Empire Burlesque: Twilight's First Gleaming

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Fri, 25 Nov 2005 03:55:45 -0800 (PST)

Empire Burlesque: Twilight's First Gleaming

 

 

 

 

 

Empire Burlesque - Chris Cloyd - Last week, America's troubled

sleep was shattered by a trumpet blast of truth sounding deep in

Washington's corridors of power, where the rule of the Lie has held

sway for so long. This intrusion of reality into the bloodstained

fantasy-land of the Bush Regime comes late in the day for the moribund

Republic - perhaps too late - but it has struck a mighty blow against

the Lie's adherents, driving them into spasms of hysterical panic,

like rats exposed suddenly to the light.

 

 

 

 

www.chris-floyd.com

 

First Light

Chris Floyd

 

Empire Burlesque

Thursday, 24 November 2005

 

[The column below appears in the Nov. 25 edition of The Moscow Times.]

 

The unlikely instigator of this historic upheaval was U.S.

Representative John Murtha, the 73-year-old conservative Democrat and

warhawk, one of many " opposition " leaders who once strongly backed

George W. Bush's murderous folly in Iraq. Murtha, a Vietnam vet, has

been a stalwart of the military-industrial complex for decades,

supporting American wars around the world and showering legislative

largess on the weapons industry - which has obligingly kicked back

lobbying contracts to his kin and friends, the Los Angeles Times reports.

 

But a penchant for typical backroom grease is not necessarily

incompatible with political courage. And Murtha showed plenty of the

latter when he rocked the Washington establishment with a truly

revolutionary act in these degraded times: stating the obvious.

Calling Bush's war " a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion, " Murtha

said American forces should " redeploy " out of Iraq immediately;

otherwise, Iraqis will never feel free, the insurgency will grow,

terrorism will spread, and America will sink further into debt and

dishonor, putting the nation's very survival at stake.

 

This riot of understatement has been self-evident to most sentient

beings for a long time; that it is now sinking into the occluded

consciousness of Potomac power-players is a turning point of genuine

significance. Although Murtha was immediately assaulted in one of the

most raucous displays of bile ever seen in Congress - with Bushist

attack dogs labelling the war-wounded Pentagon patron a coward, a

traitor, and a terrorist-appeaser - his volte-face has brought the

so-called " extremist " anti-war position of swift withdrawal squarely

into the political mainstream, and it won't go away now. And why

should it? After all, it just happens to be the position of a majority

of the American people, as poll after poll reveals.

 

None of this means the Bush nightmare is over, of course; not by

the longest shot. This gang will grow ever more vicious as their

support crumbles; in fact, it's a good bet that the worst is yet to

come. The Bushists know that they have prison sentences hanging over

their heads if they ever lose their grip on power. They will either do

" whatever it takes " keep the whip hand - in which case we are in for

political and social strife the likes of which America has not seen

since the Civil War - or, at the very least, they will make things bad

enough that the nation's power elite will negotiate a settlement, as

in Richard Nixon's day: we won't prosecute you if you'll just go away.

In any case, it won't be pleasant.

 

So no false hopes of a new day dawning. Let's not forget what

happened after the " new dawn " following Nixon's departure: six years

later, Ronald Reagan was in office with an even worse crew - a lunatic

fringe of aggressive militarists, hard-Right ideologues and religious

extremists allied with rapacious corporate elitists, all bent on

destroying the idea of a common good beyond the raw and brutal bottom

line. This poison has gone deep into the American bloodstream, and its

virulence has been increased a thousandfold by the current regime.

Bush's exit from the stage won't cure the body politic of this wasting

disease.

 

Nor will it halt the voracious system of dominance and empire that

has driven American foreign policy - under Democrats and Republicans,

liberals and conservatives - for the past 60 years, covering the earth

with more than 700 military bases while waging ceaseless war, directly

and by proxy. Indeed, war profiteering has become essential to the

wealth and power of the elite, and is now deeply " embedded " in the

American economy as a whole. Bush accelerated this all-devouring

engine into overdrive; but he didn't create it, and his departure

won't derail it.

 

Thus even if the Bush Regime collapses entirely, we will still

face an uphill battle against " Bushism " and all the long-term currents

it represents. We must also guard against something even worse rising

in its place. For the Bush years have shown how fragile American

democracy is, how relatively little it takes for a predatory faction

to seize the state and manipulate the public, cow the opposition,

intimidate the press and use violence in pursuit of loot and power.

The template is there now, and it's entirely conceivable, perhaps

inevitable, that some new would-be dictator - more competent, more

subtle, more adroit than the ludicrous klutz from Crawford - will use

it to create a more efficient and durable instrument of domination.

 

Still, the immediate task at hand - ending the bloody war crime in

Iraq and restoring some vestige of legality and reality to American

politics - is a tall enough order. So we should take heart from events

like Murtha's declaration and Bush's free-fall in the polls. There has

been a shift in the political landscape, which provides cautious but

credible grounds for hope of some measure of change - not a false

triumphalism, for there is never any final " triumph " in human affairs;

there is only the continual, never-ending task of trying to rise above

our worst instincts. But for the first time in years, the sun of

possibility has broken through the stinking murk of the Bush Imperium.