Lewis H. Lapham said something fascinating about the motivations of the current Presidency:
"What the Bush administration is primarily interested in is regime change in the United States, not regime change in Iraq or South East Asia or the Balkans. A foreign war is a wonderful lollipop to stuff in the mouth of a possibly quarrelsome press."
----Lewis H. Lapham
Along those lines, it seems that our culture, speech, actions and social interactions changed overnight since the toppling of the Twin Towers and the fire at the Pentagon. From what was once a vibrant and rather carefree sort of existence, then came a dark gloom that hovered over the American landscape. In this hushed fog, a bizarre circus of the current Administration using bizarro logic became the order of the day.
A lot of explanations could be made, but for this diary it all comes down to semantics. And it says a lot about how they affected us in a time of crisis.
President Bush and his cronies took advantage of our fear and played us like a violin. By preying on our deepest and most intense feelings of protectivism and self-preservation as a country, there was nothing else to do but hunker down and build an emotional (as well as a physical) wall around ourselves. Our grief and patriotism was manipulated, used and hung out to dry. And when it was said and done, a lot of folks have turned bitter over the fact that they've been bamboozled by utter deception.
When looking back through what was said to the American public in the media , the dramatic absurdity of the statements from the the current Administration grows in surreality. Although the current President of the United States has said many things over his tenure, it is rather telling that the double-speak that he employs were laced with a sort of cynicism and bitter irony.
See if you agree (all emphasis in quotes are mine):
"The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the 'beginning of the end of America.' By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed."
--President George W. Bush
Or this one:
America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.
--President George W. Bush
Or maybe this little jewel:
America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.
--President George W. Bush
And of course, the one that took the cake:
You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
--President George W. Bush
It says quite a deal about what we've had to take during this entire era, doesn't it?