Speechy thoughts

I almost never watch presidential addresses or presidential press conferences. It’s not that I don’t care about what the president is saying but it is more a fact that my watching it is a frivolous gesture. Thanks to the 24 hour news cycle every single angle, every iota, every moment of minutiae is played out over and over and over again until I get the urge to remove my eardrums with my tooth brush.

And, if I wasn’t there to watch the dead horse get beaten on CNN, MSNBC ,Headline News, Fox News, ABC,NBC, and CBS.. talk radio comes next with an even bigger stick to whack that cadaverous horse even further until a pulpy goop is all that remains.

What I find more interesting, indeed, far more informative then the President is what the shills all come out and say. When Shill brand blue speaks and when shill brand red speaks it helps me see how I should interpret the data. It gives me a great context to filter the fluff of a presidential speech.

Shill brand blue was vexed, vexed, by the president’s use of 9-11. They all said over and over again to the point of sounding like parrots “no connection between Saddam and 9-11”… But since I am told by the folks in the magic box that brand blue is the brand of nuance this very answer seems to run against what the people in the magic box want me to believe. Do the blue branders want me to think that Saddam and Osama were sitting around the legion of doom with Lex Luthor, Skeletor, and Professor Chaos and decided “Hey lets fly some planes into buildings.” That hardly seems a very nuanced thought line for the brand of blue.

Lets face it, the Hitler-Mussolini-Tojo thing… it really didn’t work out all that well for them. And the central powers let us not forget how obvious their actions were. So for the blue branders to say there is no connection they can hardly mean in a Hitler-Mussolini kind of way. Because we can have other forms of conspiracies then open or even covert ones like Hitler-Stalin. So I figured I would explore some of them today.

Saddam could have provided money and just money to Al-Qaeda. Saddam could have provided them some training. Both of these things are suggested by his use of Al-Qaeda operatives against the Kurds in the north, so he was free of any dirt on his hand. He could have provided them with either supplies or information; we have rumors and un finished investigations of the latter, but nothing of the like in the former. With all of these things Al-Qaeda became more capable and had more resources to allocate elsewhere. In a world of Nuance this could mean that he does have a connection to 9-11. But that is not what the blue branders; the supposed party of nuance seems to believe.

Saddam could have provided manpower; in a fashion that was knowing or unknowing, in a planed or unplanned fashion. We know several personal from Saddam’s Intelligence service have joined Al-Qaeda. We know one such person was a planner of the very first attack on the world trade center, and pioneered the first attempted use of commercial aircraft as weapons by the organization. So what did Saddam Know and when did he know it? Did elements of his regime act with Al-Qaeda without his knowledge? Here to the Blue Branders do not seem to see the nuance.
No it seems that the blue branders, who decry the red branders seeing things only in black and white and Manichean landscapes here, are very black and white in their vision. For them, those blue branders, the only connection that is justifiable is if Saddam himself sat with Osama drinking a few beverages and smoking things waiting for their great triumph to occur. The reason is simple, extremely so, that the blue branders do not want the people to view the two events as part of a single moral continuum. So they place a standard which is unrealistic, because their position requires moral separation.

But, in the way the president was speaking, he was not talking about the events on that September morning but on the larger war on terror. The Blue Branders here bark that these things are not connected. But then we must ask what the war on terror is? Is it just the US vs Al-Qaeda or is it something more? The president has pressed for the people of Lebanon to have a free and non manipulated election….Is this part of the war on terror? The president has pressed for a final settlement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue…. Is this part of the war on terror? The president has counseled the Saudi’s and Egyptians on the need to liberalize and they have done so…. Is this part of the war on terror? Is the war on terror just a war in the sense of soldiers in the field? Is the war on terror like the war on drugs? Or is it all these things and more?

If one were to take a nuanced worldview, one would see that all these actions fit into eliminating the environment where terror breeds. It is about Free states, free from corruption that become havens for business and growth. It is about states where people can live in freedom and as fully actualized humans. But this to the blue branders is not the war on terror. For they want it limited, selective, in moral purview to just those men who struck at us. Their war on terror is a war of revenge and defense. Hardly a nuanced view as it is for the Red Branders.

Maybe the men in the box are lying to me? Maybe the blue branders aren’t really nuanced? Or maybe the nuance is the sign of a mature policy that is well thought out? Or is nuance a way to excuse lack of planning? Or is nuance good some times and bad others. I don’t think the men of blue nuance will answer this question nor will the men in the magic box.

As the President’s chief made comments about the bluest of the blue and how they reacted to war, the blue shills on my TV had to strike out at the language that resembled that implication in the President’s address. Doesn’t that prove the point? That they seem interested in discussing these things in a political language that benefits them?

And now you see why I avoid the presidential address. It is in that moment where the greatest hypocrisy of our system is so utterly transparent to my eye. It is in that moment where the mediocrity not just of my government, but of those who watch and police the government, is so utterly naked and so totally sickening.

It makes me question that is this government really a product of the people, or is this like Jury duty where only those foolish enough to not avoid the system are those who serve.