NABOB - A person of wealth and prominence: • VIP (colloquial)
• big shot (colloquial)
• big wheel (slang)
• bigwig (colloquial)
• dignitary
• fat cat (chiefly US)
• high-muck-a-muck (British) (my favorite)
• hotshot (colloquial)
• lion
• personage
• celebrity
• mogul
• notable
• somebody
• heavy (slang)
• A NEO-CON
Since, on my blog, I speak rather disparagingly about the
neo-cons, (they deserve every deriding word of it) I thought
this next article written about the likes of them and an even more powerful
and sinister entity called
The old-line American Establishment
, a fitting post for my blog today.
Mr. Floyd writes so freely about the neo-cons and how they may be the
ones that are being used. Very interesting insight to what the hell is
going on.
As I've stated on my last posting...
It is time for a change. It is time for hope. It is time to bring back
sanity. Hopefully, the neo-cons and their honchos, will no longer be able to use fear to get what
they
want because people have been alerted to the fact, that what they want is
absolute power under any circumstance, pure and simple!
Our democracy, our Nation needs protecting from the likes of this elite
American faction,
who have wrecked havoc with our way of life.
Wake up America and vote your
moral and ethical newly founded awareness! Neo-cons BEGONE!! (sadly it may
not be as simple as that... please read the below article and THINK, THINK,
THINK... about what we are facing today, it may just be the beginning of the
end of democracy). thinkingblue
It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it:
it's time to take up the cudgels (heavy sticks) for the poor neo-cons.
Day after day, these dedicated public
intellectuals and hardworking federal officials are calumnied
(false statement maliciously made to injure another's
reputation) from coast to
coast, accused of every crime under the sun. Who misled us into the blood-soaked
mire of Iraq? Who's pulling strings to foment a new war with Iran? Who's fanning
the flames of Israel's assault on Lebanon, hoping to turn the entire Middle East
into an arc of "creative destruction" that will transform the region into a
pacified, profitable oasis of American power? Why, the neo-cons, of course,
guilty on every count – or so we're told.
It's certainly a pretty tale,
satisfyingly simple like most cartoons, well-suited for a stirring film adaptation,
a la "V for Vendetta." (Given the religious heritage of many neo-cons, perhaps
Mel Gibson could be induced to take it on.) We'd watch the sinister Machiavels
(rulers indifferent to moral considerations)
plot in the shadows, pouring their leperous distilments into the ears of
government leaders who, zombified by this dark enchantment, mindlessly drive the
nation into ruin. Yet if these dastards can be routed in the last act by some
hero – a "straight-talking" senator from Arizona, say, or a tough and savvy
former First Lady, or even a clean-limbed knight stepping forth from the mists
of the blogosphere – then all will be well with the Republic.
"Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" Unfortunately, the
reality of our political and moral predicament is not so neat and tidy, nor so
easily resolved. If the neo-cons all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet
tomorrow – indeed, if the cult had never arisen at all –
we would still be right
where we are today:
neck-deep in the Big Muddy.
That's not to say, of course, that we
weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being pulled for a war on Iran,
or that flames aren't being fanned to widen the Middle East war – or that the
gaggle of third-rate thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped
under the rubric "neo-con" aren't intimately involved in all of these affairs.
They are, in spades. But to accuse them of playing the central role in America's
on-going Götterdämmerunggives
them an importance they don't deserve – and unduly mitigates the guilt of the
true culprits: the good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon boardroom buccaneers of the
American Establishment, bred for generations to feast on war and rumors of war,
and to regard the hoi polloi (that's you and
me folks)as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to be mulched and
milked as needed.
Götterdämmerung - n. A turbulent ending of a regime or an institution
For what's the underlying implication of the
"neo-cons über alles"
meme? It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld – who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of
the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus – are actually innocent
lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of
Richard Perle. It's that the world-striding
oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just
wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the
dazzling sophistry of
William Kristol and
Michael Leeden. It's that no U.S.
administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious
(gluttonous) policies we've seen in
the last five years – unless they'd been tricked into it by wily
Zionists and
their ideological outriders. It is, in short, our old friend "American
exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.
German: “Song of Germany” formerly (1922–45) Deutschland, Deutschland Über
Alles (“Germany, Germany above all”), national anthem of Germany from 1922 to
1945, of West Germany from 1950 to 1990, and of unified Germany from 1990. The
verses were written in 1848 by the nationalist poet and university professor
August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben and were sung to a tune originally
composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797 as an Austrian imperial anthem.
Power Über Alles
Shakespeare pegged
the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in
Julius Caesar. Listen to Marc Antony
dismissing his fellow triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of
Great Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world
empire and using anything at hand – neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian despots,
Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite death squads – to further
their ambitions:
"This is a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands…and though we lay
these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, he
shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan and sweat under the
business, either led or driven as we point the way. And having brought our
treasure where we will, then we take down his load and turn him off, like to the
empty ass, to shake his ears and graze in commons." Or at the World Bank, as
the case may be.
Again, this is not to deny that
neo-con fingerprints are all over the various shivs and bludgeons that the Bush
Regime has used in its whack jobs on
the Constitution, the
Geneva Conventions,
the
UN Charter, the
Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments. After all,
the veritable blueprint for the whole godawful shebang – the infamous
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" document of September 2000 – was concocted under
the aegis ( Sponsorship) of that quintessentially neo-con think tank, the Project for the New
American Century. It was all spelled out there, long before 9/11: the invasion
of Iraq (regardless of whether Saddam Hussein was still in power); the vast
explosion in military spending; planting new U.S. bases in Central Asia and the
Middle East to secure dominance over world energy sources; embracing aggressive
war as national policy – and the openly stated notion that only a
"new Pearl
Harbor" could "catalyze" the American people into readily accepting the need for
these radical measures.
Damning stuff. But without the
presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney
and Rumsfeld on the
PNAC board, the plan would have remained
the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy wonks. Indeed,
it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set the neo-cons to work on devising
ways to extend the "unipolar moment" of unchallenged American power that arose
after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the first version of the PNAC plan was
drawn up at Cheney's order by
Paul Wolfowitz and
Scooter "Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last
months of the Bush I administration.
Under Bush II, the neo-cons were
brought in as shock troops; their mindless zealotry was a perfect tool for
implementing the plans drawn up by the real players in the new regime:
Cheney's
notorious "Energy Task Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force on
Petroleum" formed by the
Council on Foreign Relations and – who else? – the
James Baker Institute at Rice University. It was here that the final solution
for Iraq was hammered out: regime change with the aim of locking up – not
unleashing – Iraq's massive oil reserves, to keep energy prices high and steady
(Saddam was mischievously bouncing them all over the place) and to preserve
the power of
OPEC under the leadership of those time-honored pals and business
partners of the American Establishment, the
Saudi royals.
Greg Palast, as usual, has the goods
on this in his new book Armed Madhouse,
where he also points out one salient (dominant) fact for our purposes here: there were no
neo-cons at the task force tables, where the real action was. No, those useful
asses were left out in the paddock, waiting for their loads.
These are dark days, serious times.
The whiff of
apocalypse is in the air. For it will be virtually impossible for
the Gamesters to carry off their next immediate goal, subduing Iran – much less
their long-range aim of dominating the world throughout a
"new American century" – without the use of
nuclear weapons. So let's be done with baby talk and comic books, with the
comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes we are witnessing are the work of a
few cranks who have somehow hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it
for their own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.
(scary stuff - thinkingblue)
The reality is that Iraq was invaded
because a
powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do
it and the rest of the Establishment – the Democrats, the media, the
"respectable"
intelligentsia – countenanced (approved) the crime. The belligerence and
oppression of the hardline Israeli government in Lebanon and Palestine are
receiving unquestioned – and armed – support from the United States because this
suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global
dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic
political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American
backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical
base.
It is the American elite – pursuing,
as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the
consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the
Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi
people) – that bedevils us. (torments mercilessly ALL
OF US hoi polloi) The emergence of the
cretinous neo-conservative cult is just a
symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions
and structures of American society.
The body politic is rotting from the head.
This column
originally appeared on
CounterPunch.
***
One of the significant contributions to the "war on terror" by Britain's home
secretary David Blunkett before his abrupt departure from the Tony Blair
cabinet last year was his statement on terrorism in the House of Commons that
specifically flagged the possibility of a "dirty bomb" being planted in
Britain by terrorists.
That was in November 2002, when preparations were already in an advanced stage
for the march to Baghdad. We are still waiting for the dirty bomb and its
lethal radiation. The dirty bomb genre, however, provoked two years later a
brilliant television series on BBC2 by acclaimed documentary producer Adam
Curtis, titled ...
(IF YOU HAVE A GOOGLEPLAYER...PLEASE WATCH THIS VERY
FRIGHTENING BUT ENLIGHTENING FILM.
CLICK THE BLOOD BAR OR HERE... thinkingblue)
Curtis's argument was that much of the threat of international terrorism turns
out to be in actuality "a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by
politicians ... In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear
of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
Curtis placed al-Qaeda terrorism in a long line of dramatic panics in Britain's
checkered history since the Elizabethan era, which included the arrival of
Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, Bolsheviks,
and Irish republicans.
Naturally, Curtis comes readily to mind a week after British authorities
arrested some two dozen Muslims on August 10 for plotting to blow up
trans-Atlantic flights from United Kingdom to the United States. Not a shred of
evidence has since seen the light of day in this Mother of all Dastardly Plots.
Meanwhile, wild stories of new plots in the making are in circulation. The
latest was the "breaking news" regarding the emergency landing of an aircraft in
Boston on Wednesday due to the tantrums of an "unruly" woman passenger. Last
weekend, Michigan police locked up three hapless Palestinian-Americans for
allegedly plotting an act of terrorism. The three "terrorists" were caught
red-handed purchasing 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store.
Michigan police concluded that the cell phones could be used as detonators to
blow up the Mackinac Bridge, which connected the peninsula's upper and lower
parts. Subsequently it transpired that the three detained "terrorists" bought
and sold cell phones to make a living.
The London plot itself is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Reports have
appeared that the British security agencies were feeling increasingly
uncomfortable that their American counterparts rushed to make out that the
alleged plot was linked to al-Qaeda. More importantly, it appears that sources
in London have begun distancing themselves from the plot by claiming that the
British side was pressured from Washington to go public with the plot despite a
lack of evidence and clear and convincing facts whether any conspiracy in fact
existed at all.
Not surprisingly, the loudest voices of skepticism about the alleged plot are
heard in Pakistan, where of course the public is habitually cynical over
anything that goes to the credit of the establishment. This despite the
insistent claim that the UK, US and Pakistani security agencies had actively
coordinated in thwarting the plot - a scenario that cast Pakistan as a plucky,
feisty partner in the "war on terror", quite contrary to the prevailing
impression that Islamabad is possibly indulging in doublespeak.
The skeptics in Pakistan feel that the entire plot is a crudely executed hoax by
the Bush administration. It was not only the so-called "jihadi" circles in
Pakistan that ridiculed the plot but even sections of opinion, which usually put
primacy on reasoning. The Pakistani newspaper Daily Times commented editorially,
"There is a horrible war going on in Lebanon and it is not unfolding in favor of
Israel, US and UK. Iraq has gone bad; Afghanistan is getting worse.
"The Bush-Blair duo is in trouble at home and both need something really big to
happen to justify their policies and distract attention from their losses ...
the past record of intelligence agencies everywhere suggests they are quite
capable of blowing up or underplaying things for better media management of
their respective governments' performance. So a bit of skepticism is in order."
Adam Curtis had an explanation for the dilemma
facing the saner sections of opinion in times of public hysteria. As he
explained two years ago, such plots, when blown up in larger-than-life terms and
whipping up an atmosphere of hysteria, have a way of trapping us. In the
process, we get "trapped by a fear that is completely irrational".
Indeed, in a poll after the plot story broke, 55% of Americans voiced approval
of Bush's handling of terrorism and homeland security. A beaming Bush promptly
promised his nervous nation that the terror fight may last for "years to come".
Democrats are beginning to accuse the Republicans of using the scare to
political advantage ahead of the November elections to the US Congress.
Former US president Bill Clinton said: "They [the Bush administration] seem to
be anxious to tie it to al-Qaeda. If that's true, how come we've got seven times
as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? I think that Republicans should be
very careful in playing politics with this London thing because they're going to
have a hard time with the facts."
All the same, it is extraordinary that the
mainstream media in the US could so willingly suspend their disbelief over the
patchy official claims that the plot was a "real idea" of cosmic significance.
Furthermore, they dutifully ran "expert opinions" by commentators on the alleged
plotters' al-Qaeda connections. Not a single mainstream newspaper in the US
challenged the plot theory as such - leave alone pointed out the patent gulf
between the London plotters' ambition and their ability to pull it off.
It could be that they have succumbed to the "suspiciously circular relationship
between the security services and much of the media" (to quote Curtis) in which
official briefings become the stuff of dramatic press stories and prompt further
briefings and further stories.
At any rate, terrorism thrives on bluff. Think of the horrific bomb blasts in
Mumbai last month. Unlike the ethereal London plot, it was tangible; it was
verifiable. It was of a piece, by all indications, with the cycle of violence
ripping apart India's composite society for the past decade or so since
the Babri Mosque was pulled down by vandals incited by
Hindu fundamentalists.
Yet, in the wake of the Mumbai blasts, an attempt
has been made to link the abhorrent violence to al-Qaeda. As if al-Qaeda is an
organized international network. As if it has members or a leader. As if it has
"sleeper cells". As if it has corporate-style affiliates and subsidiaries. As if
it has a strategy towards India.
Indian media people seem to be unaware that
al-Qaeda barely exists at all and that it is more an idea about cleansing
the impure world of Islam corrupted by the al-Adou al-Qareeb (Muslim
apostates) and al-Adou al-Baeed or the "far enemy" (Israel and the
Western powers), through violence sanctioned by religion explicitly for such
extraordinary times.
Indian opinion makers seem to believe that countering al-Qaeda justifies a
national security objective. Some among them no doubt fancy that a closer
"strategic partnership" with the Bush administration becomes possible if only
India were to assertively stake claim to be a frontline state in the "war on
terror". But there is no way that India can hope to gain entry into the
exclusive, charmed circle that comprises the US Central Intelligence Agency,
Britain's MI6 and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
The so-called Islamic terror network is
the trinity's fabrication. It has become what would be known in intelligence
parlance as an "asset" or an "instrument". The "intelligence assets" do enjoy a
certain measure of independence and autonomy vis-a-vis their sponsors but that
is part of the art of dissimulation. Al-Qaeda has incrementally become then a
situation or a chain of events in politics that can arouse a particular
emotional reaction instantaneously.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to
Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
daptation,
a la "V for Vendetta." (Given the religious heritage of many neo-cons, perhaps
Mel Gibson could be induced to take it on.) We'd watch the sinister Machiavels
(rulers indifferent to moral considerations)
plot in the shadows, pouring their leperous distilments into the ears of
government leaders who, zombified by this dark enchantment, mindlessly drive the
nation into ruin. Yet if these dastards can be routed in the last act by some
hero – a "straight-talking" senator from Arizona, say, or a tough and savvy
former First Lady, or even a clean-limbed knight stepping forth from the mists
of the blogosphere – then all will be well with the Republic.
ed
the neo-cons' true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in
y
and Rumsfeld on the
intelligentsia – countenanced (approved) the crime. The belligerence and
oppression of the hardline Israeli government in Lebanon and Palestine are
receiving unquestioned – and armed – support from the United States because this
suits the larger strategic purposes of the "
Thinkingblue