Beyond Lies: The June 2008 Rockefeller Report on Public Statements by U.S. Government Officials
Maybe the media felt the Rockefeller Report was old news. Everyone knows there were no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration got it wrong. So they lied? So what? That’s history. Now that we’re in Iraq, its how we get out that is important.
Wrong! The Rockefeller Report is not old news. The public statements of Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld in the run up to the war about WMD and Saddam’s links to al-Qaeda that the report focuses on display a cognitive pathology that continues to infect in the policy thinking of the Republican leadership. The pathology is disordered thinking that willfully refuses to consider evidence that falsifies a policy position. It resembles the stinking thinking of drug addicts.
You find it in the revival since 9/11 of trillion dollar defense spending on nuclear submarines, stealth air craft, star wars missile defense systems, and the like, in order to wage war against terrorists armed with box cutters and insurgents who strike and then dissolve back into Iraqi neighborhoods. Those spending decisions by the Bush Administration are made with complete disregard for the mountains of evidence that costly weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet Union no longer have utility in the current “war on terror.” You find it in the AynRandian/Greenspandian mind set that ignores all evidence that regulation is good for a market economy as Bear Stearns crashes and burns. You find it in the Bush/McCain condemnation of the Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo prisoners as a threat to national security.
We need to recognize stinking policy thinking wherever it occurs and give it a strong dose of electoral therapy. Signs of this disorder, displayed in the Rockefeller Report, must be diagnosed for the impairment they reflect by citizens of an informed democracy. Unfortunately, the importance of this report was lost on the mainstream media in the weeks since its publication.
Ignoring the evidence and doing as they please is stinking thinking and these folks definitely got the disease, but how can electoral therapy help when nothing’s been done to mend the major voting issues we had in the past two elections that gave these very frightening people their power? Our situation is like going to get therapy from the drug dealer.