White House Diversions

If the White House has its way, everyone will be in a religious lather this morning over the feeding tube being removed from Terri Schiavo in the Florida right-to-die case. If the White House has its way, the issue of whether clinically insane people have the right to speak for clinically dead people and zygotes will make us forget that 1521 American soldiers have died in Iraq. If the White House has its way, the entire adult population of the United States--209 million people--will be so outraged over the Schiavo case they won’t know that the President’s plan to privatize Social Security is in the tank, that the President’s plan to rape Medicare is in the tank, and that the Bush administration is kissing China’s ass because China is the second-largest holder of US debt, with their whopping $200 billion investment. But the White House is having the devil’s own time with its diversions these days. And most adults in the US either don’t give a damn that a corpse in Florida has a feeding tube or they think real news trumps lunatic-fringe news. Google’s Blogger and Blogspot self-publishing system (Ratfuck Diary uses Blogger) has been experiencing posting problems lately. And Daily Kos was off-line for a day or two last week because of a high-jacking problem that may have been freeper-induced. It remains to be seen whether these glitches in the blogosphere have a more sinister and high-level origin. But the GOP’s ability to disrupt news gathering and disseminating, and it’s proclivity for causing mischief in the media notwithstanding, the real news does get out and it does get read. In the seventies when the MSM fell down on the job, alternative newspapers took up the slack and made sure the truth got out. Now it’s the blogs that see to it that Pentagon and White House shenanigans aren’t obliterated by Pentagon and White House shenanigans. While Rupert Murdoch and his underlings in the White House labor ceaselessly to keep the real news off the MSM front pages, I have two questions I’d like deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to answer before he runs off to develop the globe the way he’s developed Iraq: 1) On March 27, 2003, you said during the House Committee on Appropriations Hearing “There’s a lot of money to pay for this (the war in Iraq) that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” How’s that plan working out? 2) When you become head of the World Bank, do you think you will be greeted around the globe with flowers and as a liberator as you predicted the US would be greeted in Iraq? Or, since your reputation will precede you, will you be wearing body armor? Just asking....