Satire: The Civilian Patriotic Complex

Okay, so this is what the Republicans were hoping this past week would have been about. Victories galore on hot button issues for their base to cheer about. A bill to get tough on torturing terrorism detainees. A Great Wall of Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out of America. And of course, hard-hitting ads and speeches attacking Democrats as cut-and-runners on Iraq.

Instead they got buried under a deluge of bad news, piling up one on top of the other so fast, they decided to not even have Cheney go on Meet the Press to accuse Democrats of "coddling the terrorists", which of course was the script before all of this shit hit the fan. So what went wrong, where did they lose the script, how did reality become something the Bush administration couldn't define for the rest of us to whine about?

We've been frustrated about how the Bush administration has deluged the American people with information overload, and taken advantage of short attention spans to distort facts and engineer insinuations. Their hope, and our fear, has been that people will be so overwhelmed with all the "facts" in play in this post-9/11 world, that they will just give up and rely on their "trust" in Bush to pull our nation through.

All of a sudden, it's the Republicans who are being deluged with information overload, coming from multiple angles, dismantling the very ground they stand on, and before they know it they're waist-deep in quicksand. So what's with all the bad news, dudes? Just in one week, too many balls to juggle, and they're coming too fast.

- NIE on terrorism, now suddenly Iraq increases the terrorist threat? What happened?
- Clinton yells, now the MSM is curious about Bush's anti-terrorism actions prior to 9/11?
- Foley page-gate scandal, and the entire Republican House leadership is embroiled?
- Woodward book, and suddenly Bush is the one in a State of Denial about Iraq?

And so we find ourselves wondering if there isn't a pattern to this apparently random confluence of very timely and very damaging information overload right before the mid-term elections. We ask this primarily because none of this stuff is new, not the analysis of the terrorism threat in the NIE, not the Bush cabinet's disinterest in terrorism before 9/11, not the bulk of the evidence in Woodward's book, not even all of Foley's emails and IMs, none of it happened this past week or fortnight or month.

Unlike Allen's macaca-gate which happened on its own, all this stuff was held for release now in an apparently coordinated manner by an unseen constellation of forces. What is this shadowy alignment within the American polity that is engineering this course correction now? I believe it is the adversary of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, something known as the civilian-patriotic complex, of which we happen to be the bleeding edge.

Oh yes, we're not talking just a few pissed off ex-Langley folks wanting a little payback for Cheney, Rumsfeld, "housecleaning" and Valerie Plame. It goes far deeper than that, cutting across Democratic, independent and traditional Republican party lines, and even includes elements of the great Indifference Party of America. This is the civilian-patriotic complex taking back the country from a profoundly misguided Presidency.

Just as the military-industrial complex is hard to pin down and call to account, the civilian-patriotic complex is equally difficult to identify and rolodex. We, the liberal blogosphere, are the visible tip of this iceberg, which we suddenly find speeding full steam ahead, aimed straight at the Bush administration's Titanic. As you can plainly see, I'm not diarying this phenomenon to make us complacent, if anything I intend the exact opposite.

In spite of all the intrigue, this is a familiar moment, one when America rights itself after having let a trend run its course. Just think of Bush as something more virulent than, but exactly like, the Macarena. Our country has seen such 180 degree turns aplenty, from emancipation to suffrage, this is our moment to show the stuff our generation is made of. With the strength of the invisible but all-powerful civilian-patriotic complex behind us, let's carry on with the Republican trainwreck until and beyond election day, then redirect America toward a new and more stable equilibrium.

•  Hello

  Maybe it's not satire - but the stunning reality.

  But thanks for the diary & I know that a diary can take a long time to write.

  Cheers!

  by aimeeinkc on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 06:38:58 PM PDT

  •  Woohoo, a comment, thank you so much. (n/t)

    by wakemeup7nov06 on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 06:46:24 PM PDT

•  This is the good news and the bad news.

  It is way past time that all the chichenshit from this Administration came home to roost.  The bad news is that these boneheads are still running our country.  And, unfortunately, bad news can always get worse.

  by Friend of the court on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 07:00:37 PM PDT

  •  Yeah, our heads are going to explode

    watching these morons run the country for another 2 years, that is if they don't implode before their term ends.

    by wakemeup7nov06 on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 07:16:41 PM PDT

•  Here's hoping we can do just that

  Though I have mixed feelings about this deluge of bad news for the Repubs.  I've been worried all along about their October surprise, but now I'm afraid that they'll up the ante and trot out an even nastier Plan B for us, maybe something along the lines of an attack on a certain Middle Eastern country that shall remain nameless.  

  They're already teetering on the brink of desperation, and I wouldn't put anything past these soulless bastards.

  by deha on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 07:13:46 PM PDT

  •  That's the flip side of this, isn't it?

    How will the military-industrial complex retaliate? Thankfully, November 7 is just 36 days away, and whatever they do now will be seen for what it is, an act of desperation.

    by wakemeup7nov06 on Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 07:19:40 PM PDT