"So it’s sort of like the end of democracy, in a way. We don’t know what the government is doing. People inside the government don’t know what the government is doing." —Seymour Hersh yesterday, June 30,2008, on Democracy Now! Talking about the current covert operations against Iran
Color me low on hope, but the diaries on the Bush administration's secret doings in Iran yesterday (here and here and here and here) cycled through with little comment, and no REC list or Rescue. It’s unlikely my missive will fair better, but it should: Hersh is talking some serious shit that could impact the election, including a possible October Surprise designed to throw the electorate in to chaos and patriotic hysteria.
Maybe I'm paranoid because nothing brings the fragility of "normal" life into focus like a brush with disaster. Look, this may seem like a digression, but bear with me: I just spent the last three days without water in the midst of one of California's fire zones. My house is not in danger of burning, but it’s smoky enough around here to make clear that some 38,000 acres JUST in Mendocino County have burned to the ground and that the 43 active fires in the Mendocino Complex, though about 40% contained now, are still growing.
My water problem was unrelated, just one of those coincidences that sometimes come to call. Its purpose, it seems, was to remind me of the uncomfortable adage that civilization is only a three-day veneer. Go three days without running water for flushing toilets, showering, washing dishes or watering summer-thirsty plants, and watch what happens to "normal." As I hoarded water, wiping the tomato off my hands with a dish towel instead of running water, I found myself wondering how I will live when water no longer runs from the tap. California is, after all, in the midst of drought—that’s why it’s burning, just one symptom of the earth's plight under the growing impact of global warming.
Clearly, my sense of entitlement includes the orderly nuances of civilization as I've grown accustomed to it—in this case, running water. It pisses me off when it stops pouring from the tap. It pisses me off that the Arctic will probably be ice-free this summer, that weather patterns are extreme already, that "normal" is slipping away even as we argue over the petty and innocuous or even the important. Maybe that's the deal about the fires, I said this before, in my previous diaries about California Burning (here and here), but it's worth saying again: you can't really triage fires, they just keep growing, getting worse, becoming more damaging by the hour.
So, here's my point: it seems to me that one of the responsibilities we have as readers and diarists here at DKOS is to cover as many of the really important issues as possible. The Right is so good at creating an echo chamber for whatever they want to blast into the psyche of the general public. We should be as good and better. And this story, that Seymour Hersh uncovered and is trying to get out there into everyone's hearing, is really worth echoing and echoing until it's forced into the conversations of politicians and into the corporate media's endless loop. This is not old news. This is dangerous news that, like a forest fire in a drought, won't go away unless we get some kind of containment around the behavior that's making it news. We, the people, have to somehow prevent the Bush/Cheney administration from having their way on this.
That's why I'm posting yet another diary on the topic, this one with a beg-line in it: Would you guys please pay attention to Seymour Hersh's warning. This story really needs to break the surface.
Here's Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! interview with Hersh from yesterday (June 30). The transcripts from the interview are here. The video runs in two parts, each part is somewhat over ten minutes:
part two:
Here's a last quote from Hersh, relevant to the dangers we face in the 2008 election (emphasis mine):
They talk about Iran—internally, their position is, we’re not leaving the Presidency with Iran capable of blowing up the world; and they believe they are capable. They want to stop it. It cannot stop with negotiations; I do not know what they will do. Particularly if Obama is elected. Obama looks like he’s gonna win, that's a definite increase of the chances of the president doing something. If McCain wins, I’ve been told by people who listen to conversations there, it will be easier for them because they think McCain is on the same wavelength, which he is, on all of these issues, and that McCain could possibly do it in the middle of next year or whenever he chose. But if Obama is the winner, that will put pressure on Bush. Bush says all the time, he just said it a few weeks ago— "I don’t care what people think about me. I'm gonna do the right thing." You know, we have the most radical president we have ever had, leading our country right now, and he is completely uneducable. If that does not scare the hell out of you, it scares the hell out of me, I’ll tell ya.
UPDATE: From the comments below, Chesapeake notes that the story was broken by Andrew Cockburn on May 2 at CounterPunch: