We need someone like Rudy juliani, in other words, a politician with balls!
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2020 5:48 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: 3,000 Dead on 9/11 Meant Everything. 200,000
Dead of Covid-19 Means Nothing. Here's Why.
Boy, are we Americans in deep doodoo.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/12/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
3,000 Dead on 9/11 Meant Everything. 200,000 Dead of Covid-19 Means
Nothing.
Here's Why.
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
11 September 20
To America's leaders, our lives have value only insofar as they can be used
to create a desired panic.
Lots of people have ridiculed President Donald Trump for telling journalist
Bob Woodward that he "wanted to always play [Covid-19] down . because I
don't want to create a panic." That's hilarious, because Trump obviously
loves creating panics - about Mexican immigrants, antifa, single-family
zoning, and, scariest of all, low-flow toilets.
But Trump was, as he often does, telling us by accident something profound
about American politics.
Nineteen years ago today, a group of men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon,
and the United Arab Emirates hijacked four passenger jets. They
successfully
flew three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All in
all,
they murdered 2,977 people in one day.
By March 19, the day Trump explained his reasoning to Woodward, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention had already predicted that the
coronavirus would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and possibly as
many as 1.7 million.
In the first situation, George W. Bush, then the president of the United
States, actively fomented panic. Americans could not sleep safely in their
beds unless we invaded Afghanistan. The FBI should be able to obtain the
bank records or internet activity of citizens anytime it wanted without a
warrant. Saddam Hussein was hiding anthrax in his mustache.
In the second situation, one that was objectively much more frightening,
the
president of the United States openly acknowledged that he played the
danger
down. This goes not just for the danger of Covid-19 itself: His
administration has also played down the continuing economic danger to tens
of millions of Americans.
What accounts for the glaring disparity in reactions?
History shows the answer is as obvious as it is bizarre: Reality often has
nothing to do with gigantic government actions. Instead, politics is mostly
about illusions that leaders strive to create inside our heads.
In the case of 9/11, the Bush administration did not attempt to respond
rationally to the actual events. Instead, they used it as a justification
to
do what they had always wanted to do but couldn't get away with. An
influential think tank, the Project for a New American Century, had
explained the year before that "the United States has for decades sought to
play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security," a goal that
"transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an aide just hours after American Airlines
Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon that he wanted to "go massive - sweep it
all up, things related and not," including Iraq if possible. Both Bush and
his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, soon explained that they
saw 9/11 as an "opportunity."
By contrast, Covid-19 really did demand a large-scale government response,
but there was little that Trump wanted to do. So Trump has delivered hours
of a TV show in which he starred, but not enough PPE for doctors and
nurses,
or contact tracing, or desperately needed funding for states and cities,
and
people thrown out of work. Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that
were unnecessary, such as invading Iraq, while Trump wanted an excuse to do
nothing when, in fact, a lot really needed to be done.
Any look at history shows that this is how the world works. Governments
decide what they want to do, and then search for some public rationale.
On December 16, 1989, Panamanian troops shot a U.S. soldier and threatened
to rape the wife of a Navy officer. But in the world of political illusion,
President George H.W. Bush explained that this meant that we had to invade
Panama, which we did, killing hundreds or thousands of people (the precise
toll is disputed). An anonymous member of Congress accurately said at the
time that "the December 16 incidents were the excuse, and not the reason,
for the invasion." There was no actual connection between the attack on
Panama and what had happened to the American troops, which would have been
totally ignored if Bush hadn't wanted a war to oust the country's military
leader, Manuel Noriega, who had once been a CIA asset but had turned into
an
antagonist to U.S. interests.
On August 2, 1964 the U.S.S. Maddox exchanged fire with North Vietnamese
ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. No U.S. sailors were killed; the Maddox
suffered a single bullet hole. Then on August 4, nothing at all happened,
although the U.S. dreamed up an imaginary second attack on the Maddox. In
the world of political illusion, the U.S. used these events as
justification
to escalate a war that ended up killing millions of people in Indochina.
This isn't just an American thing.
In April 1980, members of Islamic Dawa, an Iraqi Shia organization opposed
to Saddam and backed by Iran, threw a grenade at Tariq Aziz, the deputy
prime minster of Iraq. According to Saddam, this meant that Iraq had to go
to war with Iran, which it did, leading to the deaths of a million people
on
both sides.
In June 1982, Palestinian terrorists attempted to assassinate the Israeli
ambassador to the U.K. in London. According to Israel, this meant that it
had to invade Lebanon, leading to the deaths of thousands and the Sabra and
Shatila massacre.
In September 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, who was Jewish, shot a German
diplomat in Paris. According to the Nazi Party's SA paramilitaries, this
required them to carry out Kristallnacht.
Today more than any other, we should understand how much Trump's berserk
honesty tells us about life on earth. Our lives have value insofar as the
powerful can use them to create whatever "panic" they desire. If not, we
Americans will die quietly in a void, as a thousand of us are currently
doing every day from Covid-19.
