Chris Floyd's book, Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, will be serialised in my diary at Daily Kos over the next few months.
For those of you that are not familiar with Floyd please read here.
Call it Open Source Activism - We are willing to give away the book in PDF format - just email me and I will send you a copy. If you don't want to trickle through the book over time and If you want to buy the paperback you can here. We don't have a 'real' publisher... we don't have an ISBN, we don't have cocktail parties and book signings... but we do have a book for sale that feels good in your hands and we can update it whenever we want - because it's on demand. It's a whole new ball game.
As a long time proponent of the Open Source initiative in terms of software - I can see that intellectual property with the beehive approach works wonders over proprietary control.
Google is aware of that. That's why they will win.
As are many others who have put their 'code' out for other's to improve.
As I am about to do. Love it or hate it - there is no doubt that Floyd writes with passion and love of his country. He just doesn't like the guys at the helm. Let's start today. It's a new year and let's take a look back.
INTRODUCTION
The sound you hear now is the clatter of hooves and the martial tread of men as the usurper's army descends into the churning river, bound for the capital, for war, for the death of the Republic. Lift your eyes to the horizon and see the smoke-occluded sun rising in the dawn of a new age: of rule by fear, by force, by whim and decree, by corrupt elites mouthing patriotic sham – a militarized regime maintained by foreign conquest, its cowed citizens diverted from their grim reality by lurid spectacle and relentless propaganda.
Sound familiar? Except maybe for the horses – although if you are one of the millions who have taken to the streets to protest the new Bush order, you've probably heard plenty of clattering hooves as mounted police herded you into the steel pens our witty masters like to call "free speech zones." These tawdry times lack the grandeur of ancient Rome, of course – and our tinpot, tongue-tied little Caesar is quite a comedown from that eloquent and able tyrant of old, marshaling his forces across the Rubicon – but the fall of the American Republic is equally tragic, and the reverberations from this mighty crash will likely be as lasting and profound.
But Rome wasn't built – or toppled – in a day. It takes time, and many hands, to ravage a magnificent structure like the American Republic, whose principles and ideals, however imperfectly realized, represented humanity's brightest hopes of freedom. The roots of the present crisis go back several decades, to the years following World War II, with the creation of the infamous "National Security" apparatus: a military -corporate complex financed by the looting of the public treasury, protected by a hydra of secret agencies and covert armies, and driven by the fomenting of almost-ceaseless war, coups and upheaval around the globe.
Curiously enough, this grisly history has Bush family fingerprints all over it: from the formation of the CIA by the family lawyer who helped Grandpa Prescott hide a Nazi collaboration rap to America's fatal entanglement with Middle East oil – exemplified by Daddy George's business partnerships with Kuwaiti princes, Saudi kings and the bin Laden dynasty, and his lavish coddling of Saddam Hussein during the worst years of his reign of terror; from the gun-running, drug-dealing Iran -Contra scheme for arming Latin American terrorist armies to the bailout of L'il Dubya's failing business by BCCI, the notorious underworld front group the U.S. Senate called "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history" (which was also used by Daddy to arm his buddy, Saddam). Look under any of these muddy rocks – and many others – and you'll find a Bush there, grinning amiably, twirling a golf club, filling his pockets with loot.
Armed with this sordid legacy, George W. Bush brought the slow corruption of the Republic to its completion. His regime is the apotheosis of the National Security apparatus, now standing triumphant and alone, having at last devoured the body politic upon which it has fed for so long. The final unfolding of this tragic process is the subject of this book.
***
It began with the 2000 presidential campaign: the most bizarre and appalling spectacle of absurdities, hypocrisies and mendacities in American electoral history. The amount of media manipulation, Big -Lie propaganda – and brutal financial muscle – inflicted on the Republic during this excruciating process surpassed anything seen before. The post-election battle over the Florida vote then led us into completely uncharted waters: a Miami election-office riot by Republican Congressional aides, financed and coordinated by the Bush campaign; bald-faced interventions by Bush brother Jeb and his minions in the Florida government; dark hints of military insurrection from the Bush team's roster of big-name ex-brass; the convoluted court cases and the breathtaking finale – the Supreme Court's farrago of favoritism, a "one-time only special exception" to stop the recount and hand the election to Bush, loser of the popular vote by more than half a million votes.
The rest, of course, is history – or rather, on Sept. 11, history came crashing down on the crew of corporate bagmen in the White House. While the hijacked planes hurtled freely and unmolested through U.S. airspace, while they struck with amazing precision at their iconic targets, the President sat in a Florida schoolroom, readin g a story about goats. American warplanes sat idle at bases within easy reach of New York and Washington. Dick Cheney descended into the bowels of the White House bunker to take charge of a long prepared "secret government." And Donald Rumsfeld was on the horn to his aides: "Find some way to tie this to Saddam Hussein! Go massive!"
With a dazed and frightened public still reeling from the blow, the Bush Regime seized on the catastrophe to establish a virtual dictatorship of the Executive, running roughshod over ancient liberties, Constitutional precepts and Congressional powers. Meanwhile, a carefully developed geopolitical strategy – hatched in the first Bush administration then nurtured during the Clinton interregnum in corporate-funded conservative think tanks like "The Project for the New American Century," led by Rumsfeld and Cheney – suddenly became a reality.
The plans, published by PNAC shortly before the 2000 election, called for the large-scale militarization of American society and the establishment of "full spectrum dominance" over the world economy by planting bases in oil-rich Central Asia, stringing a pipeline across Afghanistan and setting up a new, more pliant satrapy in Iraq. They recognized, of course, that the insular American people would balk at such wild dreams of world empire – unless, of course, the nation was struck by what the Cheney -Rumsfeld group called, with blood-chilling candor, "some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
Happily for them, the National Security apparatus' former employees – the army of Islamic extremists raised by the CIA fight the Soviets in Afghanistan – provided the spectacular "catalyzation" of September 11. The Regime then codified the PNAC plan with an official new "National Security Strategy" that committed America to aggressive action and military "preemption" around the world to promote what Bush called "the single sustainable model of national success" – i.e., the Regime's own peculiar brand of crony capitalism.
A heady time indeed. Or as the suddenly-popular President himself declared just days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "Through my tears I see opportunity."
A spineless Congress acquiesced in all this, passing hastily-submitted draconian laws – hundreds of pages long – without even reading them; ignoring the patently unconstitutional assumption of extrajudicial powers; and finally giving the unelected little man a blank check to launch an act of unprovoked military aggression against another nation on his own whim, with no formal declaration of hostilities.
Then came the war: riding in on a herd of lies and manipulations, shredding the hard-won, ever-fragile system of international law, laying waste to an entire country, leaving thousands upon thousands of innocent dead in its wake, plunging young American soldiers into a quagmire of brutal – and brutalizing – occupation, bankrupting the national treasury…but filling the vaults of the Bush gang with unimaginable swag.
Never had the American Republic stood in such a degraded state: terrorized, militarized, subjected to arbitrary rule, riddled with corruption, despised and feared around the world – and more exposed to attack than ever before.
***
And so here we are. But how the hell did we get here? How did we stumble into this waking nightmare? Empire Burlesque – the title taken from Bob Dylan's acerbic summing -up of an earlier outbreak of American madness – tells the tale, in detailed snapshots catching the corrupters in the act and in wide-screen vistas reaching back for historical context and sweeping forward to future implications. Drawn from weekly pieces appearing in the Moscow Times column, Global Eye, and in print and electronic journals around the world, from New Delhi to New Jersey, from London to Los Angeles, the book goes behind the fan-dance of the mainstream media to dig up the true story, the secret history, and plays it back in real-time, providing a rare view from the ground as it was happening – step by step, into the dark.
******
Chapter One
THE THUNDERCLAP (2001)
T he first nine months of the Bush Regime were a tawdry, bumbling, grubby affair, devoted largely to the looting of the public treasury on behalf of the nation's elite families and corporations – a process that the Regime's courtiers, and their media enablers, liked to call "tax relief." (Those kidders! What yocks!) This piping time also saw the stocking of the government with a host of religious zealots, corporate lobbyists, crude ideologues, convicted conspirators and terrorist facilitators (that old Iran-Contra gang of yore), Bush Family capos, Nixon relics, Ford fossils, Reagan retreads, and other assorted oddballs and fringe elements.
It was a group perhaps best exemplified by the new Attorney General of the United States: John Ashcroft. His appointment at first seemed yet another example of the Regime's heavy humor: a man who liked to douse his head with Crisco oil when taking office, to signify, in emulation of King David, his "dominion over men"; a man who loudly praised the virtues and "values" of the slaveowners who took up arms against the United States; a man who was perhaps best known for the dubious distinction of being the only United States Senator ever to have been defeated in an election by a corpse.
In public, this motley conglomeration seemed to stumble and blunder from one minor crisis to the next. Republican pundits began wondering aloud about how to help this "young president" get his bearings. Bush was, of course, the same age as Richard Nixon was when he took office, and older than either Bill Clinton or Al Gore, who had just spent eight years at the pinnacle of government. Yet this absurd image of 55-year-old George W. as a frisky young colt still finding his legs was constantly reiterated by the press, especially the New York Times. Despite these valiant media efforts, however, Bush's poll numbers continued to fall and his administration seemed adrift, lacking purpose or coherence.
We now know – to our sorrow – that there was much more afoot in the subterranean councils of the Regime. Plans for war in both Afghanistan and Iraq were already being laid. The "National Energy Plan" devised in secret by Dick Cheney and his corporate cronies had already divvied up Iraq's oilfields for future sell-offs. Long-standing investigations into the financing of terrorism by grandees in Saudi Arabia – where the Bush Family had so many financial and personal interests – were already being rolled back by orders from on high. The first stages of the PNAC scheme for militarizing American society, dominating the global economy and turning outer space into a combat zone was already being quietly implemented by PNAC alums Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others now scattered throughout the government; the plan's full glory awaited only that "new Pearl Harbor" they had dreamed of in their think-tank publications for years.
But all of this came to light only much later – too late, far too late. When the poll-battered, increasingly unpopular, much-ridiculed president decamped petulantly to his Texas ranch for a long, leisurely holiday in August 2001, there seemed little worth saying about his pitiful tenure: mediocrity neither inspires nor requires feats of discourse. Then came the thunderclap, the ricorso – which, in Vico's famous philosophy of history, presages the end of democracy and the return of leaders claiming to rule by divine sanction. On September 11, a new dark age was suddenly upon us, one that would unmask
– slowly, painfully – the vicious tangle of greed, ambition and blowback that now governs our reality.
"That Which Happened"
September 12, 2001
Perhaps their knives were made of stone – chipped flints, sharpened to a deadly point: the earliest human technology. Stone knives would have baffled the sleek security mach ines, scanning for metal, for iron and steel. Perhaps that's how the guardians of the world's greatest power were defeated by a handful of men
.
A handful of men, dedicated to God, willing to die for their cause – virtues celebrated throughout the civilized world. Old-fashioned men, too: this was not push-button war, there were no guided missiles streaking across vast oceans, no bomb bays opening somewhere above the clouds. This was the real thing, the raw thing, fierce and elemental. They came to kill and they came to die. They killed; they died.
And so the unimaginable has come, at last, to America. Unimaginable, that the innocent could lie dead in their thousands, buried beneath the ruins of ordinary life. Unimaginable, that the destruction that has swept back and forth across the world in great waves, leaving the innocent lying dead in their millions, should have at last spilled over the strong sea-walls that preserved the nation's wealth and tranquility. Unimaginable, that Americans should know what so many, too many, have known before: the sudden, gutting horror of mass-murdering injustice.
How did it happen? America spends $30 billion a year, year after year after year, on "intelligence." Untold trillions have been spent on "defense." The nation bristles with powerful ordnance, it "projects dominance" (as the strategists like to say) all over the globe. And yet its leaders are like blind men, raging like Oedipus, unable to see their attackers or defend their people or understand what is happening to them.
Struck and wounded, they fall back on empty rhetoric: "an attack on democracy" – as if the suspected plotters, who spent years in a war to the death with the Soviet Union, give a damn what America's political system might be. Then come the metaphysic al explanations: "A new evil has come upon us." "This is a war between good and evil."
Well yes, it's evil – as the killing of every innocent person is – but it isn't new. It's as old as the hills, as old as any chipped flint dug up from the ground. It's religious arrogance, tribalism, lust for power and – let's be honest about it – a falling-out among former allies, old comrades in undercover war. Each one of these is a powerful engine of hatred – churning in the dirt of the real world, in the mixed matter of the human brain, in the murk and folly of human history.
Religious arrogance: the implacable, impenetrable conviction that absolute truth is in your sole possession. You are good, favored by God; your enemies are evil, demonic. Tribalism (or in "civilized" terms, nationalism, patriotism): the belief that your country, your people, your grievances, your interests are above all others, that your values are so important that innocent people must sometimes be sacrificed to them. Lust for power: the burning desire to impose your will on the whole world – or failing that, to bring the whole world crumbling down around you.
And a falling-out. The White House points the finger of blame at Osama Bin Laden – a demon made to order, right out of central casting, remorseless, demented, crafty, rich. Like Saddam Hussein – another sinister figure suspected of collusion in the attack – Bin Laden was once empowered by America itself. The same intelligence services that now stand blind, struck and wounded, cynically embraced these brutal renegades as pawns in the Great Game of geopolitics; embraced them, armed them, paid them, built them up into autonomous powers – then, like Dr. Frankenstein, lost control of their creatures. The used became the users, and in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan – and now, New York and Washington – they have killed their thousands, and their tens of thousands.
In the name of religion. In the service of patriotism. In the lust for power – to project their dominance.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and is with us always.
But atrocity tends to raze the ground of history. In the aftermath, with the cries of lamentation rising over fresh graves, it is always Zero Hour. "That which happened" – to borrow the poet Paul Celan's phrase for the Nazis' unspeakable crimes – buries what came before, effaces the paths that led us to this place, strips away the cloak of reason (a thin rag in the best of times), and leaves nothing but the bare, anguished call for revenge.
So the leaders, the blind men, assemble. They call urgently for war – against someone, somewhere; they cannot say who, because they cannot see. The intelligence services are put to work – perhaps they will find a new pawn, someone to turn against the one who has turned against them; someone new to embrace, arm, pay, empower. Perhaps the missiles will streak and the bomb bays will open indiscriminately, as before. Or perhaps it will be left to assassins, surgeons of death who will use the terrorist's own weapons of treachery and surprise to destroy the culprits – and the inevitable "collaterals."
Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs. And who now can break this cy cle, which has been going on for generations? Past folly undoes us, but who, in the Zero Hour, can ignore the lamentations? Who can deny the ghosts, these loved ones gone, the red food demanded by the dead?
There is no answer. It will not stop. They say the world has now changed irreversibly, that nothing will ever be the same. But it will be the same.
The same engines of hatred, the same murk, the same dirt, the same mixed matter in human brains.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and it is with us always.
"Even unto the end of the world."
Panic Attack
A Blank Check for Tyranny
September 21, 2001
"The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." – Joint Resolution, U.S. Congress, Sept. 15, 2001
An extraordinary document, unprecedented in U.S. history. Although modeled on the Tonkin Gulf resolution that opened the spigots for the Vietnam War, and on the narrowly passed measure that belatedly gave George Bush I constitutional cover for the vast army he had already marshaled in the Persian Gulf, the emergency powers awarded last week to George Bush II surpass anything yet seen in the American republic.
Never has a president been given such sweeping authority. It's true that some have taken it: most notably Abraham Lincoln, who used what he called his "inherent powers" to quash civil liberties, jail dissidents, even suspend the writ of habeas corpus, the cornerstone of 800 years of Anglo-American jurisprudence. But these draconian measures – imposed, after all, when the Union was under sustained assault by a million homegrown rebels, not 19 God-maddened criminals on a suicide run – were met with violent protests, Congressional investigations, bitter partisan invective and court challenges.
Yet there was nary a peep out of the modern guardians of the Republic in the Senate as they voted Caesar this dictatorial power. For note carefully that it is Bush alone who decides who is a terrorist; it is Bush alone who decides what constitutes the "aiding" of terrorism.
The Congressional lambkins of course believe that Bush will not abuse these powers. And no doubt he and his Praetorians will show the same tender concern for liberty, legality and constitutional authority they displayed last year when they sent hired thugs to break up the vote recount in Miami, then successfully urged the Supreme Court to strip Congress of its clearly defined constitutional responsibility to resolve disputed elections, thereby shutting down the vote and transforming callow Octavian into the manly Augustus who rules today.
Poor lambkins, so trusting. But what else can they do? What can any of us do? We must all now trust that this man who can't hold his liquor will be able to hold near-absolute power without getting drunk on it. We must trust that he will somehow ignore the counsels of the conservative faithful who have heretofore molded his thinking and guided all his actions.
For these wise guides have been busy defining just who is a terrorist – and a terrorist sympathizer. In newspapers, on radio and television, in weighty journals, they're naming and shaming the guilty. The list is long: Anyone who criticizes the president in this time of crisis. Anyone who has ever criticized him before. Anyone who gives information to the American people about what has happened to them and what is being done in their name – including a conservative senator like Orrin Hatch, who was publicly slapped down by the White House for spea king without permission. Anyone who suggests that there may be a complicated historical context to the tragedy, one in which America is not entirely without a tincture of culpability for helping create the scenario that belched forth this hell.
All of these constitute a "fifth column," an "internal enemy," a "corps of traitors," we are told by Bush's patrons and mentors. Every day, they pour this poison into Caesar's ear – but we must trust that he's not listening. We must trust that although he has always believed and embraced their Talibanic precepts before, he will now, miraculously, discard them.
We must trust that Caesar will only sip at the cup of power that's been given him, just enough to rouse his spirits without disordering his senses. For it's entirely up to him now; Congress has abandoned its ancient duty to represent the people. If he decides you're a terrorist – you are. If he decides you helped them – you did. Vengeance is his; he will repay.
Don't you feel safer already?
Fog Bound
Meanwhile, In the aftermath of terror, a fog of deceit is rising from the Potomac, as deadly as the asbestos haze hanging over Manhattan. Congress is being shut out of intelligence briefings; it is to act as a rubber stamp, nothing more. Dick Cheney has taken charge as "War Minister," as the press approvingly calls him. The new war will be run by the same people who ran the last one: the one against the "terrorist evildoer" who is still in power 10 years later; the evildoer with whom Dick Cheney did $23 million worth of business – after the war – as head of Halliburton.
The same people who hired a PR firm – Hill and Knowlton – to control public perception of the Gulf War; who imposed press censorship far beyond that seen even in World War II. To this day, most Americans don't know what was done in their name during the last war; don't know that Bush I was an enthusiastic backer of Saddam Hussein, supplying him with arms and materials for weapons of mass destruction almost to the day he crossed into Kuwait; don't know that American soldiers were ordered to massacre surrendering Iraqi conscripts; or that Bush I, with an army on the scene, allowed Saddam to slaughter thousands of Iraqi Shiites trying to overthrow him – with Bush I's encouragement – just after the war.
You can't even speak of such things; you sound like a madman, a crank raving on the street. There's no context where this history can resonate, no way for it to inform the debate on how America should respond without repeating past mistakes. It's all hidden in the fog, decades of murk; and the fog is rising again.
It's a cold, brutal fact, hard to face, hard to stomach, but impossible to deny: We are all living in a world of lies – lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and the grandchildren of lies.
Masters of War
Carlyle, Crusaders and Crocodile Tears
October 5, 2001
Before we begin, a stipulation: The Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington were very likely instigated and carried out by the forces of religious fascism, who alone bear the direct responsibility for this atrocious crime.
We hope readers will excuse the stupefying obviousness of the above declaration, which wastes their precious time by repeating common knowledge. Unfortunately, in these dicey days you can't be too careful; there are legions of cranially constricted poltroons out there – some of them in the corridors of power – who regard anything other than slavish bellowing in praise of the Dear Leader to be an act of treason or an apology for terrorism. Therefore it's necessary to issue these tedious disclaimers to avoid being ranged with "the bad guys" in the increasingly cartoon version of reality being foisted upon a shaken world.
Or as Humphrey Bogart once said, in a not-altogether-dissimilar situation: "My, my, so many guns around town these days, and so few brains."
So just to make it clear: the Global Eye stands on the side of democracy – you know, that system where countries are led by those who actually receive the most votes from the electorate – and for liberty, law, tolerance, justice, mercy and truth; just like the "good guys."
The Global Eye is against tyranny – you know, where countries are ruled by leaders who weren't chosen by the people, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and that place between Canada and Mexico – and against oppression, censorship, injustice, terrorism (of both the state and "privatized" varieties) and religious fascism in all its manifestations, from the perverted Islam displayed Sept. 11 to, say, the genocidal Christian Fundamentalism of General Efrain Rios Montt, whose Guatemalan regime killed tens of thousands of people during its Reagan-backed reign in the 1980s.
Of course, examples from almost every religion under the sun could be offered in this regard – and yes, from atheistic ideologies also, to again restate the painfully obvious – but you get the idea. Now, having made the abject profession of loyalty and all-around good-guyness currently required for the exercise of free speech, can we move on?
***
Question of the day: Who benefits most from the looming "war against terror"?
Leaving aside, of course, the intangible benefits that will accrue to us all if Mr. Bush fulfills his vow to "rid the world of evildoers" and "eradicate terrorism" – stirring promises somewhat undercut by his own secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who says eradicating terrorism "sets too high a threshold," while adding that, basically, the rest of the world can go hang: "What we are attempting to do is to assure that we can preven t people from adversely affecting our way of life.'' If the evildoers hit Cairo or Kuala Lumpur next time, then that's OK.
Mr. Bush's desire to lift arms-sales restrictions against U.S.-declared sponsors of international terrorism such as Syria and Iran also seems strangely at odds with eradicating terrorism and evil – but no doubt the grand strategy behind giving weapons to those who give weapons to those who murder in cold blood is part of the super-duper "secret war" that will remain forever hidden from our delicate sensibilities. Or as one top Pentagon planner admitted last week: "We're going to lie about things." Old news, perhaps, but the candor is refreshing.
Then again, maybe releasing the spigot on arms sales to all and sundry is not so strange after all, when considering the question of who benefits. For as The Wall Street Journal reports, some of the biggest financial profits of the new overt-covert conflict will flow to two famous families much in the news these days: the bin Ladens and the Bushes. The Saudi-based bin Laden family conglomerate, from which the estranged Osama received a $50 million inheritance before falling out over his predilection for blowing up representatives of the family's Western business partners, is intricately tied to the Carlyle Group, a little-known but immensely powerful investment firm stocked with old Reagan -Bush hands – including the old hands of George Bush Senior.
Carlyle deals in "private equity": buying and shuffling companies in hush -hush trading – "a high -end business," says The New York Times, "open only to the very rich." Like Old George, who acts as a Carlyle "adviser" and rakes it in from the sweetheart deals his comrades cut with their old pals in governments around the world. For Carlyle prefers companies that are state-regulated; two-thirds of its $12 billion in investments are in – wait for it – defense and telecommunications companies. Regulated firms, you see, are more amenable to profitable intervention by well-lobbied government officials. None of tha t "free market" malarkey for these boys!
The Group even put l'il Georgie on the payroll in 1990, when the wee lad was at a loose end before God called him to higher office. Dad found Junior a featherbed on the corporate board of Caterair, an airline-catering company and Carlyle subsidiary.
Carlyle is now one of America's largest defense contractors, "owning companies that make tanks, aircraft wings and a broad array of other military equipment," The New York Times reports. And that means boffo box office when the bombs begin to fall. Even before the attacks, Carlyle Chairman Frank Carlucci, a former Reagan secretary of defense, was jawboning his successor – and old college classmate – Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of Carlyle-backed weapons, including the aptly named "Crusader" heavy tank.
The bin Laden group has plowed millions into Carlyle aerospace firms – the rockets' red glare means lots of long green, don't you know – and now the cash registers will be ringing from the Persian Gulf to Kennebunkport. No wonder George Senior has twice made the humble hajj to bin Laden HQ in Jeddah.
So yes, it's true: The Sept. 11 attacks were the work of religious fascists, who alone bear the responsibility for that atrocious crime. But the wise man knows how to turn unexpected adversity to his own advantage. Or as Dear Leader Junior put it just the other day: "Through my tears I see opportunity."
Paperback here.