Croniest

Anyone who thinks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is going to be chased out of office by a load of retired U.S. generals, thousands of errors, or dense assholishness is sadly mistaken. Not only does he have acting Presidente Bush's renown loyalty to count on, he's got actual President Cheney's -- after all, it's Rummy who gave then Congressman Cheney his first White House gig, back with Tricky Dick Nixon's administration. And we all know how well that turned out.

But the main reason Rummy stays is our upcoming Executive War with Iran. Like a sequence out of Groundhog Day, we're reliving the same build-up to a "preemptive" war with Iran as we did with Iraq, only this time the consequences are likely to blowback on us bigtime. Expect the same level of sensitivity to real world costs this time around.

The whole point is that this gang has the levers of power and they are not about to give them up. They plan on using them. They plan on using the strategies they have been developing in detail for the attack, to fire off those guns, missles and maybe even nuclear bombs they've bought, to use it all before they lose it.

If you haven't read it yet, get your gutcheck with Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article. Most chilling (or chillin', depending on your political bent) passage:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb"” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "“what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,"” and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."”

Let's party.

If you think you have any redress short of beaming high-powered microwaves into Dick Cheney's office and hoping for a pacemaker short, check out the huge layers of secrecy with which he surrounds himself. You, the tax-paying American, the one who pay's his salary and is supposedly, along with the rest of the country, his boss, you can even know who actually works for him.

His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president'’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. "“We just don'’t give out that kind of information," says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney'’s "“angels."” She won'’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. "“It'’s just not something we talk about."” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory.

Is it hyperbole to ask, "Is this fascism?"

To wit:

Benito Mussolini, the modern father of fascism, wrote that it "should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power" adding that "Fascism .. believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism .. . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it."

Hey, don't listen to me; take it from Benito.