Reich Here, Reich Now

If a morbidly obese man is a year away from a heart attack, but choking on a piece of steak right now, which should be our immediate course of action: Should we pester him about changing his diet and getting more exercise, or apply the Heimlich Maneuver right now?

The answer is obvious, as is the reason why this rhetorical question serves as a perfect Election Day metaphor.

Yes, the process of restoring some semblance of liberty through the rule of law will require long-term treatment of the deeply entrenched corruption within our body politic. Whether this can be done at this late stage of our decline into outright despotism is a question I'm hardly competent to answer.

But any progress will require, first and foremost, that we deal with the most acute threat to what remains of our liberties: The emergence of an unabashedly totalitarian Republican ruling elite that emits the unmistakable aroma of Fascism.

Assuming that the GOP's fortunes aren't favored by Diebold, as it were, the Republican death-grip on the political system will be loosened, at least somewhat, by tomorrow.

Thank God.

Of course, there's always the possibility of a lame-duck session of Congress.

And we shouldn't assume that the “Democrat” brand through which the Ruling Party retails some of its programs would be any better, were it to achieve the same political dominance that its “competitor” presently enjoys.

The case made by the Bush-led GOP for preserving the Republican majority seems to be nothing other than this: As long as we're “at war” -- and this will continue into the foreseeable future – One Party Rule is a patriotic imperative.



The Wee Decider made that point explicitly yesterday in a campaign speech before a throng of auto-lobomotized Bu'ushists in Pensacola.


"As you go to the polls, remember we're at war," commanded the Bushling. "And if you want this country to do everything in its power to protect you and at the same time lay a foundation for peace for generations to come, vote Republican."

Statements of this sort help explain the bizarre difficulty Bush displays with the English language: Clearly, his native tongue is Orwellian.

Assuming, once again, that a Democratic congressional majority, or plurality (with a Democrat majority in the House and the Senate still under Republican control) emerges as a result of today's elections, the Brownshirt wing of the Republican Party – which, to be blunt, seems to be the only fully functional wing – will be given a handy rationale for the failure of the war in Iraq.

We can expect that the GOP's media auxiliary, having execrated the mainstream media for supposedly ignoring the “good news” out of Iraq, will perform a lock-step pivot and start describing the debacle in detail, while insisting that this is the fault of those who “stabbed us in the back” -- not a failure on the part of a president and party who have faced no significant opposition since November 2002.

Charles Featherstone offers this perceptive analysis:

“What I've seen on the web tells me that some [Republican leaders and apologists], at any rate, are willing to blame the media and Democrats exclusively for the defeat. How that works mechanically, especially given how little power they have in determining policy, is anyone's guess. But we are talking about magical thinking after all. It also means that Republicans, if they take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion (and thankfully most of them don't), are going to demand something akin to one-party authoritarian government the next time they wage war. A government with the power to keep all possible secrets, detain all possible opponents and control all domestic media. Why do anything less if success in war – and thus the future of civilization itself – hinges on it?... Which means the next logical step is the rack and the inquisition – `Do you support the war? Do you love and trust your leaders?' --and torture and death for those who do not. That is, after all, what the state does when it demands the allegiance and support of all its citizens.”


Featherstone's assessment is contingent only on the continuation of the war in Iraq through the rest of Bush's reign, and into that of his successor. The Democrat Party leadership, unfortunately, has repudiated the “cut-and-run” option. It has become committed to “victory” in Iraq. In a curious way, the Democrats have dusted off Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign theme: The election is about competence, not ideology.

When we're mired in a war we shouldn't have fought, and continuing the war actually exacerbates the threat, cutting and running is the only rational course of action. Since we're looking down the barrel of immediate bankruptcy and financial ruin, a radical – and immediate – change of fiscal policy is imperative. And Americans of all backgrounds should be able to appreciate the need to blow up the foundations of the Garrison State and wartime dictatorship that have been laid during the past five years.

So we'll have plenty to do, and lots to talk about, no matter what happens at the polls today -- but first, we need to get that chunk of gristle dislodged from the trachea of the body politic....

Now, Can We Prosecute Saddam's Unindicted Co-Conspirators? (UPDATED)

Saddam's conviction and death sentence represent the last full measure of his usefulness to the Power Elite that sustained and exploited him from the time he came to power. Of the myriad crimes he committed against his subjects, international peace, and God's law, Saddam will swing for a 1982 massacre of 148 people in a Shi'ite community.

It was over a year after that atrocity that the incumbent Minister for Aggression Against Small Countries Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam as an emissary of President Ronald Reagan.

It was after the crime for which Saddam faces the death penalty that the Reagan and Bush administrations, working in collaboration with Kissinger Associates and a shadowy network of financial cut-outs, aided Saddam's war effort against Iran, in which Iraq was the aggressor.

In 1987, about five years after Saddam presided over the massacre that prompted today's death sentence, The New Republic -- a consistent supporter of military action against Iraq since 1990 -- published an essay entitled "Back Iraq," which urged Washington to offer Baghdad material and strategic support against Iran (which had, in fact, been Washington's policy since the beginning of the decade, although it offered occasional support for Tehran as well).

"The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote the co-authors of that piece. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."

The authors of that essay were Laurie Mylroie and Daniel Pipes, who have been unstinting supporters of the ongoing Iraq war and a larger campaign against "Islamo-Fascism."

In 1987, Iraq attacked the U.S. Stark, which was part of a U.S. naval convoy protecting Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The following year, Saddam's regime allegedly used poison gas against Iraq's Kurdish population, an attack that has iconic status as an illustration of Saddam's murderous depravity (we'll leave aside, for the nonce, the fact that Iran has been plausibly accused of that attack).

Roughly two years later, after the Iran-Iraq war was over, the first President Bush issued a national security directive (NSD 26) intended to continue and expand existing military and strategic cooperation between Washington and Baghdad. This continued, incredibly, up to the very beginning of the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam is a modern ruler in the worst sense of that expression. Although cloaking himself now in the metaphorical robes of Muslim piety, it was Josef Stalin who provided his model of governance, at least in an aspirational sense. Saddam was cruel and brutal, but he never amassed powers akin to those exercised by Stalin, or used the powers he had to regiment the daily life of his subjects; he was content to liquidate those people -- individually, or in groups as large as he deemed necessary -- that threatened his hold on power.

It is those for whom Saddam acted as a subcontractor -- the architects of the Glorious Global Democratic Revolution -- who lust to re-order the lives of millions through the use of lethal violence.

If Saddam deserves to experience the long drop to the end of the hangman's rope, he should be joined on the scaffold by those who gave him the material means and political support to commit his crimes, as well as those who are exploiting the memory of those atrocities to advance their own murderous designs.

As Gilbert and Sullivan put it in the Mikado: I've got a little list...

And it's not as if the architects of this war weren't warned about the likely outcome --

"The U.S. government conducted a series of secret war games in 1999 that anticipated an invasion of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, and even then chaos might ensue," reports the Associated Press, citing documents made public on November 4 via a FOIA filed by the National Security Archive.

The "Desert Crossing" wargames "looked at `worst case' and `most likely' scenarios after a war that removed then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. Someare similar to what actually occurred after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003...."

Among the anticipated consequences, according to AP's summary, were an inflammation of "Iran's anti-Americanism," the alienation of Arab governments in the region, and growing friction with "many coalition partners." From this it would be reasonable to extrapolate an upsurge in militancy throughout the Islamic world, and a corresponding increase in terrorism.

All of this was known by the policy-makers who manipulated George W. Bush -- a callow, self-enraptured, arrogant, incurious little twit with delusions of divine destiny -- into committing the United States to a war of choice against Iraq. Which is to say that those people chose the outcome we're now seeing.

The most conspicuous representative of that cabal, the man actually running the executive branch, was asked by ABC's George Stephanapolous how he would react if a Democrat-led Congress issued a subponea for him to testify about Iraq and other matters.

"Probably not," replied Vice President Cheney, who clearly believes that accountability is for lesser breeds, rather than exalted beings like himself who live beyond the law.

In this, as in so much else, Cheney and the repellent people he represents are immeasurably worthier than Saddam of the fate decreed for their former Iraqi subcontractor today.

What The Regime Does to "Great Americans"

Since the group has an absolute or totalist vision of truth, those who are not in the group are bound up in evil, are not enlightened, are not saved, and do not have the right to exist.... One outside the group may always receive their right of existence by joining the group.... The group is the "elite,” outsiders are "of the world,” "evil,” "unenlightened,” etc.

Item #8 in Robert Jay Lifton's “Eight Criteria for Thought Reform,” a checklist of cult characteristics


Anyone who has endured more than a few minutes of Sean Hannity's daily assault upon reason will be familiar with the verbal handshake – perhaps “reach-around” would be a more appropriate description – by which the Hannitoids* identify each other: “You're a great American.”

It is never explained what these people did to distinguish themselves as “Great Americans,” but no explanation is necessary: By virtue of their blinkered devotion to the Dear Leader and his vision, they have become part of an anointed elite. They need not actually accomplish anything; their membership in Sean's little cult is sufficient proof of their “greatness.”

Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson


Colonel Ted Westhusing


Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, by way of contrast, was a Great American of the traditional sort. The same was true of Colonel Ted Westhusing. Like thousands of other American servicemen, Spec. Peterson and Col. Westhusing died in Iraq. Like an unknown number, however, both of them took their own lives as a result of mortal disgust over what the regime was forcing them to do.

“I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” protested Col. Ted Westhusing in a letter he wrote to his family last June. “I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more.”

Not long after writing those words, Col. Westhusing (about whom I have written before) – a West Point graduate and Special Forces veteran, a devout Catholic husband and father – used his service pistol to take his own life. This took place less than a month before the 44-year-old Colonel was to end his tour of duty.

Westhusing had become distraught to learn that the contractor for which he worked, Virginia-based USIS, had been implicated in many serious crimes – from embezzlement to murder.

“A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal – or tolerate those who do,” according to the moral code Westhusing had learned at West Point. An Army psychologist who reviewed Westhusing's e-mails following his suicide determined that the Colonel simply took that moral code too seriously, contending that Westhusing “had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking.”

Westhusing's commitment to “moral clarity” -- a virtue hymned by neo-Trotskyites, and studiously avoided by them – made it unbearable for him to be party to a huge and hideous crime against Christian decency.

Col. Westhusing was a faithful and devoted Catholic, and almost certainly believed that “the Almighty hath set his canon 'gainst self-slaughter.” I cannot imagine the abyss of dejection into which he must have fallen before taking his own life – assuming that it wasn't taken from him by the corrupt contractors with whom he worked, as some people suspect.

Like Colonel Westhusing, Spec. Peterson was devoutly religious, a one-time Mormon missionary from Flagstaff, Arizona. She had what one friend described as an “amazing” ability to learn languages, an aptitude that helped her learn Arabic at the Army's Defense Language Institute. Like Col. Westhusing, Spec. Peterson volunteered for duty in Iraq, where she was sent to help interrogate prisoners and translate captured documents at an air base in Tal-Afar.

And, like Ted Westhusing, Alyssa Peterson was driven to suicidal depression as a result of the role the regime forced her to play in Iraq.

The military bureaucracy, as is its wont, tried to bury the truth about Peterson's death. Reporter Kevin Elston, presently with Flagstaff public radio station KNAU, exhumed the details through diligent forensic journalism of a sort rarely practiced anymore.

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners,” reports Elston, using what is now recognized as a euphemism for “torture.” “She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokesmen for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.”

Immediately after lodging her objections, Alyssa was reassigned and sent to suicide prevention training; her suicide note (which has yet to be released; Elston saw a declassified paraphrase) took ironic notice of the fact that the “prevention” training actually instructed her in the best way to kill herself.

After doing what it could to conceal the circumstances surrounding Spec. Peterson's suicide, the Pentagon continues its campaign of obfuscation: It now insists that there may have been no connection between her objections to torture and her decision to kill herself. Unfortunately, the only person who could clarify the matter -- an intelligent, capable, exuberant young woman for whom suicide was entirely out of character -- is no longer among the living.

And the same bureaucracy continues to dispatch soldiers with severe psychological problems -- including clear warning signs of suicidal impulses -- to combat roles in Iraq.

Like Ted Westhusing, Alyssa Peterson was an intelligent, self-possessed individual of strong moral convictions and exceptional achievement. What did she see that deprived her of the will to live?

If the Regime has its way, we will never know for sure. As the tyranny under which we now live ripens, and its abuses of power become more overt, we'll likely be exposed to at least some of the horrors that drove these incontestably Great Americans to suicide.

Do the Hannitoids even care about what the Regime is planning for us? The cult's rank-and-file neither care, nor understand. Their chief evangelist has bigger worries, having sold his soul in a buyer's market.

*A "Hannitoid" is best described as a severely infected polyp in the descending colon of the body politic.