Turd Blossom’s 9/11 stink bomb takes out dazed neoliberals, misses everything and everyone else

June 29, 2005-In a June 22 speech to the New York State Conservative Party, White House Propaganda Minister Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove attacked what he defines as "liberals" for responding timidly to 9/11, while lauding what he calls "conservatives" for immediately going to war ("brandishing steel").

"Conservatives," Rove said, "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

Rove’s malodorous political turd-dump was propaganda full of carefully targeted falsehoods, codes ("conservative," "liberal," etc.), hot-button codes ("Howard Dean," "Michael Moore") designed to achieve a specific effect and reaction. Understanding Rove’s propaganda game, rather than parsing Rove’s obvious falsehoods from a rational or logical place, is essential.

Rove’s Propaganda Game

Rove knows exactly what he is doing. His goal is never information, but incitement. He plants what he knows are lies and slurs into his national noise machine, and then sits back to watch explosive chain reactions take out vulnerable political enemies.

He knows how to make some of his targets (those who are not already blackmailed) whimper into submission (witness Dick Durbin) and disappear. He knows that he can make others-whose own corruption already makes them complicit with the Bush administration’s cover-ups and war crimes (neoliberal congressional Democrats and their supporters)-scramble in denial, and then fall back into line like the supplicants that they are.

Rove is a master of the playbook that his political forebears in the Third Reich also mastered. Here is Hitler, from Mein Kampf:

"The receptivity of the masses is extremely limited, their intelligence is small, their forgetfulness enormous. Therefore all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and they should be used like slogans until the very last man in the audience is capable of understanding what is meant by the slogan . . . It must confine itself to a few points and everlastingly repeat them. . . . the people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine in their nature that sober reasoning motivates their thoughts and behaviors far less than feeling and emotion . . . The art of all truly great leaders has at all times primarily consisted of this: not to divide the attention of the people, but to concentrate that attention on a single enemy. It is part of the genius of a great leader to make it appear as though even the most distant enemies belong to the same category."

Like the crafty student of Hitler and Goebbels that he is, Rove knows that the myth of 9/11 and the "war on terrorism" are today’s slogans of choice, the "feeling and emotion" provided by the shock effect of 9/11, and the persistent ignorance and fear of the masses, resulting in the "summoning of the national will." (Or, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the "imperial mobilization.") He knows that he must make what is the diverse worldwide opposition to the war and his administration’s criminality into a "single enemy."

He knows where his adversaries are weakest, and he goes after that weakness. And like a smart bully-coward, Rove never directly faces adversaries that he knows have the goods to take him and his crime family down.

Inflate the Base, Attack the Weak Underbelly

In boasting about how the Bush administration and its "conservative" base "brandished steel" by immediately and presumptively attacking Afghanistan (without the "indictments" that he accused "liberals" of demanding), Rove glorified the administration’s war crimes and violations of international law. But we expect Rove (and Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, etc.) to always wrap the administration’s crimes in the American flag.

Rove is banking that the American public remains irretrievably crippled and brain-addled, and consumed with fear and hate-and still unaware that 9/11 was an operation planned, orchestrated, carried out (and covered up) by the United States and its assets.

As Jamey Hecht noted in The Rove Remarks, "the regime is in a bind. It needs the high-octane political fuel that 9/11 can provide, but that fuel is getting more and more expensive." The administration’s plummeting popularity confirms this.

What Rove knows he cannot do is directly face the critics and whistleblowers who have compiled (from a nonpartisan, nonideological, pure law and order stance) an iron-clad fact-based case proving that the US government and its guided intelligence assets planned and executed the attacks of 9/11. Rove and the administration may "remove" these opponents using nonpublic methods, but he knows the Bush gang would lose in a public confrontation or hearing.

Instead, what Rove (and Cheney, etc.) is doing in classic thug fashion, is attack the weak (the vulnerable Democrats, neoliberals, and hand-wringing, icon-worshipping, progressives) in order to discredit and tar the larger opposition.

It is a fact that this real opposition has no connection to the individuals or groups targeted by Rove, does not condone the limited hangout views or irrelevant politics of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore (of the disastrously off-target and flawed Fahrenheit 9/11), or Howard Dean (a neoliberal Democrat not opposed to power)-all of whom have utterly failed to expose the truth about 9/11, and all of whom openly or tacitly support the core of the Bush administration’s lies ("get Saudi Arabia," "do a better job fighting the ’war on terrorism,’" "support the Kean Commission findings," "Kerry knows where Bin Laden really is," etc.)

Where Rove blasts "liberals" for "offering therapy and understanding for our attackers," he is playing a number of tricks all at once. More important than how he is diverting the guilt for 9/11 away from his own administration, and inciting hatred among his right-wing base, he is intentionally dredging up-and mangling-the misguided "blowback" thesis that is popularized by some Left icons.

Noam Chomsky is a notorious example. In his book 9-11, Chomsky immediately accepted the White House version of 9/11, arguably even before the White House itself. Without any facts, and while the World Trade Center still burned-Chomsky declared on September 18, 2001:

"For the United States, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that the national territory has been under attack, or even threatened . . . The likely perpetrators are a category of their own, but uncontroversially, they draw support from a reservoir of bitterness and anger over US policies in the region, extending those of European masters."

Chomsky’s flock obediently followed him into this abyss of hand-wringing wrong-headedness. The Left’s lemmings marched alongside. Chomsky has not changed this view since, and his contingent still refuses to pursue 9/11, nearly four years later. This, even as evidence of government complicity has been exhaustively compiled, and confirmed by admissions and lies of Bush administration officials themselves. Chomsky declared the idea of US government foreknowledge "hopelessly implausible, so implausible, I don’t see any point in talking about it."

Conveniently for Rove and the Bush administration, the blowback thesis, and its variations and red herrings, assumes the guilt of ("bitter and angry") Islamic "terrorists" for 9/11, and helps cement into place the myth of 9/11. It also assumes the legitimacy of "anti-terrorism," while diverting attention away from the Bush administration’s guilt, the facts surrounding 9/11 itself, and the geostrategic realities leading up to and following 9/11, implicating the US government and its functionaries.

It therefore makes tactical sense for Rove to slam the blowback thesis for being a "wimpier" version of Bush’s anti-terror war ("indictments and petitions," and "therapy and understanding"). Because that is what it is-particularly in the eyes of his extreme right wing thug supporters who already hate the UN, scoff at all international law, and endorse hair-trigger criminal mass murder.

The Left (what elements that can be defined as "Left" that was not already corrupted or part of the elite system) actually has respond timidly to 9/11, but not exactly in the way Rove put it. The Left’s timidity was in refusing to pursue facts that lead directly to suspects at the highest and deepest levels of the US government, and by failing to address the brutal geostrategic realities leading up to, and following 9/11.

Leave it to Rove to inflate this, turn it inside out, and use it as a propaganda weapon.

Not surprisingly, neoliberal congressional Democrats have reacted to Rove’s comments in predictably corrupt and stupid fashion, by scrambling to defend their patriotism and jumping obediently through Rove’s hoops like trained monkeys. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that Rove "knows full well, as do all Americans, that our country came together after 9/11." Rove must be laughing.

But the real laughs are being enjoyed by those who aren’t fooled by Rove’s game. We are laughing at Rove.

Hey, Turd Blossom. You missed.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/526996.html