Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [44]
• Especially keep an eye out for undercover al Qaeda agents with portable blow torches attempting to cut through the 21,736 wires holding up the Brooklyn Bridge! The FBI nabbed a truck driver who had been casing the bridge and counting the wires. Best estimate is that you could cut through the wires in about a week, so be on alert!
• Report any powdery substance you come across! After receiving a suspicious powdery substance in the mail, a New Orleans woman called the authorities, and firefighters, postal officials, police officers and FBI agents quickly arrived to investigate. It turned out to be a free sample of laundry detergent. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t terrorists out there (even if the authorities suspect that the anthrax scare of 2001 was an inside job by someone who had access to the substance in the U.S. government or government-approved programs).
Boy, those terrorists sure are busy! Explosive model airplanes! Satin gas! Forest fires! Lions! Tigers! Bears! The boogeyman is coming to get me!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
The only thing more amazing than this phony game of BOO! is our ability to fall for it. What happened to our basic common sense? You know, that reflex in your brain that used to make you scream bullshit! when confronted with such obvious nonsense? This is what happens when your fear radar is out of whack. You’re so discombobulated you can’t distinguish any longer between the real and unreal.
Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger? The answer is nothing short of their feverish desire to rule the world, first by controlling us, and then, in turn, getting us to support their efforts to dominate the rest of the planet. Sounds crazy, huh? It reads more like a movie script, doesn’t it? But Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Wall Street/Fortune 500 see this post-September-11-America-in-fear as their moment—a moment handed to them by fate, via the terrorists—to seize the reins and ram the USA down the throats of any people in the world who dare question who is number one. Who is number one? I SAID, WHO IS NUMBER ONE? That’s right. Say it loud! Say it, for George and Dick and Johnny and Condi: WE ARE NUMBER ONE! USA! USA! USA!
They know that real Americans are not into dominating anyone, so they have to sell it to us in fancy packaging—and that package is FEAR. In order to properly scare us, they need a big, bad enemy. Once the Soviet Union disappeared, Bush Sr. couldn’t figure it out. Before he knew it, Clinton had given him the boot. The right wing was out in the cold, but they had eight long years to plot their return.
To their rescue came a high-powered political think-tank, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which argued that America should have but one goal: an unchallengeable, military-imposed, U.S.-run world.
They took their first step on January 26, 1998, in an open letter to President Clinton. PNAC neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, warned that the policy of containing Iraq was “dangerously inadequate” and the aim of U.S. foreign policy must be “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”
When Bush Jr. seized power in 2000, he turned the Pentagon over to this radical right-wing nut group. After September 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (now Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary of defense), and the war crowd immediately pushed an attack on Iraq as one of the first actions in the new Permanent War Against Terror. Their next act: rush through a $400 BILLION defense budget, including $70 billion for