After one year and 325 articles, I’m hanging up the keyboard for a while. As I said when I first began this blog, I write all the articles myself and with an average of two to three a week, not counting ” The Observer’s Guide to the Right Wing,” that’s about eight hours a week of research (some of which I began compiling almost 20 years ago) and writing.

Unfortunately, it don’t pay the rent and its been displacing writing projects that do. (To say nothing of my other work, like tomorrow, for instance when I have to get up at 5 AM to be on location for “The Vampire Diaries.”)

So this is the last official post for I, Rantibus. It’s been fun in one way. I enjoy passing interesting information to others, even if and sometimes because it often scares the shit out of them. In other ways … well, not so much. After all, how much of a laugh can it be to have to listen to the Human Hemorrhoid, Glenn Beck to deconstruct his rambling diatribes that evince as much logic as trying to find fully parsed sentences in a bowl of alphabet soup? Do you think I’d voluntarily listen to Sean Hannity? I’d sooner watch Daffy Duck on crystal meth. He’d make more sense. Pour through that anorexic harpy, Ann Coulter’s dreck and drivel to tell you what you already know - that she’s a pathological liar? I’d rather have a jalapeno enema than listen to Bill O’Reiley. But yet one must if one is to point out their distortions, lies and hypocrisies. As I once said, it’s often like snorkeling in a cess pool to find a nickel.

Mostly what I’ve done - my original intention - was to look at past issues that got short shrift or zero coverage in the mainstream media; buried on page 14 of the ‘D’ section if reported at all. Issues I believed were important to understanding the wider picture. An informed electorate is the Republican’s greatest fear. Why do you think they’re all pissing and moaning about the President going on television to tell school children to study hard and get through school? An ignorant population is the meat and potatoes of Republican hegemony.

So while this blog is still on line before it floats off into the ether and fog of the Internet, I invite you to re-read some of the articles. And then get involved. Apathy is one of the ways the Rethugs get into power. Lies, fraud and intimidation are the others, and it can still work again.

Notice how Bush left a National Debt of $11.6 trillon (plus a record national and trade deficit) but that suddenly, the debt has become Obama’s. How the Bushes began the bailout to the tune of almost $750 billion with no strings attached and no oversight but all of a sudden the recession is Obama’s fault. How the previous administration cozened the nation into two wars that have currently volatilized over $2 trillion but suddenly Rethugs are pissing and moaning about not being able to afford universal health care for fear of putting our children into debt.

Well, at the current figure of 22,000 a year, over the next generation there’ll be at least 550,000 people who won’t have to worry about paying off the debt because they’ll be dead for lack of health insurance. The irony is that most of them are in Red States so that also means several hundred thousand fewer Republicans.

So, so long and thanks for all the fish. I appreciate those who wrote in, especially the faithful Mailuppa. (To the person who kept on writing in saying, and I quote: “???? ????????? ?? ???????????? ? ???,” I’m sorry but I don’t speak Cretinese.) I’d also like to thank my friend and college Sebastian de Casteel, who first suggested this blog and did all the heavy lifting to create it since it’s well known that I have the computer acumen of a cherry-stone clam.

A final admonition - don’t give up. Write letters to the editor, to your Congresspersons, (hint: tell them to find their collective balls and quit trying to appease the Rethugs. It doesn’t work. There is never enough for them) debunk the frauds and fools with facts at every term. You may also want to write and e-mail newspapers and TV news stations asking them why they aren’t covering the other side of the story like just a few days ago when several thousand people showed up in Seattle to show their support for the health care bill. Not a single paper or station covered it - not even the Seattle Times which, co-incidentally, is owned by a Republican. If you don’t challenge this kind of disingenuous BS, then the egregious and the pelf-puffed corporate shills will always win. More importantly, YOU will lose.

We tried winning in 2008 and it tasted good. Let’s not go back to the shit sandwich.

So thanks for reading. Look for me (hopefully) on book shelves in the next few years. And who knows - maybe in the future I’ll be back, whipping on the bastards with both hands.

Cheers!

“A man who hungers for the truth should expect no mercy and give none.”

Hunter S. Thompson

In the intelligence community, we’re talking big bucks. Here’s what it costs each year to run sixteen different agencies:

The National Intelligence Program (NIP) gets about 80% of the overall intel budget. This breaks down to $8 billion for the National Reconnaissance Office, another $8 billion for the National Security Agency, around $3 billion for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, $6 billion for the CIA, $1.5 billion for the FBI, $60 million for the Treasury Department, another $60 million for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and a paltry $12 million for Homeland Security.

Then, we’ve got the Joint Military Program (MIP) which sucks up around $3.5 billion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and roughly $2 billion for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The aforementioned NSA, NRO and NGA are also cross-referenced, for budgetary purposes, as combat support agencies and also receive money from MIP.

Finally, there are the military intelligence units for the Army, ($6 billion) Navy, ($4 billion) Air Force, ($8 billion) and Marines. ($2 billion - always on the shitty end of the funding stick are the Marines…)

So, that’s approximately $60 billion large a year (based on 2007 budget figures) that is absorbed by Spooks R Us, and we can’t even begin to estimate the full extent of off-book Black Budget expenditures. In point of fact, we can only look at the above figures as estimates themselves even though they’ve been ascribed monetary values because the actual amounts in the budget are often left blank and marked as Classified. For instance, a report by GlobalSecurity.org points to the CIA’s appropriations which are hidden in a section of the Air Force’s budget figures described as “other procurement aircraft.”

The bulk of the privatization of the intelligence community has been farmed out to around 100 companies. To give you an idea of how this impacts the budgets of the agencies in question, here are a few figures. Since the 9-11 attacks, the CIA has been spending roughly 50 to 60% of its annual budget on for-profit corporate contractors. The CIA now employs more private contractors than its entire full-time employees of 17,500. The NSA grew its private contractor base from 144 in 2001 to 5,400 by 2006. Approximately 35% of the staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency are private contractors. The Counterintelligence Field Activity agency of the Pentagon’s staff is 70% private hires. But the highest proportion of corporate contractors work in the National Reconnaissance Office which maintains the US’s photo reconnaissance and electronic surveillance satellites. The corporate share of the NRO’s pie is an amazing (or appalling) 95%.

It was thought least 50% of all monies spent on intelligence gathering and analysis in the US goes to outsourced corporate entities. But information that inadvertently came available in 2007 now puts that figure at 70%. Big Brother is also Big Biz.

The inherent problem here is not simply because we have “green carders” (the colour of security badges worn by non-government employees) getting access to highly sensitive, often critical intelligence data. These people are vetted very thoroughly. (or at least one might hope they are) The problem is that in many cases, you not only have private contractors being managed by other private contractors, you often have government employees being managed by private contractors. You also have these private contractors writing the draft budgets for government agencies, and writing the Statements of Work that describe and define the jobs that they themselves carry out for the government. In other words, private contractors are often becoming policy makers for the government agencies that hire them.

It’s also an issue of transparency. Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight stated “We have billions of dollars in spending going out that has little or no oversight. (by Congress) There is also the fact that budgetary information about all the US’s intelligence agencies is now available to private corporate contractors who can then use that information to lobby members of Congress on those very budget items. And, of course, it’s axiomatic that the more intelligence work is outsourced, the less effective any Congressional oversight will become. And when as that happens, so, as they say, does s__t. In 2006, Randy “Duke” Cunningham was sentenced to eight years in prison for taking bribes from the San Diego defense contractor MZM. For $2 million Randy used his influence on the House Appropriations and Intelligence Committees to kick tens of millions of dollars worth of defense contracts for the CIA and the Pentagon’s CIFA to MZM.

And, naturally, in order to perpetuate or increase their employment and to develop and sell new intelligence-gathering and military equipment, it’s not inconceivable that corporate employees of these agencies might not skew data to suggest a disproportionate danger in threats that are relatively minor or don’t exist at all. After all, that was the entire MO of the Bush administration from 9-12 to the end of it’s reign of terror. Does anyone believe that there is a slight possibility, in having such a large outsourced corporate workforce in the intelligence community, that some may find it profitable to drum up more work for their mother company?

I remember, years ago, someone saying to me “Welcome to the world of strategic analysis where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.” And that person worked for the government.

The more the Bush administration outsourced the intelligence communities, the more it cost, the less Congress had any control over it and the less you knew about it. Personally, I believe that some outsourcing is necessary simply due to the technologies involved and the volume of data many of these agencies require that they honestly can’t collect by themselves. But for some agencies to be outsource to corporations to the tune of 70 to 95% is not only absurd, it’s dangerous. Health care for profit. Mercenary armies operating beyond the scope of law in theatres of war. The outsourcing of interrogators. Where does it end? When do we say that corporate profit does not outweigh the security of a nation?

Verizon is one of the sponsors for a Labour Day weekend rally by Friends of America, a pro-coal, anti-environmentalist organization. Two of the main “entertainers” will be Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent. A group called Credo Action contacted Verizon to ask why they would be supporting such a reactionary event:

“Before we launched our campaign, Credo Action reached out to Verizon Wireless to confirm its sponsorship of the pro-coal “Friends of America” rally. Becky Bond, our political director, sent a cordial follow-up to Verizon Wireless a heads-up that our campaign had launched. Verizon replied as follows:”

“This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the e-mails are coming from.” James Gerace, VP of Corporate Communications at Verizon Wireless.

Verizon had previously co-sponsored an event put on by Massey Energy, the biggest violator of the Clean Air Act in history.

So Verizon is now sponsoring an event of climate-change deniers and corporate hacks, giving over the emcee microphone to the Prince of Sleaze Journalism, Sean Hannity, and a talentless douchebag with serious manhood issues, Ted Nugent, whose eloquence once gave us this statement of superb post-Proustian prose:

“Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. … Hey, Hillary - you might want to ride one of these (machine guns) into the sunset, you worthless bitch!”

Ah, the lyric quality, the almost Haiku-like economy of words. I’m sure it sounded even better in the original German. He then retired to the bathroom to masturbate with the latest copy of Guns and Ammo.

If any of you use Verizon Wireless, I suggest that now is the time to exercise your option. If you support such actions and the withering contempt for those who have the temerity to disagree with their corporate stance on the environment and apparent love of diseminators of lies and hate, then, by all means, keep your service. If, on the other hand, you have a healthy regard for the air you breath and rate your integrity above that of Inannity and his ilk, I would ask you to cancel their service, find another provider and inform them of your reason for dropping them like a poison toad.

In 2008, then Governor Palin declared April 16th “Healthcare Decisions Day” to “raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for end of life care.” To wit: (or in her case, twit…)

“WHEREAS Healthcare Decisions Day is designed to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions related to end-of-life care and medical decision-making whenever patients are unable to speak for themselves and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important health care directives…

NOW THEREFORE, I, Sarah Palin, Governor of the state of Alaska, do hereby proclaim April 16th, 2008 as: Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska, and I call this observance to the attention of all our citizens.”

Run! Move to New Jersey! Palin’s going to kill your grandmothers!

Of the over 50 companies that have either requested that their ads be taken off Glenn Becks’ news commentary show or removed their ads from Fox News entirely, one of the latest is Clorox. Gosh! How’s Glenn gonna keep his white sheet and hood sparkling clean?

Mexico has recently decriminalized the personal possession of drugs. You are allowed 5 marijuana joints, a half-gram of coke and also small quantities of LSD (15 mics potency) and also heroin and methamphetamine. This measure is cited to be a method of fighting the drug wars, but in reality appears to be a way of reducing bureaucratic spending since only 12 to 15 percent of those who were arrested for possession were ever convicted. In all likelihood, it will reduce the take-home pay of your average police officer since he won’t be able to shake down tourists for possession. US Congressmen were asked to comment on the possibility of decriminalization of marijuana but most were too drunk from four-martini lunches paid for by the taxpayer.

Dick Cheney recently accused the Obama administration of politicizing the Justice Department by “allow(ing) the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel. Actually, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who is sanctioning a special prosecutor which President Obama opposed. The fact is that the investigation will be focused on the use of torture as an interrogation technique which the Bush administration sanctioned. It is incumbent on the AG to investigate illegalities, especially when there is persuasive evidence that the law has been broken which is exactly the case here. Could it just possibly be that the Big Dick is breaking a sweat over the possiblity that an in-depth investigation into the authorization of illegal interrogation techniques might - just might, mind you - lead back to him?
Nahhh… the Vice President would never break the law…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Chris Wallace talked about President Obama’s “Assisted Suicide Death Book” on Faux News. Interestingly enough, apart from totally misrepresenting the subject, he neglected to mention that the document was a guidebook on living wills that was written during the Bush administration. Jed Lewison had this to say about Wallace’s comments:

“There is nothing surprising about the Fox propaganda machine peddling outrageous lies, but Chris Wallace’s fabrication is one of the most despicable, reprehensible falsehoods Fox has ever put on the air. It’s bad enough that Wallace lied through his teeth, but the fact that he chose to exploit our nations veterans for his dirty political game tells us all we need to know about his integrity - or his lack thereof.”

His father, the legendary Mike Wallace was asked whether he was proud of his son, but his reply was unfortunately unintelligible owing to the fact that he was repeatedly slamming his head against the wall.

And in the “Are You F__king Kidding Me?” department, Rush Limbaugh, a man never at a loss for words, albeit small ones, is apparently running in fear of his genitalia, such as it is. On August 25th, wattles a quiver and multiple chins flying in all directions, he bloviated the following:
“It is President Obama who wants to mandate circumcision…. And that means if we need to save our penises from anybody, it’s Obama.”
I think he may have a point here. After all, Limbaugh is one of America’s biggest pricks.
Limbaugh is also congratulating himself for predicting Senator Kennedy’s death. I dare say that when Rush shuffles off this earthly coil, his funeral will attract millions, if for no other reason than to assure themselves that this human enema-bag is actually, finally dead.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Glenn Beck is in dire need of a vacation. Might I suggest the planet Earth…
Here’s an example of his latest fare. On his TV show on August 27, he dragged out his little blackboard upon which were inscribed the words “Obama, Left, International, Graft, Acorn, Revolutionaries, Hidden Agenda.” He then wrote the first letters of each, giving “OLIGARH” which he pronounces “oligarch.” He then proudly proclaimed that there was one letter missing, and that was “Why” which he added to the jumble of letters he’d produced to create “OLIGARHY.” He then went off on a rant that I missed owing to the fact that my higher brain functions were temporarily shut down by the stunning imbecility of it all.
Glenn, you microcephalic, “OLIGARHY” is not a word! Well … actually it is … to a Fox News viewer.
Of course it doesn’t end here. Beck later claimed that President Obama is fashioning his own personal army, or as Beck put it, his own S.S. From where? Americorps, which Beck claims just got over half a trillon dollars in funding, thus putting it in the same league as the Pentagon.
In the Real World, Americorps just got less than $2 billion ($90 million under Obama’s requested sum) for their fiscal 2010 funding. What Beck appears to be speaking of is the proposed $5.7 billion (not trillion) National Service Bill that is being proposed for Americorps up to the year 2017. He also suggested that blacks from ACORN would be incorporated into this private army.
He then went on to explain Obama’s plan to inject all white people with melanin to turn them all brown, his secret agenda to divert 75 cents out of each tax dollar into the NAACP, that his health care death panels will mandate involuntary euthanesia of all Republicans and the fact that he has his own TV and radio show and has published several books is proof that he’s being oppressed and his freedom of speech taken from him. He then held a slice of onion under each eye until he teared up.

Actually, that looked like fun. Let’s use the Glenn Beck method. Let’s see … we’re write Arrogant, Smarmy, Shabby, Hypocritical, Onerous, Ludicrous, and Evil. Now let’s take the first letters and … voila! ASSHOLE!
By gosh, the Beck method works after all.

Hypocrisy Alert! It is now alleged (including by George W. Bush himself) that he volunteered to go to Viet Nam in 1970, but was turned down.
Bush, who took the Pilot’s Aptitude Test at Westover AFB in Massachuscetts, scored a 25% (average scores being in the 70’s) and 50% on navigator aptitude but still managed to get in. He also checked the box for overseas service as “do not volunteer.”
He eventually became a pilot, flying F-102s and 104s with the Texas Air National Guard. (TANG) In an interview, Bush once stated “Had my unit been called up, I’d have gone … to Viet Nam. I was prepared to go.”
All well and good to say so, Georgie, but at the time - 1970 - the Air Guard was decomissioning the F 102s and 104s. And apart from that, the minimum qualification for a TANG pilot to get sent to ‘Nam was 1000 air hours, which you didn’t have anything near.
Dubya also lost his flight status in ‘72 when he failed to show up for a flight physical. (The air war continued until 1975) Brigadier General David L. McGinnis, former aide to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, had this to say about that:

“Failure to take your flight physical is like failure to show up for duty. It’s an obligation you can’t blow off.”

In point of fact, it is a violation of contract since, as a pilot in the Guard, you are obligated to remain on flight status for five years after completion of training which Bush accomplished in 1969.

Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr, former Pentagon director of the Air National Guard also had a comment:

“There is no excuse for that. Aviators just don’t miss their flight physicals.”

So, we can see that while Bush may have been making all the right macho noises about going to Viet Nam, he did so secure in the knowledge that it would never happen. In fact, in ‘72, he positively ensured that it wouldn’t.
Hoot, Hoot! The ChickenHawk Express is now leaving for Coke Town! Would all Right Wing hypocrites, please board!

In the “History? We don’ need no stinkin’ history” department, Pat Buchanan stated on MSNBC that Hitler wasn’t seeking an empire and merely had the benign interests of German unification at heart.

“Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939 he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral nations, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace would mean war with France, and that meant war with Britain whose empire he had admired and whom he had always sought as an ally. As of March, 1939, he didn’t even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?”
Well, I’d say that he didn’t invade Russia until he created a border to it by conquering Poland first. However, history doesn’t seem to be Pat’s long suit. I suppose next he’ll be claiming that the Holocaust wasn’t a Nazi operation to exterminate the Jews, but 6 million unrelated murders by disaffected members of the Wehrmacht and the S.S. We all know it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the reputation of a fine, upstanding organization.

Speaking of Nazis, the good people at Free Republic are making runny lumps in their GWG’s over President Obama’s upcoming direct address to schools around the nation via the Internet which, according to Servicewire.org, is to stress “the importance of persisting and succeeding in school.” The people of Free Chicken Little don’t see it that way. As one person stated on their forum, “He’s recruiting his army, his Hitler Youth Brigade!”
A blogger at AmericanElephant.com wrote: “It’s easier to indoctrinate a six year-old than fight a 26 year-old or being challenged by a 46 year-old in the voting booth.”
Actually, it’s very easy when challenged by a 46 year-old, especially if, like the two examples above, they have the brains of a six year-old.
It was never explained why Obama would need a civilian army when he’s the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces. Oh, wait - that would be a logical question. Sorry…..

And finally, Dan Savage appeared recently on Keith Olberman’s show and finally said what I and many others have been thinking for a long time. To wit:

“I really do think that the Michelle Bachmans of the world and the Glenn Becks of the world are actively and consciously or subconsciously - I’m just going to say it - trying to get the President killed. That’s why they’re setting this up as a kill or be killed argument. He’s going to kill your grandma, pull the plug on grandma, death panels that little children have to go in front of. This kind of rhetoric, this paranoid style of the religious right from, you know, Birchers to Birthers usually doesn’t end well and we somebody’s got to put the brakes on it. Unfortunately for the Republican party, there are no adults left in the room. There are only the Michelle Bachmans, the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs running the show.”

Rupert Murdoch is trying to get the President assassinated. Heh - I just report … you decide.

Naturally, there’s another shoe and it didn’t take too long to drop. Directly after LSU rid themselves of the pesky Professor Van Heerden, they received a big fat cheque for $300,000 from a group called “America’s Wetland.” This group, however, did not contribute one thin centime of that filthy lucre. It was merely the conduit for “green-washing” the pelf which was donated in its entirety by … Chevron Oil Corporation. And here’s another surprise: Shell Oil is also a patron of “America’s Wetlands.” Can you believe the coincidence?!

LSU is going to continue its work monitoring the coastline, but will be doing it without the help of their once-resident expert, professor Heerdon. Instead, they will be advised by a committee of experts in coastal and hurricane research consisting of representatives of … wait for it … Chevron and Shell Oil.

And, of course, there’s a second front in this war against Van Heerdon, this time from no other than the Army Corps of Engineers.
Back before Katrina hit, professor Heerden publicly noted that the levees were too short and likely to be overwhelmed by a major storm. This didn’t sit well with the people who built them, the Army Corps of Engineers, who bitched to LSU, inquiring why the professor’s “irresponsible behaviour is tolerated.” Following the ACE’s complaint, LSU actually confiscated the professor’s computer on which he had constructed the computer model that suggested that the levees were too short and that the ACE had further exacerbated the potential for flood disaster by dredging, which appeared to have been done at the request of shipping companies.
The Bush White House, ignoring the research done by Van Heerden, (who had actually warned Washington personally) withheld information from the Louisiana state authorities’ emergency response centre and as a result, evacuation was slowed and over 1500 people drowned.
A class-action law suit has been filed against the Army Corps of Engineers on behalf of the dead of Katrina and all those who lost their homes. The State University of Louisiana forbade professor Van Heerden from testifying as an expert witness.

So has Louisiana learned its lesson? Not if Heerden’s words are anything to go by. Talking with John Amato, he stated categorically if the level of preparedness for another major storm was up to snuff:
“No. Definitely not. If anything, it’s worse than when Katrina hit. We’ve lost a lot of wetlands protection … a section of the flood-wall itself has sunk about nine inches, a result of (hurricane) Gustav.”
“The Army Corp of Engineers won’t talk to me. Like everybody else, they are crossing their fingers and hoping we don’t have a storm.”

Good luck on that one…

So here’s my question. Why are some Americans so staggeringly stupid?

And before you accuse me of whipping unseemly on Americans, let me be the first to point out that you’re not alone. Pervev
Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azem University in Islamabad, wrote the following in the Washington Post in 2002:

“A former chairman of my physics department in Islamabad has calculated the speed of heaven. He maintains it is receding from earth at one centimetre per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dialation factor of 1000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
One of the two Pakistani nuclear engineers who was recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan’s energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire, so this high-placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.”

The French feminist critic, Luce Irigaray, has proclaimed Einstein’s E=Mc2 equation to be a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.” She has suggested that pure mathematics is biased due to its inherent “sexist” concern with closed spaces rather than the “partially open” structures apparently only visible to the subtler female mind.

First, let’s define the genre. Ignorance is not stupidity, but simply a lack of knowledge. I myself am quite well informed on a number of subjects and almost frighteningly ignorant of others. However, I can ameliorate my ignorance by study. Stupidity is a different story. It is, in my opinion anyway, the willful ignorance of a subject, combined with the public espousal of opinions on that subject that are based on misinformation or outright bullshit. When a person rants at the public option in health care being socialism and in the next breath warns the president to keep his hands of his Medicare, that is outright stupidity. When someone shouts down a Congressman at a town meeting with outright falsehoods, proudly proclaiming that he got his information from that hemorrhoid of a man, Glenn Beck, that is blatant stupidity.
Stupidity requires that the facts be readily available but that the person in question is either too lazy to seek them out or doesn’t wish to have the facts confound his preconceived notions or prejudices of a subject. To have to reconcile the facts with misinformation or personal bigotries would require one to examine one’s own stance on a subject which would lead to the horror of abstract thought or the terrifying possibility that the Becks, Limbaughs and Hannities of the world have been lying to you which, to the average right-wing person of the Republican pursuation, would be anathema. Stupidity is the acceptance of an opinion as fact not because it is verifiable, but because of who said it. Most stupid people get their opinions off the rack rather than tailor them themselves. Now speaking personally, I would be disinclined to take the words out of anyone elses’ mouth. It’s very unsanitary and in the case of Limbaugh or Coulter, you can never know where they’ve been.
Unfortunately, America was saddled for eight years with a president who popularized stupidity, a man who was willfully ignorant and seemingly inordinately proud to be so. Dubya himself was not a mental defect - his SAT scores were quite high - in the upper ten percent. His ignorance was a choice because it was easier than becoming educated. This lead to such statements as the jury still “being out” on the subject of evolution.
What jury, where. The Scopes trial ended many decades ago…
Here we may make an excursus on the subject of religion. Religion is the faith in things unprovable and unseen, for which I have no particular axe to grind. However, Creationism is stupidity. This is because it claims to be a science without applying the scientific method to its assertions. In order to believe that the earth is between 6000 and 17,000 years of age, (as Sarah Palin claims) one must essentially discard the evidence to the contrary from biology, zoology, archeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, physics, etc. One of the prime attributes of stupidity is that it cannot stand to be contradicted and insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it is right.

“The earth was created in six days. God did it, end of story.”
“Where’s your proof, your empirical evidence of that claim?”
“God said so.”
“And where’s your proof that God even exists?”
“What are you? Some kind of Satanistic Liberal commie?”

Another feature of stupidity is that it seeks to prove its points by not simply ignoring but re-writing facts. The so-called “death panel” provision in HR 3200 is a case in point. Read the relevant section and you will find that it refers to living wills and the right of a person to leave instructions to not resuscitate or use extraordinary measures to prolong life if the person in question is in an irreversible coma or a vegetative state together with the physician’s responsibility to discuss such things with the families involved. Somehow this got translated into pulling the plug on granny. A recent Gallup poll showed that the largest number of opponents of health care reform come from the southern States which have the highest number of people uninsured. So we can see another function of stupidity - the ability to act against your own self-interests. But one might recall that these are also the same people that were bribed by the Bush administration into voting Republican by a $250 dollar tax rebate and ended up with two wars and the highest National Debt and deficit in history. It’s never amazing to realize that most people can be bribed, but just how low some people’s prices appear to be.

Everyone knows the term “functional illiteracy” and to what it refers. There’s another classification, “functional incompetency,” which is defined as the lack of knowledge of the forces, political, economic and otherwise, that directly impinge on a person’s day-to-day existence. When you get your news from Fox, you economic knowledge from Jim Cramer and your political opinions from Glenn Beck, then I would argue that you are functionally incompetent.

It is often said that stupidity is its own punishment and that people get the government they deserve. Well, nowadays, the US has finally gotten the government it not only deserves but desperately needs. And yet, there are many who are trying to return it to the days when America got the government the stupid deserved. The question now remains: are you going to let them?

Order #2, issued May 23, 2003, dissolved the entire Iraqi army, including its intelligence services. This numbered almost half a million men who were now out of work, with no way to support their families, and all trained and armed. Lord knows how many joined the fledgling insurgency. The deputy Iraqi ambassador to the UN, Faisal al-Istrabadi, put it succinctly:
“I don’t understand why you took 400,000 men who are highly armed and trained and turn them into your enemies.”
Why indeed? The thing is that this wasn’t in the original game plan which had called for only around 9000 senior officers plus the Special Forces to be de-BA’athed. Bremer apparently took it upon himself to throw the entire army out into the street. When you consider the number of dependents involved, essentially Order #2 created 2.4 million enemies in a single day.

Order #12, issued June 7, 2003, created a “Trade Liberalization Policy.” At least that’s what Bremer called it. I call it “Iraq is Now Our Bitch Policy.” This order, in its own words, suspended “all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq.” Essentially all protective barriers designed to shield domestically produced goods, including food, were torn down overnight, leaving Iraqi business to compete with cheap (or not-so-cheap) foreign imports.
This was particularly devastating to Iraqi farmers. Although Iraq hasn’t been self-sufficient in food production since the ’50’s, Iraqi farmers had a competitive leg-up due to the government subsidizing agriculture. Crucial articles such as seeds and fertilizer, farm machinery, etc, was subsidized often at up to one fourth the open market price. The government had also leased land to farmers, if you’ll excuse the pun, dirt cheap, often as low as one cent per six-tenths of an acre for a year. The government also ran a guaranteed food program that included monthly family packages of flour, sugar, etc.
No more, Jack. The Bremer regime considered subsidized farming “all wrong.” If you merely educated the farmers (who have been farming this region for untold generations) and provided them with the technology, “the market will take care of the rest.”
Well, when cheap, untaxed goods start to flood the market and local farmers can’t compete and start going under, you might notice two things. First, since they’re having a hard time making a living since the only way they can compete with the cheaper goods is to undercut them in price, they can’t afford the technology they’re being offered at regular market price. And when people can’t afford to buy, especially with unemployment at an historic high and prices of certain commodities much higher than pre-invasion, the sacred free market pretty much falls to hell and is replaced by an underground economy.

Order #17, revised on June 27, 2004, is nothing short of hideous. Essentially, this grants full immunity from prosecution in an Iraqi court of law to all members of the Coalition forces and all foreign contractors including scum like Blackwater. This order basically declared open season on Iraqi citizens - military forces and private security companies could literally commit murder and have done so. Contractors could pollute and do third-rate work that would never pass muster in their home countries. Oh, but if any Iraqi has a legitimate grievance, they can always seek justice in the courts of the offending person’s nationality.
Right … that’ll happen. Ask any North American Indian what it’s like to use the white man’s legal system to prove that the lands he stole from you don’t belong to him. Adam Price, a British MP put it another way:
“How is anyone in Iraq expected to bring a case in the British courts? It is taking the idea of diplomatic immunity and applying it to 130,000 troops. There is a danger that you are actually going from immunity to being able to act with impunity.”
That’s exactly what it was and still is to this day because Bremer specifically excluded Order 17 from being rescinded by Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi when power was supposedly handed over to an equally supposedly democratically elected government.

Order #37, issued Sept. 19, 2003, completed ammended Iraqs’ previous tax code. Prior to the invasion, corporate tax could be as high as 40%. With Order 37, this dropped to 15%. In fact, it created a flat tax of 15% that was applied across the board. The guy who buses tables at the Baghdad Holiday Inn pays exactly the same rate as the Prime Minister. The Yanks couldn’t get away with this in their own country so they decided to inflict it on Iraq.

Order #39, issued Sept. 19, 2003, mandated the privatization of all formerly nationally owned businesses, together with 100% foreign ownership of said businesses with no preferential treatment of domestic businesses over foreign ones. It also provided for unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds. It further mandated 40-year leasing periods and the right to move legal disputes out of Iraqi jurisdiction and into international tribunes. Basically, this order created a corporate tax haven and, for all intents and purposes, relegated Iraq to the status of the Caymans and Sechelles. It created a back door to the whore house Bremer was constructing; a veritable free-market capitalist’s wet dream.
Although this order specifically excluded oil extraction and processing from privatization, it does allow for the privatization of things formerly guaranteed by the Iraqi constitution prior to the invasion, specifically Articles 11, 27 and 33 which guarantee maternal, child and medical care and free education. Problem is that violating these articles is specifically forbidden under the Hague Reulations. Fortunately for Iraqis, the Bush administration was a staunch believer in upholding international agreements to which they’d previously been signatories…
And of course, Bremer himself, apparently a fan of irony, had gone on record in November of 2001 as stating “Privatization of basic services, for example, almost always lead to price increases for those services which in turn often lead to protests or even physical violence against the operator.” Or, Paul, its nearest surrogate or enabler, in this case, the US and Coalition forces.

Order #40, issued Sept. 19, 2003, and then amended to Order #94 (June 6, 2004) essentially created a whore house of the Iraqi banking system by spreading its knees to foreign ownership. Under Order 40, the percentage of an Iraqi bank and the number of banks that could be owned by foreign institutions was limited to 50% and 6. No more. Now it became 100%. Nor could the Iraqi government require a certain number of financial institutions be owned by Iraqis. Consumer protection such as exists in the US through legislation such as the Truth in Lending Act, or the Community Reinvestment Act are totally lacking. As a result, individuals and small businesses are getting screwed on loans - if they get them at all.

Order #62, issued Feb. 26, 2004, restricts Iraqis from running for public office locally, regionally or nationally, without first receiving the CPA’s imprimatur. This stamp of approval could be withheld if, for instance, one had publicly opposed the occupation. This order was rescinded prior to the handover of power to the newly elected government, presumably because Bremer didn’t want such authority to be transferred to the new Prime Minister.

And so on and so on. We won’t even go into Order #14 that defined “prohibited media activity” which essentially meant that any TV or radio station or any newspaper that had the temerity to criticize the occupation or the utterly corrupt and incompetent reconstruction would find its doors padlocked and, more often than not, their offices trashed. Or that 40% of Iraq’s professional class have fled the country, including on third of all its doctors,(or that since 2003, over 2000 doctors have been murdered) or that 1.6 million citizens have been displaced within Iraq or that 1.8 million have bugged out entirely, or that school attendance has dropped from its pre-invasion figure of almost 100% to 30%. We’ll just gloss over the fact that the over 620,000 who got sacked as a direct result of Orders 1 and 2 were receiving a CPA mandated “half-pay” at a time when other orders were causing inflation to rise at unprecedented rates (over 36% shortly after Bremer started issuing his encyclicals) and that any form of government-run safety net had been summarily terminated. Or that unemployment, depending on the industry in question, was running at between 50 and 70%. Or that in the capital city itself, electricity was only available for around three hours a day.

The CPA consisted of around 800 people, 17 of which actually spoke Arabic and only one of whom could have been considered an expert on Iraq, (hint: it wasn’t Bremer) all living in total isolation from the rest of the country, and apparently allowed by the Bush administration to run amok, issuing orders that totally destroyed a workable constitution and an entirely functional government infrastructure, created enemies of over 400,000 armed men and drove out almost every citizen with an education above a GED. Paul Bremer, more than anyone else (apart from Bush and the sleazy cabal that lied the nation into this utterly unnecessary war and totally incompetently run occupation) created the Iraq we see today, along with the suffering, death and deprivation inflicted on its citizens. I would even go so far as to say that his incompetence is responsible for a large portion of the US’s combat deaths and casualties.

So, naturally, President Bush bestowed upon him the Medal of Freedom.

Kind of wonder where the previous administration’s priorities lay, doesn’t it.

Or maybe not so much…