The Neocon Aberration

The Neocon Aberration

A chronicle of one American’s quiet rage through a decade of

Republican excesses and abuses of power at home and abroad.

By D. Grant Haynes

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by D. Grant Haynes

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Bush the Bungler

Chapter 2 The Sheeple

Chapter 3 The Environment

Chapter 4 Tree-sit Days

Chapter 5 Gun Control

Chapter 6 Immigration

Chapter 7 Bill Clinton

Chapter 8 The Media

Chapter 9 Capital Punishment

Chapter 10 Animal Rights

Chapter 11 A Refuge From the Storm

Appendix The Neocons

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I owe hundreds of nameless IMC (Independent Media Center) editorial volunteers throughout the English-speaking world a debt of gratitude for their non-judgmental acceptance of editorial statements of mine that might have otherwise gone unpublished and unread.

During the darkest days of George W. Bush’s so-calledwar on terrorism—at a time when members of the mainstream corporate media accepted their shackles and their salaries uncomplainingly while serving as unquestioning conduits for administration hype, spin and lies—volunteers at IMCs in major cities across the nation and world kept the tattered banner of a free press alive.

However obscure their profiles and however miniscule their budgets, never believe for a moment that the alternative media aren’t being noticed or that they don’t make a difference.

Anything of note posted on an IMC server that is legitimate and reasonably well written will be picked up by the major contemporary Internet search engine within 48 hours.

The corporate toadies are watching, reading and weighing what we in the alternative media say, however reluctant they may be to acknowledge our very existence.

Preface

A word about visual images not on the cover of this book.

At the outset of this project, I naively assumed that I would be able to produce a visually compelling book cover incorporating some of the thousands of shocking still photos produced by photojournalists during the now five years of war on Iraq by the United States of America. From the opening shock and awe volley in March 2003 when up to 1,000 missiles were sent into Baghdad by cowardly Americans from the safety of high-flying aircraft and submarines—to the awful carnage of the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004 when phosphorous bombs, napalm, and other illegal weapons were used on civilians—to the present daily attrition in Baghdad’s endless street fighting—there are images aplenty out there.

But I quickly learned that corporate media interests have acquired rights to all notable photographs of the atrocities of the Iraq war—atrocities facilitated by their craven acquiescence in the early phases of the conflict. And these damning images are jealously guarded by copyrights that discourage a self-publisher from utilizing them. I found that to legally use two or three Iraq war images would double the initial expense of my project. I could not afford to do so and opted for a non-visual cover design.

I would invite any reader interested in viewing uncensored photographs of the war on Iraq to initiate a search through a major Internet search engine image data base using the terms,shock and awe,Fallujah, andAbu Ghraib. Be sure to change your browser preferences to permit anunfiltered search. This, because a moderately filtered search (the default setting) will protect you from seeing the full horror of what has been done in your name of and with your tax dollars since George W. Bush attacked Iraq.

Also, an excellent video titled, The Convoy of Death, was still available through the Democracy Now! archive on the Internet at the time this book was written. That film details the intentional death by suffocation inflicted on 3,000 Taliban prisoners of war in Afghanistan in November 2001 while American advisers stood by and did nothing to stop the monstrous war crime under way.

Additionally, independent journalist Dahr Jamail maintains an extensive gallery of war photographs from Iraq on his web site.

I encourage readers to avail themselves of these vital visual records of Bush’s immoral and unlawful assault on Afghanistan and Iraq.

D. Grant Haynes

May 2007

Introduction

The germination of the concept—the conceptualization—for this work and the transformation of that concept into a typescript seeking a publisher has been as much a surprise to me as it may be to those that know me well—or to those that have known me in passing at various stages of my life.

Though a journalism major with several degrees in that discipline, I never thought in terms of writing a book—a journal—a screed—whatever this collection of my utterances of the past ten years may be called by readers and critics.

I had always regarded my journalistic training and reasonably honed writing talents as means to make a living at best. I worked as a reporter for daily newspapers and at various times as an editor or reporter for small town weeklies. I also taught journalism at the secondary and college levels for some years.

But newspaper journalism, as well as opportunities to teach the discipline in conservative communities here and there, left me singularly uninspired. I was invariably constrained by an editor, a publisher, a college department head, a high school principal, or some coalition of small town business interests whose advertising and patronage the publication or the institution needed in order to survive.

Wherever I happened to land in my vagabond career, the names and faces were different, but the story was inevitably the same.

I muddled along, never feeling any sense of creativity or vitality in my prostituted writing career and certainly never entertaining a desire to compile a book or any sense that I had something important enough to say that it should be recorded for posterity in a permanently bound volume.

But the last decade of the old millennium saw a chance confluence of several unrelated developments—one technological—one political—one personal—that afforded me an opportunity for the first time in my life to explore my writing skills and find my natural style and genre without the creativity destroying constraints of others.

(1) I acquired some Internet savvy and a computer and learned about political web sites, personal web sites, and blogging.

(2) Though a news junkie and a liberal or progressive thinker for decades, I developed an expanded interest in national politics after the Republican revolution in the midterm elections of 1994. Their petty, and we now know wholly hypocritical, pursuit of Bill Clinton for the last six years of his presidency enraged me, as did the corporate media’s acquiescence in these excesses.

(3) Finally, in March 1999 I turned my back on corporate journalism for the last time and no longer had an editor or publisher to whom I had to answer.

I had begun blogging and establishing my own web sites as early as 1998, but after leaving corporate journalism a year later, my web writing blossomed and, I would like to think improved, as I experimented and sought to perfect my style.

This book consists of 11 chapters—each presenting dated essays or editorial statements related to a particular topic and usually written in response to a specific event or news story having appeared immediately prior to the writing—a so-called news peg in journalistic parlance. The date of each statement is a contextual clue of sorts to that which follows and should be taken into account to understand the ire or the rare elation that I may have felt at a given moment in time.

The presentation within each chapter has been chronological for the most part, but there are exceptions. In some cases I have presented articles in topical groupings within a chapter, while in other cases I have led with statements that have achieved the greatest notoriety and sparked the most interest on the Internet.

On March 20, 2003, as cruise missiles were slamming into densely populated areas of Baghdad, according to author Harlan Ullman’sShock and Awe prescription, and thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children were perishing each hour, this writer—one of many who had fought the criminal Bush administration’s peremptory strike on Iraq to the last minute—was in a highly agitated state. My initial statement during those dark hours reflected the blackness that I felt. I would not change a word of it, though I might not be able to formulate it again today in 2007. It is a valuable record of a moment frozen in time and should be viewed as such.

It is my hope that this small book of essays which chronicles what Americans and American tax dollars did to Iraqis when flag-waving was chick and dissenters were labeled by John Ashcroft as traitors, will serve as a reminder for decades to come of the precarious nature of the balance of power in the government of the United States of America.

Americans must never forget how easily they—like Germans in the 1930’s—were led down a very wrong road by an aberrant administration bent on no good.

Americans must also never forget how near they came to losing a republic that had withstood more than 200 years of threats from without and from within when the present testing time came.

D. Grant Haynes

May 2007

"I’m the decider and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain."

—George W. Bush, April 18, 2006

Chapter 1

Bush the Bungler

As I sought to organize a manuscript of my thinking and writing during the time span of 1997-2007, I found myself wrestling with a monumental stack of statements reflecting more than six years of acute frustration about George W. Bush and the damage he has done and continues to do to me, to my nation, and to the human race.

My Bush commentaries run more than twice the length of anything else in this work because his every action has annoyed, frustrated and angered me to such an extent that I have been moved to sit up late decrying the illegitimacy of his office, the insanity of his foreign and domestic agendas, his diplomatic clumsiness, and his embarrassing ignorance on the world stage.

I cannot recall anything good or helpful that George W. Bush has done for this nation or the world since he was appointed to an office he never won by five activist Supreme Court judges in December 2000.

The inherent wrongness of that judicial fiat has been demonstrated a thousand times over during the intervening years as we have seen our nation dragged to depths of confused depravity many of us would not have believed possible had we not watched it occur.

From his crass and cynical use of 911 to garner support for neocon agendas that had been set well before he came to office; to his unilateral withdrawal from an ABM treaty that had preserved the peace between nuclear powers for a third of a century; to his unprecedented tax breaks for his constituency of wealth and privilege; to his assault on Social Security; to his present stubborn refusal to get out of the Iraq quagmire before more lives are needlessly sacrificed on the alter of corporate capitalism’s failed power grab there; George Walker Bush has done nothing right and more that is wrong and dangerous for the United States of America and the world than any U.S. president in the history of the nation.

I believe that this Republic’s very survival depends upon the dispatch with which whatever administration that comes to Washington in January 2009 seeks to apply emergency measures to halt and reverse most if not all of Bush’s initiatives. Time will be of the essence. The ship of state has already drifted far too long in very dangerous waters.

Bush Country

Life can be good in Bush Country...

Good, that is, if you’re a member of a managerial elite—and if you possess the correct political ideology—and if you belong to the correct religious community—and if your genetic heritage is acceptable—and if you’re a sportsman who golfs and fishes in the summer and hunts ducks and geese in the fall between football weekends.

Jump through these hoops appropriately and you might earn the right to drive a $50,000 SUV on the rear of which you can indicate in a subdued and tasteful manner your various politically correct affiliations in any hedonistic and money-dominated pocket of America that is Bush Country.

A national nightmare is ending

October 22, 2006

The Bush administration’s lies, incompetencies, hypocrisies and endless failures are finally catching up with them. Those of us who never approved of anything George W. Bush did, but who had to endure it with all of the flag-waving fools that approved, may be entitled to a bit of gloating now.

For five long years we of the left have had to sit and watch, helplessly, it often seemed, as the Bush administration prepared and carried out a nefarious plan hatched long before 911 to invade and decimate Iraq.

We have had to watch helplessly as arrogant fools overtook and passed us in their SUVs and Hummers with the flapping American flags, Bush bumper stickers, Pisces symbols, and NRA decals.

They thought their president and their nation were infallible—thatAmurka could kick ass all over the Middle East with impunity. They sneered and occasionally shook their fists at we who dared to criticize the cruelshock and awe invasion of Iraq or question the morality of attacking a defenseless Third World nation just because it was there, was rich in petroleum, and couldn’t defend itself.

These forces of absolute evil have had their day—five dreadfully miserable years of it. We who knew from the outset how wrong the Iraq invasion was remember each of those terrible days. They are engraved indelibly in our memories by news stories none of us ever expected to see or hear about our nation.

Fallujah.

Abu Ghraib.

Guantanamo Bay.

Rapes of children by American soldiers.

Beating deaths of prisoners by American soldiers.

The list is long and shocking.

But the sun is finally setting on this obscene episode.

The tables are turning as turn they must when something so wrong is occurring.

Republicans are close to unprecedented losses in a midterm election and George Bush is seeking an exit strategy from Iraq, whether he admits to it publicly yet or not.

And one sees fewer flags flapping on those gas-guzzling SUVs and Hummers—symbols of all that is excessive and wrong in America. The greed hounds piloting them are even a bit more subdued than before.

I anticipate that happy day when the last Americans who went to Iraq to make a killing off the misery of the Iraqi nation are frantically cramming themselves into Green Zone helicopters to escape the wrath of a freed Iraqi people.

Americans had NO business invading Iraq. This misbegotten, dark, and hopefully, aberrant episode in our national history is ending the only way it could if there be any justice in the universe.

A mammary gland is a mammary gland but 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians is a war crime

February 5, 2004

The inanity, the puritanical hypocrisy, the blindness to significant realities, the mass stupidity that characterize—indeed, that are America at this time—are all encapsulated in the brouhaha now raging over the partial exposure of one of performer Janet Jackson’s breasts during Super Bowl 2004’s halftime extravaganza February 1.

After refusing to lend Super Bowl airing to a MoveOn.org-produced 30-second spot critical of George W. Bush’s performance as president, CBS News crawled, groveled and apologized for more than 24 hours because viewers of the Super Bowl halftime show may have caught a glimpse of one