Orthodoxia Claustrophobia

The president, his administration, the corporate mainstream media, the evangelicals, Wall Street, oil companies, members of congress who voted in favor of making themselves irrelevant after 9/11 and giving the executive more power than is healthy, the members of congress who made the president a de facto dictator by voting for the Military Commisssions Act of 2006, and the Newt Gingrich wing of the GOP who holds that the Bill of Rights, and the first amendment is a tool of terrorists, and facilitates, and encourages terrorism are all stock holders, card carrying fellow travelers in the Iraq debacle.

Their group think knee jerking can be seen at any time on their fear mongering propaganda organs CNN and MSNBC.

Its always struck me as strange that in a nation of three hundred million people there are only a dozen or so political pundits qualified to be on every channel, and almost every political talk show. Its equally strange that of all the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been to Iraq and Afghanistan, served in the military, the only consultants TV networks consider worth listening to are retired generals.

Where are the TV network consultants who worked for non-governmental organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why aren't there any TV consultants who worked for UN humanitarian relief organizations? Why aren't there any TV consulatants to tell us the effects of a single five hundred pound bomb on a densley packed urban neighborhood?

The formation of the Baker Commission marked a turning point in the national perception of the Iraq war policies, jingoistic patriotism is no longer the robust factor that it once was, but is now an anemic hollow sounding shadow of its former self.

John Kerry's statement that, "fifty percent of America's casulaties in Vietnam occured after our government decided our strategy would not work, and the war could not be won", should be haunting all of us at the present time. Thats exactly the process we are going through now.

The advent of the Baker Commission opens up thoughts among people, righly or wrongly, that change will soon occur in Bush's thinking. Maybe. He could always thank the members of the commission lavishly, shower medals and awards on them and then ignore their every word.

The administration is longer pressing for victory in Iraq, now its just politics, and looking for a way out. Our soldiers, and Iraqi civilians are being killed and maimed while the media and the politisized evangelicals try to enforce an intellectual orthodoxy that will protect the Bush administration's self-congratulatory prestige so that defeat can be called "re-deployment", and incompetence can be whitewashed as a "change of policy".