Rush

Here's a journal entry from four years ago:

3/15/03 -- Electronic Media Rush to War:
Unless I missed something, it seems to me that the major media outlets, overwhelmingly electronic, are marching to G.W.’s battle hymn and an inevitable attack on Iraq. It’s really unseemly. The daily, hourly, blow-by-blow accounts of our march to war have become like some weird and deafening cheering section – right down to how the correspondents themselves will live and work and even earn measures of media fame and promotions. The whole thing has become like a survival reality TV show.

So let’s review just where this rush has taken us today:

1. When Osama bin Laden’s Saudi Arabian Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “The Decider” chose to attack Iraq, of all places, a non sequitur;
2. The pretext for this dyslexic invasion was Saddam's dreaded weapons of mass destruction, but it turned out they just did not exist;
3. Since then, terrorism has exploded over there, literally, at a cost of more than 3,000 American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, not to mention the many thousands more who have been wounded and even maimed for the rest of their lives;
4. Vice President Cheney’s company, Halliburton, has made billions of dollars in Iraq as an inept inside contractor;
5. And now the company has been cited for billions of dollars more in overcharges;
6. Halliburton's chief executives just announced they are moving to Dubai;
7. Osama bin Laden is still at large;
8. But American oil companies are getting their Iraq franchise back, apparently making out like bandits;
9. And word is out that we are building an opulent embassy in Baghdad befitting an emperor.

You could say that getting access to Iraq's oil again for us was a good thing; although you can't tell why at the pump, except of course for the oil companies. You might also suggest the administration was clever in keeping the terrorists all tied up over there fighting amongst themselves so they wouldn't come back here any time soon. Or you could ask, whose side are Bush and Cheney on anyway, or even, who are the real terrorists in this scenario? The federal budget deficit is out of control, the highest it has ever been, ever, and continues to mushroom like a WMD cloud. The military-industrial (and -congressional) complex is mortgaging our future mercilessly, and the mainstream media doesn’t even seem to so much as peep. Bush's war on terror has inflamed terrorism worldwide, like throwing gas on a fire. He might as well have declared war on the weather.

You’d think people would wake up and want to take their country back from this reckless oligarchy. You'd think the media would be taking them apart by now. Instead, during the past four years we’ve seen “reality” TV shows flourish. But what reality is that? Maybe the contestants are getting a rush out of it all, but the rest of us sure as hell are not—unless we’re all dreaming or in some prolonged state of infantile denial, driving around in ersatz SUVs distracted by cell phones, road rage, and pussy prohibitions against smoking and trans fat. Then this rush is just surreal. Especially when you consider that Bush and Cheney rushed into Iraq with the MSM and trashed America for their own personal amusement, and profit, certainly not ours.