Political Terror

"Ooooh! See that? It's a car bomb! Muslims really are terrorists and al Qaeda MUST be behind this! They were Doctors in England? Blame Michael Moore's Sicko! Let's put this out there and scare people back to our party!" - Some ridiculous Republican Strategist Somewhere.

The sad part is it seems they actually want terror attacks to happen. The Chair of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan and oh yeah, whack job Rick Santorum have actually SAID they want terror attacks. They think it would be for the good of the country to bring the people back to the Bush policy.

That photo above came last week from Glasgow. Like most every plot that the Bush Administration has hyped since 9/11 to try to artificially trump up their case for an endless war on terror, this one was not a big deal either. A few agitated muslim doctors with no real connection to anyone got together with a very uneducated attempt to light their car on fire and drive it into a building. Except it didn't really blow up the way they wanted and in fact they had to push the car the last part of the distance. Clearly these were not the 9/11 masterminds at work.

As with every moment when the political heat gets really going, Bush and the Right Wing try to up the fear level. This time they are clearly under fire for breaking the law and committing a felony by ordering two White House aides to ignore subpoenas and not testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee Hearings held yesterday morning.

As usual, Bush tried to distract and deflect. When Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor either outright refused to show or gave selective testimony while claiming executive privilege on harder questions, Bush held one of his rare press conferences on Iraq. Every major network cut into their daily programming for it and the presser was pointless. It was more confirmation of exactly the same talking points he and his other White House lackeys have been spouting for quite some time. More of the same. Stay the Course. Aka, no real plan.

That generally worked but the night before another Bush Administration official decided to plant a generally larger seed with the media to throw them off the trail. Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff came out with this ridiculous tripe about having a "gut feeling" about a possible terror attack in the Summer. He purposely attempted to put distance between his gut and the facts but it had the media either so bent over in laughter or so pressing for White House comment that not once in that presser did a single reporter talk about those pesky subpoenas.

Of course this is not the first time they have pulled this. It's become a very irritating pattern with this Administration that when the going gets tough, the terrorists somehow get tougher.


Countdown with Keith Olbermann did a great piece on how the Bush Administration does this late last year entitled, "The Nexus of Politics and Terror". It puts together a timeline of elevated threat levels and rhetoric versus the scandals of the moment. Crooks and Liars split it into two parts and below are links to the video of this.

WMV Part One Part Two
QT Part One Part Two


The problem with all of this is, who do we or who can we even believe anymore? Obviously not the Bush Administration. While they play the terror card to keep whatever is left of the flock of sheep in line, we are in Iraq making new terror enemies every day just by our mere presence in the region.

The man responsible for this entire war supposedly, Osama Bin Laden, is not a top priority for this Administration anyway.

Remember this? During a debate with John Kerry in 2004 Bush says that he never said he wasn't concerned about Bin Laden, even calling it an "exaggeration". Except for the video proof of the comment.



As it turns out, he wasn't lying about not being concerned. He spoke with his good friend and apologist, Fred Barnes of that Right Wing Rag, The Weekly Standard. In their conversation, Barnes says, Bush told him that capturing Bin Laden is ‘not a top priority use of american resources’. Barnes even went back to the Bush Network, er, FOX NEWS and told them as much.

They've had multiple chances to get this guy. In February 2001, the Adminstration rejected the Taliban's offer to give him up to them in exchange for a drop of sanctions. See for yourself in this brief clip from a presser where they refuse to talk about it.



Then in December 2001, they had him cornered at Tora Bora and let him get away.

Then after all these years where we know he's been in Pakistan, we find out that Bush basically outsourced the war to the Pakistanis. Giving them $1 billion a year in funding and demanding no results or accountability for that money.

He shut down the CIA unit responsible for hunting Bin Laden down. And then, after not caring about whether either Afghanistan or Iraq were sovereign countries before invading, he refused to invade Pakistan claiming... wait for it... that they were a sovereign country.

In fact when Republicans try to drum up terror for support (they have no ideas for this country anymore, their only card is to scare you into voting for their lunacy) they use the ridiculous TV show 24 as some sort of barometer of what can really happen. In their Presidential debates they actually debated to what extent torture is okay because it worked for Jack Bauer and saved a major U.S. city!

But in their arguments based off that show (produced by FOX no less), they always talk of terrorists getting nukes and setting off a dirty bomb against us.

Strange then how we take no action against Pakistan who let the one guy buying and selling these nukes on the black market to terrorists, A.Q. Khan to be free. Not to mention we allowed the Pakistan Government to order us not to question the guy. The guy is clearly able to operate again.

So from all of this what have we learned? The Bush Adminstration does not care about the war on terror. Don't let their aides, lackeys or politically bought and paid for Congressmen tell you otherwise. Terror is a political tactic, a form of control for them. Strangely enough that is exactly what terror is to the actual terrorists.

We have no interest in getting Bin Laden, we have no interest to quell terrorism at all.

So why are we in Iraq? Oil. Not how you would think. We don't want the oil for ourselves. We want it to stay in the ground.

That way big oil controls the supply and can price it where they would profit the most from it. They've established nothing but record profits since Bush got into office, why change a good thing? After all Bush is an oilman and Cheney had energy task force meetings with these people.. so secretive that he refused subpoenas for the documents in those meetings.

Since we've been in Iraq it's been easy to tell who the war profiteers have been. Here in Milwaukee gas jumped from $3.19 a gallon to $3.49 a gallon overnight. 30 cents, just like that. And on Saturday it went from $2.95 to $3.19. 54 cents in less than a week. They're making out like bandits.

Sadly it leads us to the ultimate conclusion. The war on terror was never about Bin Laden. It was about profit. We invaded the places where we could change oil policy by building big pipelines for one major oil company or keeping the oil in the ground for all of them.

Over 7,000+ Americans have died by official count in 9/11 and Iraq combined. These figures are low because they don't count the Afghanistan numbers, the civilians killed or those who died from sickness or non-mortal wounds later after the initial attack.

And Big Oil is smiling all the way to the bank thanks to Bush.

Oh and here's the kicker, it was announced today that intelligence shows that al-Qaeda is back to pre-9/11 strength.

Heckuva job Bushie.

-Rp