WRONG! See “update and correction” below.
The needle on my b.s. meter is in the red zone.
Yes, some of our right-wing friends aren’t always playing with a full deck, but I simply don’t believe that an article calling for the nuclear obliteration of the Iraqi population and then the use of our victorious army in Iraq to make George W. Bush President-for-Life with dictatorial powers could be anything but a hoax.
By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.
Now, really! A little broad, don’t you think? Yes, a particularly dim Straussian might believe this, but Straussian esotericism would dictate that it never be said in public.
Not that there’s not some obscenely bad stuff (see below) on the Family Security Matters website, and its “Board of Advisers” reads like a wingnut who’s who — they’ve even got Monica Creepy Crowley — but if they’ve scrubbed the piece Digby points to (in a cached version) the most natural explanation is that the piece was never supposed to be up in the first place.
Read it and see what you think. But for now I’m filing this under “probably bogus.”
Footnote Make no mistake, these folks are whacko. (WTF is Jim Woolsey doing on their board of advisers?) Here’s a sample, from an article arguing that the belief in the 9/11 attacks as a Bush-led conspiracy follows (no, I’m not making this up) from left-wing perfectionism.
Professors sitting in their Ivory Towers imagine that a perfect order is attainable in this world. Of course, America falls short of that order, but, comparatively speaking, not far. Historically, most countries are far worse, and few can boast even one or two of the many benefits America has granted its citizens and the world. But that’s neither here nor there.
The dream for a perfect order can never be consummated. In this imperfect world it is impossible; it must forever remain a dream. Those who hold this belief, like Professors Mueller and Quigley and their Communist sympathizing predecessors, must develop an explanation for why their purposes are continually frustrated. Why did the Soviet Union and not the United States fall? It must be that the leaders of the Soviet cause were corrupt and fascist in nature. With the right leaders, perhaps the experiment could one day succeed. As long as corrupt, fallen human beings are at the helm of such enterprises, and they always will be, then I suspect the results will only be more of the same. “If men were angels” then, as James Madison said, we could expect a different outcome.
The New Deal, the Great Society, and whatever other programs have fallen under the umbrella of the welfare state in the last eight decades are all an attempt to establish this conception of an earthly paradise. But obviously, they are failing. There must be a reason for their failure. It must be that there is a conspiracy to undermine their efforts. They suspect it has something to do with evils inherent in the American system. America is the product of capitalist and colonialist sins after all. If that’s the case, is it so hard to believe that the government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks?
See? Completely insane. But not distasteful to a certain sort of coarse right-wing palate. The denunciation of democracy as “the worst form of government” is something else entirely.
Update and correction This is completely and hilariously wrong. Atkinson was for real, and both the offending article and the author have now been scrubbed from the FSM website, entirely without comment. Winston Smith would be proud.
And Family Security Matters turns out to be a front for Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a substantial player in right-wing “security” thinking and staffing GWB’s original national-security team.