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International News Title: Britney Shaves Her Head while Neocons Finger Iran on the Cheap Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times, reposted at Raw Story, remarks that watching the neocons “try to get [their] story straight about Iran’s role in Iraq last week was like watching third-graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.” Nice analogy. But, honestly, I don’t think the neocons, who are largely Straussians, thus buy into Strauss’ take on Plato’s Noble Lie—not a significant departure from Hitler’s Big Lie—are concerned their mojo amulets have dried up. Of course, the Straussian neocons, more Machiavellian than Platonian, have perverted Plato’s concept, told to keep social cohesion. For the neocons, the Great Unwashed are to be cast into wars engineered to profit and enhance the power of the ruling elite, wars and invasions deemed to last generations if not indefinitely. “Oceania was at war with Eurasia,” George Orwell wrote, “therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” Rich seems to think the neocons are simply inept bumblers, clumsy bunglers, and this is a common enough misconception. “Surely these guys can do better than this,” writes Rich. “No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. Pace said he didn’t know about the briefing and couldn’t endorse its contention that the Iranian government’s highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq.” Pace, of course, as a shrewd military man, is simply calling them as he sees them. No doubt, as well, he did not want to be held to account for flimsy and easily disprovable neocon lies, painlessly deconstructed, even by the likes of humble bloggers, the bane of the political undertow. Surely, as Rich observes, “these guys can do better than this,” but I think the point is they can’t be bothered, especially considering the intended audience. Most of us here in Bushzarro world, cast adrift in an electronic marinade of consumerist and often decadent ephemera, appear to be more interested in the lowbrow spectacle of Britney Spears shaving her head—and other nether regions as well, so we are told—and really, all this Iran jazz is tedious. I mean, why expend precious energy and resources if a cheap gimcrack will suffice? Of course, cheap gimcracks only work if people are looking and obviously millions are not. Last time around it was Curveball and Saddam dancing the fandango with Osama Been Forgotten. Not only did the neocons get away with telling outrageous lies, in the aftermath, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions, due to depleted uranium, likely to follow suit, they were not held to account. In fact, it appears most of them never will be arrested, tried before a jury of their peers, and sent to the gallows for plotting mass murder on a scale soon to eclipse that of Hitler and Stalin (see the aforementioned reference to depleted uranium, sucked into our lungs now for well over a decade, with a half life of 4.5 billion years). But, really, we can’t be bothered, not with the embalmed body of Anna Nicole Smith making headlines, said to “retain the beauty and dignity” of the former Playboy Playmate. I fear, however, considering the way things are going, even with Frank Rich noting the obvious on the pages of the New York Times, down the road, and maybe sooner before later, a lot of us will follow Ms. Smith, and probably not with a whole lot of “beauty and dignity,” as cancer and radiation sickness—at least for those trapped in Iran’s neighborhood—is anything but dignified and beautiful.
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