ThinkingBlue: NIGHTMARES, NABOBS AND NEO-CONS, ON MY!

Neo-Cons and Nabobs

WORD FOR TODAY: NABOB - A person of wealth and prominence:

• VIP (colloquial) • big shot (colloquial) • big wheel (slang) • bigwig (colloquial)
• dignitary • fat cat (chiefly US) • high-muck-a-muck (British) (my favorite)
• hotshot (colloquial) • lion • personage • celebrity • mogul • notable • somebody
• heavy (slang)
• A NEO-CON

Since, on my blog, I speak rather disparagingly about the neo-cons, (they deserve every deriding word of it) I thought this next article written about the likes of them and an even more powerful and sinister entity called The old-line American Establishment , a fitting post for my blog today.

Mr. Floyd writes so freely about the neo-cons and how they may be the ones that are being used. Very interesting insight to what the hell is going on.

As I've stated on my last posting...

It is time for a change. It is time for hope. It is time to bring back sanity. Hopefully, the neo-cons and their honchos, will no longer be able to use fear to get what they want because people have been alerted to the fact, that what they want is absolute power under any circumstance, pure and simple!

Our democracy, our Nation needs protecting from the likes of this elite American faction, who have wrecked havoc with our way of life.

Wake up America and vote your moral and ethical newly founded awareness! Neo-cons BEGONE!! (sadly it may not be as simple as that... please read the below article and THINK, THINK, THINK... about what we are facing today, it may just be the beginning of the end of democracy). thinkingblue

PS: Please click on the many links for even more of a better understanding as to what is happening to our America.

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Asses Bearing Gold: Of Neo-Cons and Nabobs

Written by Chris Floyd Wednesday, 16 August 2006

It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it: it's time to take up the cudgels (heavy sticks) for the poor neo-cons.

Day after day, these dedicated public intellectuals and hardworking federal officials are calumnied (false statement maliciously made to injure another's
reputation) from coast to coast, accused of every crime under the sun. Who misled us into the blood-soaked mire of Iraq? Who's pulling strings to foment a new war with Iran? Who's fanning the flames of Israel's assault on Lebanon, hoping to turn the entire Middle East into an arc of "creative destruction" that will transform the region into a pacified, profitable oasis of American power? Why, the neo-cons, of course, guilty on every count – or so we're told.

It's certainly a pretty tale, satisfyingly simple like most cartoons, well-suited for a stirring film adaptation, a la "V for Vendetta." (Given the religious heritage of many neo-cons, perhaps Mel Gibson could be induced to take it on.) We'd watch the sinister Machiavels (rulers indifferent to moral considerations) plot in the shadows, pouring their leperous distilments into the ears of government leaders who, zombified by this dark enchantment, mindlessly drive the nation into ruin. Yet if these dastards can be routed in the last act by some hero – a "straight-talking" senator from Arizona, say, or a tough and savvy former First Lady, or even a clean-limbed knight stepping forth from the mists of the blogosphere – then all will be well with the Republic.

Well, as Brick Pollit told Maggie the Cat:

"Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" Unfortunately, the reality of our political and moral predicament is not so neat and tidy, nor so easily resolved. If the neo-cons all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet tomorrow – indeed, if the cult had never arisen at all –
we would still be right where we are today:
neck-deep in the Big Muddy.

That's not to say, of course, that we weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren't being fanned to widen the Middle East war – or that the gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under the rubric "neo-con" aren't intimately involved in all of these affairs. They are, in spades. But to accuse them of playing the central role in America's on-going Götterdämmerung gives them an importance they don't deserve – and unduly mitigates the guilt of the true culprits: the good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war,and to regard the hoi polloi (that's you and me folks) as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and milked as needed.

Götterdämmerung - n. A turbulent ending of a regime or an institution

For what's the underlying implication of the "neo-cons über alles" meme? It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus – are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle. It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden. It's that no U.S.
administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious (gluttonous) policies we've seen in the last five years – unless they'd been tricked into it by wily
Zionists and their ideological outriders. It is, in short, our old friend "American
exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.

uber alles - ABOVE ALL

German: “Song of Germany” formerly (1922–45) Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles (“Germany, Germany above all”), national anthem of Germany from 1922 to 1945, of West Germany from 1950 to 1990, and of unified Germany from 1990. The verses were written in 1848 by the nationalist poet and university professorAugust Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben and were sung to a tune originally composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797 as an Austrian imperial anthem.

Power Über Alles

Conservatives Endorse the Fuhrer Principle: Our leader über alles

Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in Julius Caesar. Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world empire and using anything at hand – neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads – to further their ambitions:

"This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands…and though we lay these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point the way. And having brought our treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons." Or at the World Bank, as the case may be.

Again, this is not to deny that neo-con fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments. After all, the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang – the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document of September 2000 – was concocted under the aegis ( Sponsorship) of that quintessentially neo-con think tank, the Project for the New American Century. It was all spelled out there, long before 9/11: the invasion of Iraq (regardless of whether Saddam Hussein was still in power); the vast explosion in military spending; planting new U.S. bases in Central Asia and the Middle East to secure dominance over world energy sources; embracing aggressive war as national policy – and the openly stated notion that only a "new Pearl Harbor" could "catalyze" the American people into readily accepting the need for these radical measures.

Damning stuff. But without the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks. Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neo-cons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the first version of the PNAC plan was drawn up at Cheney's order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush I Administration.

Under Bush II, the neo-cons were brought in as shock troops; their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime:
Cheney's notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations and – who else? – the James Baker Institute at Rice University. It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out: regime change with the aim of locking up – not unleashing – Iraq's massive oil reserves, to keep energy prices high and steady (Saddam was mischievously bouncing them all over the place) and to preserve the power of OPEC under the leadership of those time-honored pals and business partners of the American Establishment, the
Saudi royals.

Greg Palast, as usual, has the goods on this in his new book Armed Madhouse,
where he also points out one salient (dominant) fact for our purposes here: there were no neo-cons at the task force tables, where the real action was. No, those useful asses were left out in the paddock, waiting for their loads.

These are dark days, serious times. The whiff of apocalypse is in the air. For it will be virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran – much less their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a "new American century" – without the use of nuclear weapons. So let's be done with baby talk and comic books, with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.
(scary stuff - thinkingblue)

The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment – the Democrats, the media, the "respectable"
intelligentsia – countenanced (approved) the crime. The belligerence and oppression of the hardline Israeli government in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned – and armed – support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base.

It is the American elite – pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people) – that bedevils us. (torments mercilessly ALL OF US hoi polloi...thinkingblue) The emergence of the cretinous neo-conservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society. The body politic is rotting from the head.

This column originally appeared on CounterPunch.
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Below is another article about the cretinous neo-cons and The powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment, to alert you to the dangers we are facing because of their lust for power. thinkingblue

COMMENT Be skeptical ... be very skeptical
By M K Bhadrakumar

One of the significant contributions to the "war on terror" by Britain's home
secretary David Blunkett before his abrupt departure from the Tony Blair
cabinet last year was his statement on terrorism in the House of Commons that
specifically flagged the possibility of a "dirty bomb" being planted in
Britain by terrorists.

That was in November 2002, when preparations were already in an advanced stage
for the march to Baghdad. We are still waiting for the dirty bomb and its
lethal radiation. The dirty bomb genre, however, provoked two years later a
brilliant television series on BBC2 by acclaimed documentary producer Adam
Curtis, titled

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.

CLICK THE BLOOD BAR OR HERE...

(You will need a google player, get yours here... thinkingblue)

Curtis's argument was that much of the threat of international terrorism turns
out to be in actuality "a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by
politicians ... In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear
of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

Curtis placed al-Qaeda terrorism in a long line of dramatic panics in Britain's
checkered history since the Elizabethan era, which included the arrival of
Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, Bolsheviks,
and Irish republicans.

Naturally, Curtis comes readily to mind a week after British authorities
arrested some two dozen Muslims on August 10 for plotting to blow up
trans-Atlantic flights from United Kingdom to the United States. Not a shred of
evidence has since seen the light of day in this Mother of all Dastardly Plots.

Meanwhile, wild stories of new plots in the making are in circulation. The
latest was the "breaking news" regarding the emergency landing of an aircraft in
Boston on Wednesday due to the tantrums of an "unruly" woman passenger. Last
weekend, Michigan police locked up three hapless Palestinian-Americans for
allegedly plotting an act of terrorism. The three "terrorists" were caught
red-handed purchasing 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store.

Michigan police concluded that the cell phones could be used as detonators to
blow up the Mackinac Bridge, which connected the peninsula's upper and lower
parts. Subsequently it transpired that the three detained "terrorists" bought
and sold cell phones to make a living.

The London plot itself is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Reports have
appeared that the British security agencies were feeling increasingly
uncomfortable that their American counterparts rushed to make out that the
alleged plot was linked to al-Qaeda. More importantly, it appears that sources
in London have begun distancing themselves from the plot by claiming that the
British side was pressured from Washington to go public with the plot despite a
lack of evidence and clear and convincing facts whether any conspiracy in fact
existed at all.

Not surprisingly, the loudest voices of skepticism about the alleged plot are
heard in Pakistan, where of course the public is habitually cynical over
anything that goes to the credit of the establishment. This despite the
insistent claim that the UK, US and Pakistani security agencies had actively
coordinated in thwarting the plot - a scenario that cast Pakistan as a plucky,
feisty partner in the "war on terror", quite contrary to the prevailing
impression that Islamabad is possibly indulging in doublespeak.

The skeptics in Pakistan feel that the entire plot is a crudely executed hoax by
the Bush administration. It was not only the so-called "jihadi" circles in
Pakistan that ridiculed the plot but even sections of opinion, which usually put
primacy on reasoning. The Pakistani newspaper Daily Times commented editorially,
"There is a horrible war going on in Lebanon and it is not unfolding in favor of
Israel, US and UK. Iraq has gone bad; Afghanistan is getting worse.

"The Bush-Blair duo is in trouble at home and both need something really big to
happen to justify their policies and distract attention from their losses ...
the past record of intelligence agencies everywhere suggests they are quite
capable of blowing up or underplaying things for better media management of
their respective governments' performance. So a bit of skepticism is in order."

Adam Curtis had an explanation for the dilemma
facing the saner sections of opinion in times of public hysteria. As he
explained two years ago, such plots, when blown up in larger-than-life terms and
whipping up an atmosphere of hysteria, have a way of trapping us. In the
process, we get "trapped by a fear that is completely irrational".

Indeed, in a poll after the plot story broke, 55% of Americans voiced approval
of Bush's handling of terrorism and homeland security. A beaming Bush promptly
promised his nervous nation that the terror fight may last for "years to come".
Democrats are beginning to accuse the Republicans of using the scare to
political advantage ahead of the November elections to the US Congress.

Former US president Bill Clinton said: "They [the Bush administration] seem to
be anxious to tie it to al-Qaeda. If that's true, how come we've got seven times
as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? I think that Republicans should be
very careful in playing politics with this London thing because they're going to
have a hard time with the facts."

All the same, it is extraordinary that the mainstream media in the US could so willingly suspend their disbelief over the patchy official claims that the plot was a "real idea" of cosmic significance. Furthermore, they dutifully ran "expert opinions" by commentators on the alleged plotters' al-Qaeda connections. Not a single mainstream newspaper in the US challenged the plot theory as such - leave alone pointed out the patent gulf between the London plotters' ambition and their ability to pull it off.

It could be that they have succumbed to the "suspiciously circular relationship
between the security services and much of the media" (to quote Curtis) in which
official briefings become the stuff of dramatic press stories and prompt further
briefings and further stories.

At any rate, terrorism thrives on bluff. Think of the horrific bomb blasts in Mumbai last month. Unlike the ethereal London plot, it was tangible; it was verifiable. It was of a piece, by all indications, with the cycle of violence ripping apart India's composite society for the past decade or so since the Babri Mosque was pulled down by vandals incited by Hindu fundamentalists.

Yet, in the wake of the Mumbai blasts, an attempt has been made to link the abhorrent violence to al-Qaeda. As if al-Qaeda is an organized international network. As if it has members or a leader. As if it has "sleeper cells". As if it has corporate-style affiliates and subsidiaries. As if it has a strategy towards India.

Indian media people seem to be unaware that al-Qaeda barely exists at all and that it is more an idea about cleansing the impure world of Islam corrupted by the al-Adou al-Qareeb (Muslim apostates) and al-Adou al-Baeed or the "far enemy" (Israel and the Western powers), through violence sanctioned by religion explicitly for such extraordinary times.

Indian opinion makers seem to believe that countering al-Qaeda justifies a
national security objective. Some among them no doubt fancy that a closer
"strategic partnership" with the Bush administration becomes possible if only
India were to assertively stake claim to be a frontline state in the "war on
terror". But there is no way that India can hope to gain entry into the
exclusive, charmed circle that comprises the US Central Intelligence Agency,
Britain's MI6 and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The so-called Islamic terror network is the trinity's fabrication. It has become what would be known in intelligence parlance as an "asset" or an "instrument". The "intelligence assets" do enjoy a certain measure of independence and autonomy vis-a-vis their sponsors but that is part of the art of dissimulation. Al-Qaeda has incrementally become then a
situation or a chain of events in politics that can arouse a particular emotional reaction instantaneously.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to
Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).