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<back | home Dubya is Actually A Leftist Radical! by Sri Subramanian As I read the LA Times, my nose started to twitch. I looked around. No one in Muddy Waters [cafe in Santa Barbara] was paying attention. I quickly put my finger to good use, and resumed reading. Something about torture memos, and giving Bush power over Congress to do whatever he bloody well wants. After all, the memo argued, we were at war! Why, he could designate even an American citizen as an enemy combatant and then torture that hapless fellow, the memo said. Great, I thought. Here we were entertaining noble thoughts of lighting the Middle East with the fire of democracy, while at the same time, yearning to imitate the practices of their most repressive regime. My nose continued to twitch -- something smelled fishy to me. I looked around, but found no scraps of rotting entrails on the floor. I stuck my head outside for a whiff of fresh air, but that didn’t help either. My nose was now flapping like the U.S. flag outside Paul Bremer’s palace. Lest people started pointing, I hastily ducked out and sat outside on the bench. The car drivers on Haley couldn’t care less, although I did see a couple of SUV drivers saluting as they passed me. Needless to say I was alarmed. The last time my nose went ballistic on me was when Clinton uttered those famous lines: "I never had sex with that woman", and I had thought then that that had sounded awfully familiar. Who had Clinton been imitating? I knew that tone, I knew that cadence. My nose had subsided only when I realized it was Ronald Reagan, who had famously said, "We did not trade weapons, or anything else, for hostages." Clinton had studied Reagan, and he had probably figured if a doddering Gipper could get away with treason, who within reason would blame Wild Bill for a wayward zipper. But enough of that. Smell the exhaust, Sri, I told myself. Think of what’s happening now. So, maybe Bush had sanctioned torture. Maybe he had played Emperor, and maybe he had confused the Bible for the Constitution. And of course, maybe he had lied to the public to start a war. In which tens of thousands of people died, and a country is now in shambles. Yeah, yeah, maybe. And maybe he had even revived Reagan’s much-discredited supply-side economics, and in the process, looted the country’s treasury on behalf of his billionaire buddies. So, what? What is one to make of Bush? That he’s an extremist, a radical right winger and an autocrat? Nah, that’s too easy. Too obvious. The world is more mysterious than that. It has to be. Suddenly it came to me -- a vision! A most amazing thing. Suddenly all the fuzz in my brain fell away, like when you down that fat mug of dark coffee first thing in the morning. Let me tell you what I believe happened. A long time ago, Bush Jr and Ralph Nader met as fellow conspirators against the system. You know what I mean by the system don’t you? Think Nader’s definition. Corporations attaching strings made of dollar bills to politicians’ back pockets. Screwing the unions and the workers. Making the environment tomorrow’s problem, you get the idea. So, Nader and Bush had a meeting. They both agreed that Democrats and Republican were equally to blame. Nader said "we need a third party." Bush, with a diabolical smile, said, "no, the people need to rise, and we must expose the system from the inside." Think hacker. What does a hacker do, he doesn’t write a white paper on why a website is vulnerable. He doesn’t seek a job as a programmer to try and fix the problems from within. He just hacks the wretched website. Puts up a sign on its home page, maybe saying something like "Mission Accomplished." Then, people start paying attention. Heads roll, and holes are plugged. This is Dubya’s way. He sneaks into the Republican party, embraces the religious right and shows the entire world how easy it is to hack this democracy. He is a true radical. Maybe he even decided that 9/11, and the use of that event to grab total power, was necessary to wake people up. What’s a few thousand deaths against the long-term health of our country! The people must rise, he probably said to himself, they must be made aware how ridiculously easy it is to sabotage this country. To take away people’s civil liberties and threaten them with "enemy combatant" status, to thumb noses at foreign governments, to always do what is best for the oligarchs in power. He probably reasoned to himself thusly. If only the people were set free by truth. If only they saw for themselves how Orwellian, politicians’ use of the word "democracy" was, to justify everything from Iraq to Haiti. If only the world was united in true representative democracy and against oligarchy. Even if the venom was directed against him (remember how he unified Sunnis and Shiites against the U.S.), even if he was ousted from power and relegated to a pariah status, if only the people could rise in joyous rebellion and change the system, in the sentiments of Madeline Albright, "the price would have been worth it." There, my nose is feeling a lot better now. It just might have caught scent of a truly patriotic radical. m Check out Sri's home page at http://members.cox.net/sriminu/sri or email him at subramanian_sri @ yahoo.com. <back | top^ |