American idiot

Last night, I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 again, and was again struck by the same couple of facts that stood out the other times I have seen the film. These particular facts stand out for me--not because I think they are the most important ones, though one of them may be--but because they illustrate so dramatically the cognitive dissonance that characterizes the right wing and much of "moderate" America.

One of these facts is the existence of the Washington tea parties Bush had with the Taliban so that the pipeline in Afghanistan could be built according to White House expectations. Consider this: In the 2000 election, Bush did not know what the Taliban was when asked about it by a reporter. That alone should have been reason enough to realize he was an ignorant slacker who could never be elected to the presidency. However, once someone (and that someone would have been Kenneth Lay, whom Bush claimed to not know) clued him in about the pipeline deal, he became a gracious host to this powerful group of sadistic, murdering, misogynist organisms.

The other fact that stands out is that when 500 families of the victims of September 11 sued the Saudi government, the House of Saud retained James Baker as its attorney. Baker, of course, has been a key player in everything from the 2000 election recount to Enron to the Carlyle Group. He is also a former Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury.

Here are the facts, in simple language:

1.The supposed President of the United States was very thick with arguably the most savage group of people in the world, who not only tortured their own people, but who considered America as their greatest enemy, and one who must be crushed. ( Only Britain's press bothered to cover the Taliban's visits to Washington for the pipeline discussions.)

2, A former Cabinet member and major representative of the "values" party chose to represent the home of most of the September 11 killers against a suit brought by the victims of those killers.

Where was the outrage?

There has been silence from the media, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party. The treachery and amorality of the Bush administration is summed up so tidily in these two events that if you put them into a piece of cheap fiction, even lovers of cheap fiction would say your plot was too over the top to be believable. I cannot allow myself to think about this too much because I fear my head may explode.