Bush's USA: Endless War Is The New Normal

I was reading through a few "liberal" sites today, and thinking, "These US Democrats still don't quite get it."

For example, Geov Parrish writes:

Even if his nomination goes down, the very fact that the Bush Administration nominated [Bolton] in the first place is a diplomatic insult that will not soon be forgotten in the halls of the U.N. and in the capitols of the world.

Does he still not realize that that was the whole point of the nomination? What did he think the Wolfowitz nomination was? And the Negroponte nomination? And the Gonzales nomination? These are all calculated slaps in the face by an administration that has been playing hardball since before Day One.

Similarly, sites like Daily Kos, Atrios and Josh Marshall keep framing everything in bilateral GOP-versus-Democrats terms. Don't they understand that it has gone way beyond that now?

Then I read the latest Tomgram: The normalization of war, which started off with the ominous words "We are now in an America where..."

"War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices. "

Bingo.

The neocons once boasted that they would change the nature of reality and that people like me would be left to "duly report" the new world order. And guess what? It's happened, in the USA at least. I hate to say it, but it has.

Engelhart's piece introduces a new book by Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War, which "focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by -- and found themselves in thrall to -- military power and the idea of global military supremacy".

The primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society...

As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced...

Thus reimagined -- and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life.

Read more excerpts here.

Elsewhere, Stirling Newberry at truthout says it should now be obvious to everyone that "in America that we have reached a constitutional moment." He pins the blame for this primarily on Karl Rove:

There are three basic pillars of constitutional order: the mandate of the government, the meaning which binds the people and the government together, and the mechanism by which the government pursues the mandate given to it by the people. Of the various mechanisms, money is the most important, though not in the crude sense merely of who gets money, but how money works, how it is created. Money determines, to no small extent, the incentives and range of actions that an individual has available to him.

The New Deal instituted a new kind of money, money based on assets that banks could show on their books, and backed by the Federal Reserve and deposit insurance. One of the key programs that the New Deal used to make this new kind of money work was Social Security. This money replaced the gold-backed money of the previous constitutional order, and changed, fundamentally, the way America worked as a nation. The mandate of the government was to balance the economy; the meaning was based on consensus for action; if there was a problem, or even a potential problem, then the public sense was that it had to be met head on.

Karl Rove has, more than any other single political operative, been responsible for designing a means of attacking that political order, and he has, in no small measure, accomplished this...

Rove knows that in order to secure Republican domination for a generation or more, he must place a weight on the back of government so heavy that no one can remove it. Should a Democrat manage to take the White House, then all that need happen is that a Republican Congress [from Gandhi: hell, who needs Congress? Big Business is GOP-controlled anyway!] stop doing the behind-the-scenes juggling that keeps the economy going, a recession will ensue, and the Oval office will return to Republican control...

The idea of constitutional crisis is not far from the public's mind, even though those words are never spoken in the broadcast media... Rove's agenda is to take his vision of a different constitutional order, and marry it to political tactics that work within that order. He is attempting to make a coherent set of changes that will force governments that come after this one to adhere to the broad outlines of the kind of state that is now being established...

And it is Rove's intent to create a permanent political coalition where only a Republican can win the White House.

Read the full article here.

Talking about creating an endless GOP regime, Ernest Partidge at The Crisis Papers sums up two and a half years of dismay on electoral reform and machine voting systems:

Electoral integrity is arguably the most important political issue to face the American people since the founding of our democracy, as it raises the question of whether, in fact, we still have a democracy. For if, as the skeptics contend, the outcome of our federal 'elections' are decided before a single vote is cast, then the government of the United States no longer '[derives] its just powers from the consent of the governed.' Despite what we are told from Washington, or by the corporate media, this is not a government 'of, by, and for the people.'

The grounds for suspicion about the integrity of our elections are simple, straightforward, and undisputed. In federal elections, thirty percent of the votes are cast, and eighty percent of the votes are regionally compiled, in machines: (a) utilizing secret software, (b) producing no independent record of the votes (e.g. Paper trails"), and (c) manufactured by active members and supporters of the Republican Party. In sum, the system in place is effectively designed, either deliberately or accidentally, to facilitate fraud...

Meanwhile, confirming the dismal situation we face, another Google Search today on Khaled el-Masri indicates that the story is probably already dead.

"Democracy"? Hah!