The D.C. Matrix

You know, I usually don’t make a habit of posting anything overtly political or religious in this particular forum, mostly because I have extremely strong opinions on some issues, and I refuse to inadvertently offend someone and end up having conflict on my site. This is one of the very few peaceful refuges I still possess.
But, let me tell you, I just have to get a few things out. For those of you who may not know, currently I am residing in a homeless shelter for victims of domestic violence, where I am provided with my own apartment that is run by the shelter and paid for by the shelter, until more permanent housing is acqired, usually in the form of section 8. Well, I had applied for my section 8 back in October, and being that I am homeless, should have gotten it rather quickly. In fact, I was supposed to have gotten it back in April. So why am I still here? Well, due to Bush’s tax cuts and frenzied overseas spending, Section 8 has been frozen in the state where I am living. And I found out yesterday that the freeze is effective until June 2004. 2004!! WHAT am I going to do until then?? The shelter is supposed to be a maximum year and a half program. Obviously, they won’t just kick all of us out, but what about the other women needing shelter, needing to leave their situation? The regular shelters are already filled to capacity, with nowhere to send the women on to after their stay there is done. Not only is this an awful situation for me, I can’t help thinking about all the women who may not even get an opportunity to leave now. As for me, I am going to be stuck here in a tiny town with no car (and believe me, there are NO jobs here), under the thumb of an organization that revels in trying to run my life. All because some fanatic needs to fund his stupid war, and has some idiotic belief that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow magically create more jobs for those of us who cannot find one or who lost one. *rolls eyes*
I think I am much to angry to formulate a coherent statement about all this, but it’s ok, because Arianna Huffington has said brilliantly what I cannot at this time. In the ‘more’ section, I have posted an article in its entirety pertaining to this issue. I apologize for this brief rant, and will return you to out regularly scheduled drollness shortly. :biggrin:

The D.C. Matrix Fri, 30 May 2003 01:33
A White House Fluent In Language Of Fanatics
By Arianna Huffington
Maybe Karl Rove has moved his office into the “Matrix.” Maybe Laurence Fishburne is auditioning for Ari Fleischer’s job. Maybe it’s all just a bad dream: “The White House Reloaded.”
I’ve been racking my brain, trying to reconcile the ever-widening chasm between what the White House claims to be true and what is actually true. After all, we know the president and his men are not stupid. And despite the tidal wave of misinformation pouring out of their mouths, I don’t believe they are consciously lying.
The best explanation I can come up with for the growing gap between their rhetoric and reality is that we are being governed by a gang of out and out fanatics.
The defining trait of the fanatic — be it a Marxist, a fascist, or, gulp, a Wolfowitz — is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief. Bush and his fellow fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis who can hold their breath and go without air for hours. Such is their mental control, they can go without truth for, well, years. Because, in their minds, they’re always right. Oopso facto.
That pretty much sums up the White House m.o. on everything, from the status of al-Qaeda to the condition of post-war Iraq to the magical job-producing virtues of the latest round of tax cuts.
Who else but a fanatic would have made the outrageous claim, as the president did last Friday, just four days after the deadly reemergence of al-Qaeda in Riyadh, that “the United States people are more secure, the world is going to be more peaceful”? More peaceful than what? The West Bank?
In the weeks before the attacks in Riyadh, the president had repeatedly maintained that “we are winning the war on terror,” and that al-Qaeda was “onthe run… slowly, but surely, being decimated.” So he clearly wasn’t going to let a little fact like 34 dead bodies — the result of three closely coordinated suicide bomb attacks — change his mind.
He was similarly unperturbed by that troubling new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential and non-partisan British think tank — released a day after the Riyadh bombings and three days before the president proclaimed us “more secure” — which found that al-Qaeda was “just as dangerous” and “even harder to identify and neutralize” than it was prior to 9/11.
And just 4 hours after the president strapped on his trusty blinders and delivered his rosy vision of a more peaceful world, the tranquility was shattered by the five simultaneous suicide blasts in Casablanca. Oh well, at least we still have the upcoming Jessica Lynch TV movie to make us feel good about ourselves — give or take a few last minute rewrites by the BBC.
The president’s evidence-be-damned fanaticism is equally apparent when it comes to the state of post-war Iraq. “Life is returning to normal,” he proclaimed just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad. “Things have settled down inside the country.”
Really? Just who is preparing his morning briefing papers? Pollyandy Card? Little Condoleezza Sunshine? Did he bother consulting any Iraqis about “normal life” there? Probably not. One of the keys to being a flourishing fanatic is to surround yourself with those of a shared — and equally deluded — mindset.
And according to that mindset, the definition of “settling down” can be expanded to include rampant looting, sporadic water and electrical service, hospitals in disastrous condition, outbreaks of cholera and dysentery, streets filled with uncollected garbage and raw sewage, half a dozen ransacked nuclear facilities, missing barrels of radioactive material, growing anti-American sentiment, and disparate ethnic and religious groups arming themselves. No wonder Don Rumsfeld called the media’s reporting of all this “an overstatement.” It’s just another “normal” weekend at Camp David.
And don’t bother trying to make the case that everything isn’t hunky-dory in Baghdad to rabid acolytes such as Jay Garner. Like the president, the demoted viceroy doesn’t care what the facts indicate — to him even a looted and punctured glass can be half-full. “We ought to be beating our chests every day,” he said, dismissing the notion that any of us should feel bad about the problems besetting Iraq. “We ought to look in a mirror and get proud. We ought to stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, ‘Damn, we’re Americans.'” That’s sure to win us some more goodwill around the world. Hoo-rah, and pass the Kool-Aid, General Jay!
And if you think the president is saving his fanaticism only for the international sector, think again. His dogged devotion to selling his latest round of tax cuts for the wealthy as a “jobs creation plan” — despite an avalanche of evidence that it will do nothing of the sort — proves that he can be just as fervent on the home front.
“Jobs are on the line,” said Bush after the Senate passed its version of the tax cut. “I call on Congress to resolve their differences quickly so I can sign a bill that will help create jobs, boost take home pay and spur economic growth.” And for those with “…illionaire” as part of their economic description, it probably will.
It obviously makes no difference to the president that 10 Nobel Prize winning economists have condemned his tax cuts as “not the answer” to high unemployment, or that a new Congressional Budget Office study found that the “jobs and growth package” will actually have very little effect on long-term growth. Not interested. Not listening. The 1.4 million jobs the White House repeatedly says the tax cuts will create are more a matter of a fanatic’s faith than of dispassionate forecasting.
The fact is there are now 2.1 million more unemployed Americans than when Bush took office — the vast majority of them having lost their jobs after the president’s initial $1.3 trillion tax cut was passed in 2001. Difficult evidence to ignore — unless “ignore the evidence” is your eleventh commandment.
A popular definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Well, that seems to be the White House theory on the power of tax cuts to produce new jobs: It didn’t work before; let’s try it again.
Welcome to the D.C. Matrix.