Fair Game: Valerie Plame's outing on the big screen. Where's Bush?

Plame's book, Fair Game, has been made into a movie, out soon. Perhaps it will yield enough profit for her to protect herself and her family since the government she served has declined. (Wiki commons photo)

I'm tired of talking about George W. Bush. I used to think he was simply the puppet of Dick Cheney; then someone convinced me that he did have a brain and was not Dick's puppet. I don't know and don't, any longer, care who ran the mechanism of whom. The fact is, the two of them brought such ignominy to the White House and its environs that it would seem that Washington, DC., is no more than salted earth today, unable to support life or nourish those who depend on it.

I often -- for example, day in and day out -- try not to think of the disaster those two miscreants left behind. I am beginning to learn something about British politics, which is only sensible since I live in the UK now. But yesterday morning, BBC4 radio broadcast an interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA clandestine agent outed in a fit of pique by Deadeye Dick's well-exercised right hand, "Scooter" (perfect name for Dick's right hand, no?) Libby.

Amazingly, Libby served time for his unconscionable engagement in payback. Payback? For what?

Bush administration kicks truth in the teeth

For truth. In the Bush administration, any breath of truth allowed to exit the compound would have to be dealt with severely, rendered a body blow until it was no longer recognizable as truth, so that their lies could supplant it.

Just so, Bush and Cheney and Libby and countless others mantracized the lie of the hour. One of those lies, according to Valerie Plame Wilson, was that Iraq had WMDs and that Niger had supplied the essential “yellow cake.” Not. Her husband, a retired ambassador with first-hand knowledge, said it did not. So the Bush-Cheney cabal paid him back for his disloyalty (or to the rest of us, his honesty) by ruining his wife's career. (This, of course, leads to certain assumptions about the regard of the Bush-Cheney administration for the female gender.)

Outed undercover agent in danger

A subsequent lie tossed into the murky air of Foggy Bottom was that the Wilson family was not in any mortal danger after Libby outed Valerie Plame Wilson, or at least, Bush-Cheney used that excuse when their CIA (recall, it had once been Daddy Bush’s CIA, literally) denied her request for protection.

Unbelievable. Is this, then, the same government that believed the entire nation was in mortal danger because some Muslims had wreaked havoc and taken 3000 lives in New  York City just a couple of years before? Is this the administration that was throwing money, ordnance and lives of young military personnel against countries that might be harbouring that sort of terrorist? The entire nation was supposed to be at risk from deadly forces from overseas, but there was no reason to think anyone might want to harm Valerie Plame Wilson or her family after it had been made clear that her job was collecting information about national enemies for years: Is that right? No, it's clearly wrong.

It would be natural to ask, how stupid were Bush and Cheney, and how stupid did they think Americans are?

Dumb like foxes

Bush and Cheney weren't stupid at all; they knew exactly what they were doing in engineering precisely what has come to pass―a nation deeply divided along ideological lines. More succinctly, they created a nation divided between those who drank the Bush Kool-Aid and chose to be frightened and therefore manageable by those who would force them into ignorant servitude, and those who were not afraid because they knew:

• The world was always thus, fraught with dangers

• It is not impossible that 9/11 was either and inside job or done with inside foreknowledge

• It is tantamount to becoming a serf to trade personal and civic freedom for putative protection, especially from shadowy forces.

Bush-Cheney were smart enough to know that they could force most Americans into the Kool-Aid parlor; they thought Americans were pretty stupid, and by and large, they were right. It's unfortunate that their single instance of correct assessment was that one.

Considering the hubris and self-referential activities of the Bush-Cheney cabal, it is easy to believe that there never was a real threat from Middle Eastern terrorists, even if one accepts the Twin Towers as a bona fide case of two towers, built to withstand almost anything, collapsing although the fire did not engulf them and was still localized on the upper floors when the buildings fell like a house of cards with the LOWER decks kicked out by an unseen hand.

Home-grown terrorists on Christian agenda

But let's leave that possibility. In the past ten years or so, most of the horrific acts in the US were carried out by US citizens and not even Muslim ones at that. I cite, most recently, the shooting of Rep. Gabriele Gifford, the killing of a judge and a little girl, and the wounding of many others. Where were the Muslims then? Living on the inhospitable alien landscape of Afghanistan, a nation that has been no more than rocks and camels and donkeys and men who would make other men and all women into chattel for centuries, and whose land--despite having been fought for by superpowers from Alexander the Great to the USSR to America--is virtually a pile of rocks and dust offering little more than vicious subsistence to the inhabitants. This factor, unfortunately, makes the place almost ungovernable and certainly unbconquerable; those with little to lose care little to live and will thus sacrifice yours and theirs with equal abandon.

It was a dingbat looney with Christian zeal who wreaked havoc most recently, an apparent home-grown psycho who had slipped through the cracks as he wound down into fundamentalist uber-angst and reckless behavior.

***

Valerie Plame Wilson got no protection. She left government, although she claims she still encourages students to enter government service. The woman must be an eternal optimist, thinking that there will never be another government as unethical in its conduct and inimical in its intent toward the American people as was the execrable government of George W. Bush. Or else, advising college students to go into government service is one way she can protect her hide from those inside who would do her harm. It is certain that the government that dumped her out of the boat is not going to wet its slimy hands helping her get to shore. And make no mistake; it’s still the same government, with just enough window dressing to keep the credulous confused.

It was an interesting interview. The interviewer asked Plame Wilson if she might have been over-reacting to threats against her and against her family. Her answer was clear, succinct and unemotional, precisely as one would expect from someone who had worked within the stress of clandestine ops for years. Valerie Plame Wilson, I have concluded, is good indeed at what she does, not least of which is surviving a several-pronged attack by the government she was proud to serve, and emerging with her mind intact.

Will brainy college graduates save America?

Bush and Cheney have so much to answer for, I and an army of bloggers could point out their misdeeds daily for the next decade and barely scratch the surface. Plame Wilson said she tells college students to study hard and graduate with the best education they can get because the nation will need brainy people who are well educated to solve the problems created in the past decade.

That’s true. But will they be treated as traitors for voicing concerns, even if they also offer solutions? Will truth ever regain a foothold in American life? Hearing truth requires a willingness to grapple with it, something in short supply in America since Bush could reach no higher than holding a book upside down when pretending to read it to children.* Grappling with truth often requires at least a modicum of education and courage, both of which Bush-Cheney badly damaged nationally.

Bush-Cheney virtually destroyed primary and secondary education in the United States via No Child Left Behind. They systematically dismantled the US economic system via a wealth shift of major proportions away from the middle class and to the top 400, and the concurrent rendering of a great deal of America's population homeless or jobless, or both. They rendered the population helpless to help themselves by a steady diet of panic alerts, color-coded so that an uneducated and biddable population might be driven to excesses of both fear and pseudo-patriotic zeal. Remember "freedom fries"? The puerile hallmark of a deluded and gullible population looking for a scapegoat for their own fear and their leaders' failures.

***

I wonder if that interview with the thoughtful and well-spoken Valerie Plame Wilson would ever have happened on a US radio station. I think not. I think a Limbaugh or Hannity would have been employed to assault her verbally in an attempt to prove to the baggers of the nation that this patriotic woman is in fact a traitor despite her years of service, and because she shouldered her betrayal by her superiors better than almost any soldier might.

I would like to think that the absence of an American demand for accountability by Bush-Cheney is also a mass shouldering of betrayal in the upright manner of Valerie Plame Wilson. But I think it is not. I think it is the craven simpering of a nation of peasants convinced by their masters that, if they speak out, they will be denied even the small scraps of dignity shown to them, as well as all means to live. Lord knows, there is little dignity in an America where educated people scrape by on jobs the less-educated would have once been glad to have as a means to start up the ladder. There is little means to live, when threats are made daily by Congress to scrap the meager program (compared to Europe’s) that is Social Security, to dam up unemployment benefits in a nation where the major industry is, at the moment, unemployment.

America no longer needs to fear becoming like the USSR. It already is. As in the USSR, America’s peasants refuse to revolt, or perhaps are already officially terrorized far beyond the capacity to take meaningful political action, concerted action, not actions cynically orchestrated by platoons of emperor wannabes like the Koch brothers and Rush Limbaugh. The population doesn't realize that, sooner or later, there’s going to be a gulag like Guantanamo, and not only for those identified as enemy combatants (rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter in a police state), but for those patriots labeled as traitors by the actual traitors in a democracy-killing real-life version of Mad magazine's prescient Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy.

* Bush was photographed holding the kindergarten book upside down. What did that signify? Did he think, like a mirror, the camera would reverse things? Or could he have been pre-occupied with other thoughts?

(Oxy)Moron Bush*: Education failures to be trashed

Moron Bush's school days? (Wiki Commons)

Is Amurika goin too git smarter? Are it feesabal possabale two over tourn Goerge W. Bushes Know Child Lift BeHind inishativ? At the same time, are well we be abel to git rit of boguz collages like FeenixPheenix?

***

President Obama would like to do two things that cannot help but have a positive effect on American education. He would like to diminish the prevalence of pseudo-colleges like the University of Phoenix and DeVry. And he would like to abolish his predecessor’s addlepated excursion down a road so unfamiliar to him  (education) that his pet program, No Child Left Behind, has put American kids at the forefront of the world’s dummies in a less than a generation. That's quite an achievement for the barely educated Mr. Bush, a man who derived little from the educational opportunities bought for him by a rich daddy whose pockets were not deep enough nor connections wide enough to keep the world from finding out little George was not even a ten o'clock scholar.

The problem is, of course, that No Child Left Behind, if it were replaced tomorrow by actual education (that thing requiring scholarship, dedication, independent thought, etc.), it would take a decade for produce a crop of publicly educated kids capable of anything with greater similarity to a college or university than the University of Phoenix. To cavil about the fact that such paper mills charge outrageous fees for virtually worthless degrees is one thing; it’s quite another to instantly create an educational opportunity, or even a chilling-out place, for thousands of students short-changed by their experiences in Mr. Bush’s educational quagmire.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to create some sort of publicly funded remedial educational system that will prepare the less successful NCLB graduates (is that even possible?) to do something other than collect a dole check and skip out on humongous so-called higher education bills when they come due. If going to a for-profit culinary institute makes a student into a pot-washing grunt for ten bucks an hour rather than executive chef for a resort Hilton, then perhaps the answer is to rectify the gaps in that student’s education at public expense. And then, if he or she really wants to be a chef, let that person do it the traditional way―by working a food-prep job in a big kitchen for ten bucks an hour and learning as they go. Only a few would make it to executive chef. Some would change fields. Some would stay low on the kitchen-work ladder, and accept that. But at least they wouldn’t have $100,000 in loans to repay, and may well have acquired some general knowledge they can use for working or living.

But how would the newly impoverished, post-Moron Bush United States ever pay for such a thing, for two or more extra years of public schooling for those ill-served by the Moron’s juggernaut? Darned if I know. Possibly the government could seize some of his or Neil Bush’s assets (Neil sold the computer garbage that made NCLB lucrative for the family) to help pay for it.

Or maybe they could simply use what’s being shoveled into the pockets of the for-profit stink tanks now. According to Huffington Post:

Students enrolled at for-profit colleges make up only 12 percent of college students nationwide, yet the sector takes in nearly a quarter of federal student aid dollars and accounts for 43 percent of student loan defaults, according to a recent analysis from the Education Trust, a student advocacy group. Students at for-profit colleges typically carry an average of $14,000 in debt--almost twice as much as students at non-profit colleges, according to the Department of Education.

Preventing the student loan defaults alone would probably help the economy enough to eke out some extra dough to use for real education.

Real education encompasses infinitely more than Moron Bush’s notion (calling it a concept or even idea would be to falsely elevate the substandard snapping of his mental synapses), encapsulated in No Child Left Behind.  Mr. Obama would like states to adopt “standards that ensure students are ready for college or a career rather than grade-level proficiency – the focus of the current law.” (Could it be that Moron Bush could hope for no more himself, and in typically greedy and self-centered fashion, desired no more for others?)

Huffington Post also noted that, in Congress―THANK THE LORD AND PASS THE DIVIDED NOTEBOOKS―

Lawmakers also said they want to allow states to use subjects other than reading and mathematics as part of their measurements for meeting federal goals, pleasing many education groups that argued No Child Left Behind encouraged teachers not to focus on history, art, science, social studies and other important subjects.

Moron Bush had destroyed American education well before the end of his first interminable term. It will take a lot more than Mr. Obama’s current term, halfway finished already, to begin to turn American education around, and another decade before public schools in many locales produce graduates capable of performing well on a job or benefitting from bona fide higher education.

Moron Bush has much to answer for, but possibly the most egregious of his multiplicitous attempts to terminally weaken the United States was NCLB, a program that rewarded schools for failing to educate, and that rewarded teachers for making their students into gormless, clueless parrots unable to synthesize and analyze, unable to use logic, unable to understand ethics, unable to succeed beyond subsistence in a wildly complex modern world.

But in a Moron Bush world, it made sense. Uneducated citizens are essential to the sort of world Moron Bush―and to be fair, his one-worlder father―envisioned. A world where a few wealthy, powerful people are able to do as they please with the rest of us, making us into cannon fodder, paupers, petty thieves stealing for survival. In short, a world that would not be acceptable to a population with a decent education, and which those decently educated people would be at pains to renovate or overthrow.

*The Education President