 May 7, 2009
George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency.
For example, he apparently really thought that: he was a uniter, not a divider; Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (until it was absolutely proven otherwise); cutting taxes for the rich would boost the economy; as President, he had all of those powers that Dick Cheney, Richard Addington, and John Yoo pretended to find for him in the Constitution; abolishing Social Security would benefit everyone whose social security was thereby abolished as well as the country as a whole; as President he had the authority under the Constitution to say "I'll follow this Act of Congress but not that one, at my own discretion;" he could, on his own authority, abrogate ratified treaties if his White House Legal Counsel thought they were "quaint;" Saddam bought "yellow cake" in Niger.
While George Bush really is an undereducated, ignorant, and dumb, person, he, in his alternate reality certainly never thought of himself in that light. No, he was not a secret voracious reader, as "Turdblossom," otherwise known as Karl Rove, was so fond of telling us. There were never any references to such readings except on the occasions that they were written into speeches for him. But he probably thought that he was, given that Rove told the world that he was. What a nice fit for Bush’s alternate reality.
 Dick Cheney is cut from an entirely different cloth. He is very knowledgeable, very smart, and knows exactly what he is doing every minute. He had a very clear agenda when he was in office: to run both the presidency and the President to the extent that he could, to achieve certain well-defined objectives. He was very clear in his own mind, and even on rare occasions in public by indirection, that his ultimate objective was to establish an authoritarian government in the United States. That was something he called "The Unitary Presidency." Most not otherwise prejudiced observers, under the brief definition (of mine) that follows, would call it "fascism:”
"Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy."
Dick Cheney does not make off-hand remarks. Dick Cheney knows the truth from falsehood. Dick Cheney does not live in an alternate reality. Dick Cheney does try very hard to conceal from both the general public and most of the government officials he associates and associated with the reality that he lives in. That is why, during his vice presidency, he made very few public appearances where one or more members of the media could question him. However, he did make such an appearance on a Sunday back in March on CNN.
In that interview he uttered several palpable falsehoods. First he made the claim that Iraq was a "state sponsor of terrorism," by implication related to 9/11. There was and is absolutely no evidence to substantiate this claim. After 9/11, and especially in the early days of the War on Iraq, Bill Safire of The New York Times among others did like to cite a supposed meeting between a supposed al-Qaida operative with a supposed representative of the Hussein regime. The meeting supposedly took place in Prague, The Czech Republic. There is no firm proof that such a meeting ever took place. But if it did, given the prior relationship between Hussein and bin Laden, the message most likely to have been delivered by the Iraqi to the Saudi was one that could be summarized in two words: “F__k off!” It is a fact that Saddam went out of his way to avoid associating with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden (who happened by-the-by to hate Saddam as a secular Muslim) if for no other reason than to not give the U.S. an excuse to attack him.
In that interview Cheney also stated that the Democrats are responsible for the current economic crisis. He held that his administration and the Republican-led Congress that controlled policy and the monetary blank checks it issued through 2006 to further its own policy aims had no responsibility for any of the mess, even though no one but the Republican Scream Machine holds to that view. Since Cheney, unlike Bush, clearly does not live in an alternate reality, he knows the truth. He just chose not to state it.
Not a falsehood, but a totally unsupportable position stated with total conviction, Cheney stated that President Obama's policy of closing Guantanamo would make the U.S. "unsafe." This is the case according to him even though only a handful of the persons held there are known terrorists or potential terrorists, when it was Bush/Cheney who ignored that clear warning of an impending bin Laden-led attack on the US they received from the CIA on August 5, 2001. (Or possibly, speculation here, they did not actually ignore it because they already knew that something was up and were determined NOT to stop it.) At the same time, it is now widely acknowledged that the Iraq War that Cheney and the Neocons largely ginned up has become, over the years, a major recruiting and training ground for potential terrorists. (I was pleased to note that after I originally penned these lines, the President too used this line of attack on Cheney.)
 So why did he offer these falsehoods and misrepresentations? To score current political points? To indicate that he is now, post-position-of-power, falling into his political dotage and succumbing to the George W. Bush alternate reality disease? Certainly not. Cheney represents certain major elements of the US power structure: the extractive industries, the military/industrial complex, the prison/industrial complex, the agribusiness sector, and certain elements of the other major economic sectors. What Dick Cheney did was to make it very clear that his battle to establish an essentially fascist state in our country for the benefit of those elements is far from over. If the Cheney Wing of the Republican Party, now lead by Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Scream Machine clones, is ever to make it back to power, the first essential endeavour for them is to establish a mythology on which they can run. For they cannot possibly run on reality and hope to come close to winning.
The German Right in the 1920s did it with the "Stab in the Back" claim for the German loss of the World War I. Never mind that by 1918 Germany had been thoroughly bled of men, material, and money, that the U.S. with its relatively limitless supply of men and materiel was fully engaged on the British/French side, and that following the failure of the 1918 Summer Offensive under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, even the Kaiser was ready to quit. No. It was the "Socialists" and the "Communists" who "stabbed the German nation in the back." “They” (in the Limbaugh/Coulter sense) did it. So "we," the patriotic Germans, have to get “them.” For it is all “their” fault.
And here, now, Cheney is marching down the same track. He has the full collaboration of Savagely-O'RHannibaugh and etc., the Republican leadership in the Congress and outside of it (Gingrich) who see nowhere else to go, and their echo chambers, such as NewsMax (the voice of the American Conservative (sic) Union), the Fox "News" Channel, and the Heritage Foundation. Yes, the Rovian Privatized Ministry of Propaganda is still very much in play. With them all, Cheney is laying the groundwork for their hoped-for GOP comeback. But this time it would be with a vengeance, both figurative and literal. It's "The Liberals," those traitors who, so Limbaugh and Coulter tell us, are responsible for everything that is wrong with the U.S., and "we" have to get "them," "squash them like cockroaches" so the self-parodying Mark Le-vin tells us.
One big difference now, as compared with the Clinton years, is that the Obama White House hits back. So much and with so much effectiveness, that Rove, et al feel impelled to go back after them, especially the sharp-tongued Vice-President. He in fact has been so effective that the mouthpiece NewsMax has to spread rumors of “White House dis-satisfaction with the Vice-President” that have absolutely no basis in fact.
Stay tuned. Indeed we all better stay tuned, because Limbaugh out loud and Cheney to himself and privately to his friends are serious when they say that they want Obama to fail. For that failure, combined with the mythology they are quickly developing, would very easily lead them back to power. And were that to happen, then even the GW Bush Presidency, which moved down the road to fascism but did not get there yet by any stretch of the imagination, could become something that we would look back upon with longing.
 Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In his book The New Americanism (1992, available at www.amazon.com), Dr. Jonas presented his proposal for that “new vision and mission” for the Democratic Party that so many, for so many years, have been urging it to find. A new vision and mission were obviously needed with increasing urgency as with increasing speed and determination the Georgites were driving our nation towards frank theocratic fascism. In Barack Obama the Democratic Party seems to have found an effective new voice to lead the nation back to the re-establishment of Constitutional Democracy in 2009 and beyond. President Obama represents a clear break with the policies of the Democratic Leadership Council which, over the past 30 years, had driven the Democratic Party, and the nation along with it, nearly into the ground. In 1992, Dr. Jonas found what he considered to be the needed vision and mission in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is hopeful that the Obama Administration has adopted it.
Dr. Jonas is also the author of The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym "Jonathan Westminster" this book was originally published in 1996. It was republished with a New Introduction in 2004. Under Georgite rule, major elements of the “fictional non-fiction” scenario of this work of “future history” have, most unfortunately, become all too real. Fortunately the book’s scenario departs from the reality that the 2008 election has now delivered. However, the similarities between, for example, Sarah Palin, who will hardly be disappearing from the national political scene anytime soon, and the book’s fictional first fascist President, Jefferson Davis Hague, are all too real. With continuing Republican efforts to make things as bad as they can for the Obama Administration, the threat of a fascist future for our nation has hardly disappeared.
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