right wing ideology could see was coming. PNAC's manifesto is essentially a users manual for US imperialism, and it doesn't take an expert to decipher its intent.
Unfortunately, their reasoning was lousy and all they accomplished was pissing off a nation of hyper-consumers and normally inattentive TV addicts while reversing Bushie's growing unpopularity and turning him into The Commander Guy with a 90 percent approval rating. The rest is just bloody history, per the PNAC script.
Or...
If 9/11 was an inside job -- and I don't see any way it wasn't, given the huge and growing body of physical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that makes a joke of the official myth -- then it's our fault for allowing the right wing coup to take over without 50 million people in the streets of DC running them out of town before the moving vans even showed up.
Instead, we proved to the right wing overlords that we're not serious people and that we don't really value the things we say we do -- chief among them a government of, by and for the people that seeks to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens.
This demonstration of passivity signaled that they had free rein to do just about any damn thing they wanted to without any real risk of resistance from the debt slaves and corporate androids who slept through the coup and were about to sleep through the Bushie's regime.
But one little detail was missing: the "new Pearl Harbor" PNAC saw was necessary to get away with the whole war profiteering, money making, crony rewarding scam. They needed an event so outrageous that the American people would be scared half to death and turn to the Bushies for protection.
An event that would allow them to get away with the most transparent lies, suppress anything inconvenient by declaring national security and/or muzzling the already compliant corporate media, implement the most obviously fascistic laws and policies without public or congressional opposition, attack any country they damn well wanted to (as long as there was money to be made in war hardware and/or fossil fuels theft) and generally conduct themselves as the masters of the universe that all pure sociopaths see when they look in the mirror.
And so 9/11 was set in motion. Evidence now suggests it was planned long before the 2000 coup, possibly as early as the mid-90s. This would be consistent with a tightly choreographed, meticulously planned sequence of events scripted by a group of right wing takeover artists who knew they had all the pieces in place to assure a Bush victory in 2000 -- by any means necessary.
So that's the other argument, taking into account the foregone conclusion that this coup would take place on schedule and that it would require a significant, polarizing event to get the public to go along with massive DoD spending hikes and corresponding cuts in social programs. I'd say mission accomplished, eh?
Those already bored can stop reading now, if you haven't already. For the rest... a brief diversion into the mechanics of the coup and the amazing legal and PR moves that planted Bushie as The Decider in the public mind.
As it happened, the process was relatively simple: First, set things up so that the whole election turns on results from a state governed by Bushie's brother and where the woman in charge of running fair elections is also chair of the Florida for Bush campaign.
Then have his first cousin declare Bush the winner on Fox TV on election night. Even though the rest of the networks had called Florida for Gore or had said it was too close to call either way, this one move positioned Bushie as the winner, a good man wronged and just trying to stay above the fray while fending off this unseemly challenge to the will of the people from a couple of "sore losers."
Then, when the recount starts, ship in a couple of dozen GOP operatives playing angry preppie mobs, intimidate local election workers into stopping critical vote counts in key districts, bring out a robust-looking James Baker -- the Bushie's chief fixer -- to make Bushie's case and, thanks to the customary democratic incompetence and stupidity re PR, pair him against Warren Christopher, the dem's chief advocate, who looked like he had been exhumed after five years underground and made Baker look even more credible by comparison.
Create numerous false trails and diversions, keep Gore supporters wasting limited time chasing phantoms, run to the Florida supreme court when anything even looks like it might go against the GOP, keep badgering the ballot counters so they screw things up and waste more time, keep sucking up to the local and national media so the case is tried in the press rather than in the Florida courts, where they might actually lose.
Finally, after screwing around for weeks, getting extensions, fomenting more preppie intimidation, fighting through a couple of setbacks from the Florida supremes -- and all the while TV "news" is showing Bushie meeting with his cabinet and preparing to go to work, further demonstrating that Bushie knows he's right and that he's a patient, dedicated public servant, respectful of the rule of law, and willing to let the process vindicate him... After all that, Baker claims that the Florida court shouldn't be the arbitrators of a national election.
People actually buy this, even though it's unconstitutional, Rehnquist agrees to hear the case, and Baker gets his day in front of the US supremes -- a carefully selected group of hard right wingers and "moderates" who in any civilized country would be called totalitarians but here in winger land are known as centrists.
And of course, they give it to Bushie 5 - 4 in a decision so odious that none of them signed the majority opinion. They also made sure everybody knew this case was not to establish precedent -- even though the main thing the supreme court does is establish precedent.
Trying to find humor in a right wing coup is pretty tough, but you've got to love the court's reasoning that continuing to count the ballots might prejudice Bushie's chances of being elected and so the counting must stop. Which is to say, further vote counts might show that Gore won, which would fuck up the entire bloodless coup thing and they'd have to send in the troops to seize power. Nobody wants that, so it's best for all to just quit counting votes and avoid bloodshed.
So, that's my case for why we're all to blame for "the events of 9/11(tm)." Lame? Nice try, but...? Right on the mark? Stupidest thing I've ever read? A triumph of logic and perception? Or maybe just a single :puke:
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