 
She couldn't warn us of possible terrorist attacks after the Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily briefing titled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." -- and "President" Bush, who was on vacation in Crawford, Texas at the time, couldn't be bothered -- but Gee Dubya's Chicken Little, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, shown left with her frequent reptilian expression, now warns us that terrorists might strike again in the United States before November in order to prevent Bush's "re"-election. We know where the Bush regime's priorities lie, don't we? (Hint: "re"-election.) Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, right, with his repeated assassinations of key Palestinian opponents, has taken a page from the Bush playbook: Provoke terrorist attacks on your own people and then claim that you are waging a war on terror and that your people must keep you in office because you are protecting them from the evil terrorists. (Associated Press photos)
'War on terrorism' is job security for right-wingers
I see a trend emerging: Right-wing leaders, such as "President" George W. Bush and his cabal of warmongers, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and recently ousted Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar do all they can to provoke terrorist attacks and then use their "war on terrorism" to keep their electorates in perpetual fear in order to maintain their grip on power.
This Associated Press story from today, headlined "Rice: U.S. Bracing for Terror Before Polls," is worth excerpting in full because it demonstrates my point:
The United States is bracing for possible terrorist attacks before the November presidential election, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said [today].
The opportunity for terrorists to try to influence the election, as was the case last month in Spain, appears to be an opportunity that would "be too good to pass up for them," Rice said.
"I think that we do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain," Rice told "Fox News Sunday."
"I think we also have to take seriously that they might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something," she said.
"We are actively looking at that possibility, actively trying to see -- to make certain that we are responding appropriately," she said.
Jose Maria Aznar, outgoing prime minister of Spain and a strong U.S. ally in the war in Iraq, says he has warned President Bush that he believes terrorists will try to affect the U.S. election as they did in Spain.
On March 11, terrorists blew up a rail line in Madrid, killing 191 and injuring 1,800 others.
"I told George Bush, and [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and other political leaders to be extremely careful before elections...and to be very vigilant," Aznar told Fox.
Aznar's Popular Party was favored to win the election until the four commuter trains were attacked. "It is obvious that these attacks were looking for a political effect," he said.
Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who succeeded Aznar over the weekend, was holding his first cabinet meeting on Monday.
A Spanish newspaper, ABC, reported that his foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, will travel to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice.
ABC said the minister hopes to show American officials that Spain wants to maintain its current good relations with the United States, despite Zapatero's plans to pull Spanish troops from Iraq by June 30 unless the United Nations takes over political and military control of the occupation.
"That will not be good for Spain, not a good day for the coalition, and a very good day for those who don't want stability and democracy in Iraq," Aznar said.
It's interesting that Condi would warn us of a potential terrorist strike between now and the November presidential election but that we didn't hear a fucking peep from her between Aug. 6, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001, after the Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily briefing unambiguously titled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." was issued. Clearly, it is more important to the members of the Bush regime to ensure that King George II get a second term than it was important to them to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (Hey, don't bug the "president" while he's on vacation [again] in Crawford!)
And the not-so-subtle subtext of the entire AP story is that if there were a terrorist strike on the United States between now and the November election and Bush were turned out of office in the November election, it would be solely because the American people are pussies and caved in to terrorists.
Noooooooooo, it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the Bush regime's record, such as rampant unemployment and a federal budget surplus turned into a record federal budget deficit and the Bush regime's war on the poor and the middle class, war on the environment, and war on civil rights.
(Not to mention its illegal, immoral, imperialistic and unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was based upon the bold-faced lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and thus posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies, and which so far has served only to make the subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton, even richer with billions and billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars that could have gone instead to health care, education, improvements in infrastructure, environmental restoration and protection, employment assistance, etc., etc. Funny how the Republicans like to tell us "it's your money and you should keep it" when they talk about tax cuts -- which is about all that they can talk about anymore because they care only about accumulating even more wealth, are morally bankrupt, and have no vision higher than their greedy self-interest -- yet they have no problem whatsoever funneling billions and billions of our tax dollars from the things that we need to their own and their fellow filthy rich frat buds' pockets.)
Rice's and Aznar's statements in the AP story above ignore the facts that Aznar involved Spain in Bush's illegal, immoral, imperialistic and unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq against the wishes of 90 percent of the Spanish people, and that after the March 11 train bombings in Spain, Aznar's Popular Party tried to mislead the Spanish people by asserting that the bombings were committed by ETA, a Basque separatist group, rather than by al Qaeda, because if the attacks were perpetrated by al Qaeda it would be politically damaging to the Popular Party (the attacks apparently were perpetrated by al Qaeda and it was politically damaging to the Popular Party).
Noooooooo, Rice and Aznar and other right-wing nutjobs would have us believe, the Spanish voters turned out Aznar only because they are pussies who caved in to al Qaeda.
Ariel Sharon wants in on the Orwellian perpetual terrorism for political gain, too. Reports the AP today:
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said [today] he would keep hunting down Hamas militant leaders while pushing forward with his plan to evacuate all Gaza Strip and some West Bank settlements.
At the start of a weekly Cabinet meeting, Sharon thanked and praised the defense establishment for Saturday's "successful" operation, in which Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was killed.
Rantisi was killed in an airstrike less than a month after Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin was killed in a similar attack.
"This policy of making an effort on the one hand to advance a political process and on the other hand to hit the terror organizations and their leaders will continue," Sharon said.
No wonder Bush and Sharon are in lockstep: Both are right-wingers who want to maintain their grip on power by claiming to be protecting their people from terrorist attacks when they are acting in ways that virtually guarantee further terrorist attacks on their own people. Hey, why not? Bush and Sharon are highly unlikely to die in a terrorist attack themselves.
And it's clear that when the United States and Israel strike their enemies, even "pre-emptively," it's self-righteous "self-defense," and when the United States' and Israel's enemies strike their enemies, it's always "terrorism," as Ted Rall points out in his latest cartoon:
(For those of you who don't follow Rall's stuff, the guy in the lower righthand panel is "Generalissimo El Busho.")
The only way to win the "war on terror" is to oust the right-wing leaders -- who are terrorists themselves -- who would gladly have us in a state of perpetual tit-for-tat terrorist attacks that they perpetuate in order to keep themselves in power by controlling us through fear of terrorist attacks.
10:17:24 AM 
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