- A scientist friend from Silicon Valley, who has been
working on a top-secret project for the past three years, permitted me
to visit his laboratory the other day to witness the results of his labors.
He's calling his patent-applied-for invention "B.S. Away!"
-
- He's sworn me to secrecy about the details of how and
why it works, but, since he's about to bring it to market, he said it's
OK for me to describe its essence: You can either spray it on the person
engaged in B.S.ing, or on printed matter (and even on the computer screen)
that carries the bullbleep. Instantly, it transforms the B.S. speech into
simple English truth. It's amazing!
-
- Let me give you an example. Bush, who always claims he
wants folks to accept responsibility for their actions, is incapable of
ever admitting that he might have made a mistake, and even more so these
days in the run-up to the November election. You've heard and read all
the many assertive statements over the months -- by Bush and his chief
cohorts -- that the administration absolutely, positively KNEW the weapons
of mass-destruction were there in Iraq, and even the exact areas where
they were to be found.
-
-
- Now we push the nozzle and the "B.S. Away!"
sprays out. Voila! Here's Bush's truth version:
-
- "My most important advisers -- including Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and the whole PNAC crew -- were out to get Iraq
even before we took office. We sorta knew that Iraq was going to be a pushover
in the war. That's why we chose to bomb and invade it, so that we'd have
an easy time establishing a military foothold in the Middle East.
-
- "We didn't feel we could get Congressional permission
to invade Iraq if we told the truth -- that there were strategic, political,
corporate and natural-resource reasons to conquer that country -- so, since
the CIA wouldn't give us the WMD report we wanted, Rumsfeld's Office of
Special Plans cherry-picked the raw intelligence to get the WMD justification.
We hyped it to the press and public, and the invasion began. We were hoping
we wouldn't get caught out -- that there would be lots of leftover WMD
there to justify our propaganda -- but, unfortunately, nothing showed up.
The lies and deceptions and manipulations were out there for all to see.
-
- "On top of that, we grossly underestimated the resistance
we'd get from huge segments of the Iraqi population, who chose to see us
as their Occupiers rather than their Liberators -- we got played big time
by the Iraqi exiles -- and how an ongoing guerrilla resistance over time
would build a sophisticated network to attack our soldiers and those Iraqis
working with us. Our troops had no nation-building Plan B and became, and
remain even today, easy targets for those wanting to force us out.
-
- "If the Iraqis will just cool it for awhile, we'll
be out of the main fighting areas by July, when we'll return a manageable
kind of 'sovereignty' to the Iraqis (our military forces still will be
there, at our bases, as a warning not to go too far). Well sure, that July
timetable has more to do with our own election cycle in this country rather
than what's happening on the ground in Iraq -- but we've simply got to
defuse the Iraq issue before the election; I'm being battered on our Iraq
debacle daily from the Democrats. After I win in November, everything can
be rethought and reversed, if we choose to. We'll have four more years
to work our will, and there isn't anybody strong enough to stop us, inside
the U.S. or out."
-
- KERRY AND HIS WAR-VOTE
-
- Want to see another example? Take John Kerry's wishy-washing
fudging and waffling on his vote to authorize Bush's war in Iraq. He says
that he voted for the resolution because he believed that "the Administration
would wait for U.N. authorization" before it launched its attack.
-
- I'm spraying "B.S. Away!" on my computer screen
now. There it is -- Kerry's move into truthtelling:
-
- "I want to clear up the whole Iraq-vote business,
right here and now. My fellow Americans, I was wrong, horribly wrong. I
let my political ambitions box me into a corner -- wanting not to appear
'unpatriotic' -- instead of standing up and saying, as only a few did,
that this war had no rational justification, and yet we were willing to
spend untold billions to send our young men and women into a rat's nest
of little-understood tribal and religious complexity. I permitted myself,
and I wasn't the only one, to be snowed by the neo-con arguments and didn't
even stop to consider the parallels with the war that made my reputation,
Vietnam.
-
- "So I apologize for my vote. I should have known
that Presidents lie, and that this President, who'd already made up his
mind long before to go to war, was not about to return to the U.N. for
authorization. I vow never to permit myself to be rolled so easily, and
always to remember the lesson from Vietnam: never get our military involved
in a ground war in Asia, especially in countries and cultures we don't
really understand."
-
- Want a couple more?
-
- CONDI RICE AND 9/11
-
- National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that
Bush/Cheney and their national-security team "had no idea" that
hijacked airplanes might be used as weapons. She also said the August 6,
2001 Presidential Briefing Report -- which contained warnings about an
imminent, massive Al Qaida attack -- referred only to their activities
abroad, not to any terror plot heading our way.
-
- Here, have a misting of "B.S. Away!", Condi.
-
- "Well, OK, I lied. We had been receiving reports
all spring and summer of 2001 that Al Qaida was coming, and that hijacked
airplanes would be employed, probably aimed at icon American targets. That's
why Bush hightailed it to his Texas ranch for a whole month, and Ashcroft
and others stopped flying on commercial airlines.
-
- "The point is that in order for us to initiate and
have any chance of carrying out our domestic and international agendas,
we needed to have a compliant, frightened American populace, who would
be willing to giving us all the power we needed. Since Al Qaida was coming
anyway, we chose to do little or nothing and use 9/11 as our launching
point. But, please believe me, we had no idea of the full magnitude of
what Al Qaida had in store for our country.
-
- "Because we were dissembling to begin with, the
coverup just naturally followed. Cheney requested of the leaders of Congress,
especially Daschle and Gephardt, not to investigate the pre-9/11 knowledge
of the Bush Administration, for 'national security' reasons. They obliged.
But eventually we couldn't ignore the growing calls for an independent
investigation, so we delayed and postponed and stonewalled their requests
for information -- hoping that there would be no definitive report on our
pre-9/11 activities, only incomplete surmises. We're still covering up,
since nobody has to testify under oath, and we'll probably get away with
it."
-
- BUSH AND THE AWOL SCANDAL
-
- Bush has stated unequivocally that he "fulfilled
his duties" in the National Guard in the early-'70s, that he served
with honor, that he got an "honorable discharge" -- and that's
the end of it.
-
- Spray on some "B.S. Away!", and here's Bush's
truer version:
-
- "I was a wild, spoiled kid, who spent a good share
of my 20s drinking, smoking, snorting and chasing skirts. My family and
their wealthy friends always bailed me out. My dad's clout -- he was a
Congressman, and then U.N. ambassador -- got me skipped over 500 other
applicants anxious to avoid service in 'Nam and I joined the Guard. I trained
and flew for awhile. I didn't want to have to take the annual medical exam,
for reasons that probably are obvious. (Because I wouldn't submit to the
exam, that meant I couldn't fly anymore, dammit!)
-
- "So, sure, I didn't show up in Alabama very much...well,
hardly at all. But the paperwork got filled out and I received an honorable
discharge -- it was fairly easy to arrange all that in those days -- in
case I ever ran for office. Oh yeah, we 'cleansed' the files later, I think
it was 1998, so there would be no embarrassing revelations about my Guard
duty and my brushes with the law.
-
- "I don't know why I just didn't fess up about my
missing Guard duty when I first went into politics -- just tell folks right
out that those were 'youthful indiscretions.' Usually, Americans are very
forgiving to those who sin and confess, especially when they're young.
Coverups always are worse than the crime, and they drag out endlessly.
Clinton knows that, and I now know that."
-
- RUMMY AND THE MIDDLE EAST
-
- And, here's one from Donald Rumsfeld, who has denied
that the U.S. has any "imperial ambitions" either in Iraq or
elsewhere in the Middle East. Give that man a spritz of "B.S. Away!",
and here's the truer story.
-
- "Cheney and I and Wolfowitz and Perle and the rest
of the PNAC crew are not about to give up on our dream of a modernized,
'democratic, free-market' Islamic world in the Middle East -- which, of
course, means one run by regimes we can easily influence and control. We'll
pull in our aggressive horns for now, to get Bush elected in November,
but after that, it's full steam ahead. (By the way, hot diggety, we got
one of our PNAC founders appointed to the commission examining pre-war
intelligence on Iraq!)
-
- "We're already starting to quietly propagandize
against and undermine the regimes in Iran and Syria and, if they don't
agree to our terms next year -- in terms of oil production quotas, bilateral
projects with American companies, malleable governments to our liking,
and so on -- they'll learn there are severe consequences to pay. The transformation
is liable to be messy, but if it has to be done, by suasion or by force
-- and a return to drafting young soldiers -- we'll do it.
-
- "The liberals and the Europeans may scream and holler
in the short run, but in the long run, they'll thank us for our willingness
to think big and to do the heavy lifting. And provide their citizens with
a stable source of oil for the foreseeable future. Of course, it doesn't
hurt any that our huge corporations -- oil and energy and construction
and otherwise -- stand to make a good deal of change in this Middle East
transformation, a good share of which will come back to the GOP to keep
this neo-con machine running forever."
-
- ASHCROFT ON THE PATRIOT ACT
-
- And, finally, here's John Ashcroft, who wants to amend
the Patriot Act to give the government even more police powers. He says
the "war on terrorism" justifies all the drastic actions. Here,
have a full blast of "B.S. Away!", John.
-
- "Look, virtually every one of the extreme police
powers in the Patriot Act were proposed in bills over the years, and the
namby-pamby Congress, citing 'Constitutional protections of due process'
or some such horsemanure, turned them down. Once 9/11 came, it was easy
to collect all those powers and put them into the Patriot Act, and get
it passed nearly unanimously; of course, it helped that few if any of those
Congress types got a chance to read the final version of the bill, which
we whipped through at the last minute.
-
- "I love my job. And I have no qualms about locking
people up, sending them to detention camps, violating attorney-client privilege,
reading their email, authorizing blackbag jobs -- whatever it takes to
deter and capture 'terrorists,' and those pinko liberals who support them,
I'll enthusiastically do. There still are too many 'civil-liberties' holes
in the Patriot Act, though, and I need more police powers to clamp down
on dissenters, revolutionists, and immoralists. Martial-law might work
better; maybe if Bush is still down in the polls in late-October, we can
postpone the elections along those lines. Red terror alert, that sort of
thing."
-
- Well, based on those quick examples, you get the idea.
"B.S. Away!" is a wonder product that is amazingly useful when
dealing with politicians. It's also helpful in personal relationships.
Want to hear this "Dear John" letter I got the other day, and
then the truth version after spraying "B.S. Away!"? Well, OK,
maybe another time.
-
- But if you're interested in getting in on the IPO for
"B.S. Away!", talk to your broker. Things are going to start
popping quick. Unless Ashcroft confiscates the entire stock of prototype
cannisters because they look too phallic.
-
- Bernard Weiner is a poet, playwright and journalist,
formerly with the San Francisco Chronicle. A Ph.D. in government &
international relations, he has taught at various universities and currently
co-edits the progressive website The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org)
-
- http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/bs-away.htm
|