The Night of the Living Neo-Cons
Disturbing news in both The Washington Post and in Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times confirms what we've always assumed. Neo-cons are not living people. You can't kill them. Not beings such as John Ashcroft with his "Patriot" Acts or, now again, John Poindexter and his frightening "Total Information Awareness" lab experiments, which many of us thought were stopped in February by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and others.
Well, "they're baaaaaaaaaaaaack!"
Yesterday, Poindexter's wing of the Dept. of Defense released a report to Congress that basically reasserted that 12 is really 1, and that white really is black and that they can do basically whatever they damn well want.
And now they will use any wile, any guile to reach their ends. As Dowd states, "Showing typical bureaucratic flair, the crowd at Total Information Awareness tried to calm fears by changing its name to Terrorist Information Awareness."
I like that: calming fears by raising fears. Classic ghoul mindset.
You can't kill them. Not with guns, not with knives, not with flamethrowers. And certainly not with legislation or rational thought or pleas to reason. You can't indict them all; you certainly can't convict them all. They're impervious to being discredited. They merely write a book, then reappear in some governmental capacity. And you can't hide from them either, whether you're holed up in your house, the Congress, the Shopping Mall or in a cemetary by the Tomb of the Bill of Rights. They keep coming. Calling for "More brains..." and "More money...," and "More power...," destroying all in their path as did the ghouls in the movies.
It is important to note that we are not talking about actual Republicans here. Or actual Conservatives. But Neo-cons. They are neither Republican nor Conservative. But rather, an alien force which has infiltrated these traditions and taken full control of the apparatus of each. These are very dangerous beings.
The target of scores of scary, cautionary tales from the Sixties, such as Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove, Neo-cons hold more in common with Ira Levin's The Boys from Brasil than they do The Federalist Papers.
These definitely are not descendants of the Republican Party of Taft, Eisenhower, Dirksen or even Nixon, but rather the children and grandchildren of the fanatics that brought us the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater in 1964. Remember "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"? Yeah, those people.
These ghouls were nurtured and groomed during the Reagan years. Then, they sat and plotted during eight torturous years in the Clinton desert, until they saw their chance to grab power once again.
In 1964, the GOP truly was a Grand Old Party, but the Goldwater forces tore it apart at the spine. As I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, conservative thought forced us to remember that balance was needed amid worldwide change. That budgets need to be balanced and taxes raised before you erect structures and mandates to help those in trouble. That the individual was equally important as the group. That we need to balance our Liberal impulse to help our fellow man and woman with our Conservative ability to reason how to accomplish those ends most efficiently and effectively—for the good of each and for all.
All of these fine distinctions are lost on the ravenous Neo-con. The Neo-con has one mind-set, and one mind-set only:
"I am right. I am always right. I must be fed."
We find ourselves at the point in the movie where the good guys are still trying to figure out the antidote, or the right ray-gun, or how to jerry-rig the electrical grid to keep the monsters from wiping out all life on earth. We're still looking for it; we just haven't found it yet.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Remember! Write your elected officials, today!
posted by Gotham 10:58 AM
