The Summer of our Malcontent or July Surprise

The news for the past week has been déjà vu all over again. Remember 2002?…The last Congressional mid-term elections. It was Iraq then, and in summer 2002 we were being programmed to go to war with Saddam Hussein who was going to have nuclear weapons and all kinds of other Weapons of Mass Destruction real soon. Condi said:

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Source: Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN (9/8/2002).
Quoted from http://www.bushoniraq.com/rice6.html

This week we hear that we’re already engaged in World War III, or is it World War IV? Newt Gingrich and the ubiquitous haranguing Neo-Cons can’t seem to decide, but it’s “definitely another World War”. (Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says "America is in World War III and President Bush should say so.")

Come on folks. Are we going to buy into this again? The Repugs launched the Iraq adventure midsummer of 2002, just in time to whip up fervor among the electorate and propel their candidates to an unusual mid-term gain for the Party holding the White House.

On the one hand, I’m thinking that people are a lot wiser and a lot more skeptical now after watching the Katrina fiasco unfold and after months of unceasing bad news from Iraq. But even on Air America, both Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes still get callers who are fully committed to war with Hezbollah and Hamas and of course Syria and Iran “who are behind it all.”

I guess that there’s that one knee-jerky element of the population that just never gets it. It’s hard not to lapse into pejoratives, but in reading comments to some of the blogs, it’s definitely a less well-educated segment of the population. If they can’t do grammar and they can’t do spelling, you’ve just got to think that they don’t do history or politics too well either.

However, I’m sitting here in front of the TV watching the flames lick higher and higher in Israel and Lebanon and my profound skepticism keeps a close eye pealed for Karl Rove’s fingerprints, as well as a keep-Congress-Republican angle, in addition to a new campaign to spread fear and anger among the unplugged and disengaged electorate.

War drums are already deployed across the Corporate Media. False News, CNN and the NBC conglomerate have all crafted signature screens and martial music for breathless “Breaking News” interrupts. Gabberatchiks are providing the usual talking heads with platforms to relentlessly advance The Agenda.

No doubt task forces are in place with war rooms humming throughout the corporate establishment hatching plans to get in early and grab those government no-bid contracts and suck in billions in easy loot.

Ominously, I keep hearing that Syria and Iran are the “real problem.” The tone sounds a lot like the above remark from Condi, the sort of flat pronouncement framed with infallibility which strikes terror into soccer moms and drives testosterone levels off the charts in NASCAR dads. It’s the perfect prop for generating doubt about the opposition party and providing Republican candidates with a powerful tool to singe their adversaries in the upcoming general election.

So I hope that Howard Dean and Company are watching all of this unfold and are developing a better strategy than the slack-jawed, deer in the headlights confusion that saw us falter in 2002.