Reply #44: First off, I don't believe that a small group of highly powerful people...

[warren pease]

... get together once a month in a discreet banquet room in an understated but elegant hotel somewhere in the south of France with the exclusive purpose of deciding the most effective ways to fuck over Warren's life for the next few weeks.

I do, however, believe that at any given moment there are literally thousands -- maybe lots more -- ad hoc conspiracies of mutual convenience afoot that draw certain people with certain skill sets together to plan and execute an attack on a mutual enemy.

I've just described the exact nature of a high-level marketing strategy meeting at any of the numerous high-tech corporations I've consulted with, my job in most cases being to translate features and benefits into marketing messages that both boost the product on its own merits while attacking the alleged deficiencies of the competition. Tactics include sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), questioning performance claims or raising compatibility issues, with the express purpose of eroding their competitors' sales, their market position, stealing their customers and, in the best case, driving them out of business.

Now, if that kind of sociopathic behavior is normal in today's hyper-competitive, zero-sum business environment -- and I submit some version of the above is prevalent in most successful companies, no matter the industry or the product -- why is it so hard to imagine that people who hold analogous positions in the public sector are immune from this kind of approach to destroying the competition?

One huge difference, particularly in the case of this administration, is the single-minded viciousness they evince, along with the various kinds of over-the-top revenge they exact, when deflecting or countering an attack on their policies or actions. After all, they're just marketing a certain world view -- one held almost exclusively by zealots and maniacs admittedly -- but a version of reality nonetheless.

It relies on the phony patriotism generated by constant war, along with the continuous, low-level background dread generated by this ridiculous "war on terror." And it doesn't tolerate dissenting points of view. Rather, it demands a uniform level of free-floating fear and hatred of the enemy du jour among the general population as today's predominant social control mechanism, and woe betide those who call bullshit on these trumped up warnings of the horrors just ahead.

Now, how did they achieve this state of nationwide paranoia at the very thought of radical Islamists operating unchecked in "the homeland?" How did they get us to do a striptease just to get on a plane? How did they convince us to abandon 220 years of Constitutional rights and freedoms just to protect our sorry asses from these vicious brown people? How did they manage to find some strutting Himmler clone to divulge his gut feelings about terrorist attacks without laughing him right off the stage? How did they convince even reasonably intelligent people that federal spying on our private communications is good for us? How did they manage to get an entire country of supposed rugged individualists to sit the hell down and shut the hell up?

Well... 9/11 changed everything, you see. We must learn to live with these small inconveniences because the great white father in Washington needs the widest possible latitude to protect us in these perilous times.

So, given that 9/11 was the single catalyzing event that made the Bush administration's entire criminal assault on decency, legitimacy and the Constitution possible, is it out of line to hypothesize that those who benefit most from the crime should at least be on the list of suspects?

On Sept. 10, 2001, Bush was a bumbling idiot presiding over an administration tanking quickly in the polls, with not much respect from Americans and unrelenting derision from overseas. The very next morning, he got really lucky – or perhaps his luck was created for him.

Personally, after sifting through alternate theories of what actually happened that day, the least likely conspiracy theory I can find is the one about 19 guys with box-cutters taking over four huge airliners, handling them like pros as a result of their extensive training in Cessnas, three of them executing maneuvers and hitting targets with the skill of Blue Angels pilots, the fourth being retaken by passengers who then sacrificed their own lives by crashing the plane into a field in rural Pennsylvania after talking about the whole thing to loved ones on cell phones that can't possibly work at airliner altitudes and speeds -- and the debris field for this plane was five to eight miles long, which doesn't work for a plane crash but is perfectly normal for a plane losing its parts after being attacked by air-to-air missiles.

Now *that's* one hell of a conspiracy theory. But that's not considered insane; it's the official story, backed up by a real commission report and passed into national lore along with unquestioned truths like Pickett's Charge or the Battle of Midway. That should be an insult to every American who values his or her national heritage. But that's hardly the case; it's the official truth and everything else -- no matter how well-sourced, no matter how reliant on pure physical evidence, no matter how simple in comparison to the official conspiracy theory -- is just the work of anti-American crackpots with an ax to grind.

So yeah... Conspiracies happen thousands of times every day -- in boardrooms, hotel banquet rooms, stuffy corporate conference rooms -- and their objective is to take over their tiny slices of the world. Is it so difficult to imagine that similarly inclined groups of people, who happen to have the resources of the entire US government at their disposal, don't also occasionally get together and decide how to use all that power to advance their agendas and, of course, enrich themselves and their pals in the process?


wp