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The first Bush junta tax cut for the rich occurred on 5/3/01. It was a very close and controversial vote. The ten "Blue Dog" Democrats who voted in favor of it were headed by Gary Condit, one of whose mistresses--a young Bureau of Prisons intern, Chandra Levy--had disappeared two days before, on 5/1/01. On that day, 5/1/01, the day of Levy's disappearance, Condit met with Dick Cheney at noon, and there was a big hole in Condit's schedule after that until 3 pm. The initial "window of time" for Levy's disappearance--released by the FBI/DC police--was mid-morning. That was later revised to the early afternoon--much later. The FBI had taken custody of Levy's computer in May, and it took them several months--apparently--to determine when she had last used it. Big announcement in late July, that she had last used the computer, not in mid-morning, but in early afternoon around 1:00--and a high profile re-search of Rock Creek Park. (She had done MapQuest searches of the park and other locations.) They found nothing. (Her bones were found a year later, not far from one of the trails that had been searched in the park. Oh, and some poor El Salvadoran immigrant worker has been charged with her murder this year--eight years later!)
I was interested at the time, and am still interested, in the complete lack of interest by the FBI/DC police and the corpo-fascist press in Condit's meeting with Cheney, a meeting that was revealed in June (when Condit released his schedule for the day of Levy's disappearance). It was not even addressed in the press until August--just after the change in her disappearance time--when Newsweek published a story in which Cheney's aides said that neither Cheney nor his aides had ever been asked about the meeting, by anyone. So then they gave the official version of the meeting, in Newsweek: 20 minutes long, routine political meeting, nothing odd about Condit's behavior, two aides present.
The other thing that was going on that summer was a high-profile investigation of the FBI, by the House intelligence committee, of which Condit was a member. I don't recall what the investigation was about (or it was never made clear to the public). Condit was privy to many secrets, as a member of this committee. Thinking back from the present time, I suspect that it was an attempted Cheney purge of the FBI, with Condit as one of his operatives. It may not be related, but simultaneous with these events was John O'Neil's forced ouster from the FBI. He was THE agent following the Al Qaeda money trail in Yemen. (He took a job in private security at the WTC the week of 9/11, and died there on 9/11.)
My conclusion about these events, at the time, was that, a) the Washington press corps had gone totally rancid, and b) the Dark Force that had taken over our nation's capitol, via a stolen election, was extremely dangerous. Little did I know how dangerous.
However, it's interesting to look at it from another angle--in view of this Brit's remark--that the Cheney-Rumsfeld junta was very fragile. It had sold itself as "compassionate conservatism," blah-blah-blah, but actually represented only a tiny number of multi-billionaire global corporate predators and war profiteers. It had no legitimacy, as to representing America's mainstream, and was about to demonstrate that over the next eight years, by its mindboggling destruction of American democracy and prosperity. Its views were not at all "centrist conservative," but far rightwing extremist. 9/11 provided these rightwing extremists, and genocidal murderers, torturers and master thieves, the means of shoring up their fragile and illegitimate power with war fever, fearmongering and an assault on democratic rights and on all of our democratic institutions such as we have never seen in our history.
Dangerous they certainly are, but my new thought is that their actions derive from fear --fear that they tried to project outward--rather than from strength. They feared honest people and tried to purge them from the government. They preferred the corrupt--as they showed time and again, with all the venal (as well as grand scale) corruption around them--and they used peoples' weaknesses and corruption to blackmail them into doing their bidding. I think that our national political establishment--for all its grave failures, secrecy, dirty deeds, crime and corruption--finally got fed up with this junta, circa 2006, and de-fanged them somehow (related to nuking Iran--which got taken "off the table" at that time--Rumsfeld's ouster, and the Bush/Rove vs Cheney/Libby war over who would take the fall for outing CIA agent Plame and the CIA's WMD counter-proliferation project).
I feared Cheney, because of his evident power to prevent even a questioning of his meeting with Condit (not even to verify that the meeting took place!), and then to plant his own version of the story in Newsweek, in his own good time. And I still fear him--because of the power of Diebold & brethren. He and his evil crew have somehow been immunized for their crimes and they could come back. The far rightwing extremist corporation that now has a monopoly on our 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting system (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold) has the capability--the EASY capability-- of putting Dick Cheney in the White House, or anyone else they please.
But I think maybe we should consider the thing from this other side--that Cheney and other Bushwhacks, and the global corporate predators behind them, and the collusive Democrats-- fear us. They are grabbing everything they can--stealing from us hand over fist--in a "panic of the super-rich"--before we, as a people, fully catch onto them and gather our strength to disempower them. That's a better way to look at things than that we are hopelessly doomed to enslavement and continuous robbery, and other horrors. We need to understand that their power is an illusion, spun in the corpo-fascist media, reinforced by stolen elections--unrepresentative, illegitimate, fragile, brittle and breakable.
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