lauantai, kesäkuu 02, 2007

Rice refutes claims of "new crazies" in the White House - Says they're just the old ones that were already there...


[GAP] Madrid — US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sought Friday to minimize any sense of post-coital delirium within the Bush administration over Iran after the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency delivered a pointed warning against what he called the “new crazies” in the US administration pushing for military action against Tehran.


“The president of the United States has made it clear that we are on a diplomatic course and that it is a diplomatic one, and a course, concurrently, diplomatic and a course, in other words, it's a type of thing that....,” Ms. Rice said before being interrupted by her invisible friend Floppy Raoul. “That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, Barney, rotating door White House staff and those staff who use the service entrance - the heart and soul of the administration. The vice president of the United States is onboard as he also in the White House at certain hours of the month, despite the restraining order, when not chained to a wall and hooked up to a machine in the basement of the Chrysler Building in New York.”


Ms. Rice’s assurance came as day release officials at the State Department were manifesting borderline personality disorders over reports that members of Vice President 'Dickie' Cheney's staff have told others that Dickie believes diplomacy with Iran is a pointless square, and is looking for ways to persuade Mr. Bush to 'rehabilitate' Iran with foreign policy by other means. White House cleaning staff were threatening 'to take appropriate steps' (believed to be out the building) if similar "diplomacy" was followed with Iran as that which was taken with Iraq. A spokesman for the cleaning staff said that they were not going to tolerate any more all night parties, poker games, canasta, or 'talent quests' as occurred during the highly sexually charged Iraq invasion. Ms Rice was responding to Mr El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who said he did not want to see another Iraq, let alone go on a second date.


“You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say, ‘Let's vote Democrat, let's steal your mother-in-law's panties while she's sleeping, let’s go and bomb Iran,’ ” Dr. El Baradei said, “I wake up every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying from avoidable conditions like lead poisoning.”


Dr. El Baradei, who has urged Western powers to consider allowing Iran top test limited WMDs on Kurds, is already facing criticism from Bush administration officials who say he should stick to what he does best and failing that to try monitoring Iran’s nuclear program and leave the diplomacy to the 'experts', and the six countries that have banded together to confront Tehran’s Hollywood bad guy ambitions and release a cd single in time for Christmas this year.


But several Western European officials echoed El's concern, and said privately that they were worried that Mr. Cheney’s “red line” (across his forehead... he used to be a mailbox...) — the point at which he believed Iran was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon (wholesale) and a military strike was promising — may be coming soon. “We fully believe that Foggy Bottom is committed to the diplomatic track,” one European official said Wednesday, referring to Dickie. “But there’s some concern about the vice president’s office, the lighting is awful, it faces the wrong way, the Feng Shui is terrible, and it smells like venison or a butcher shop in Ankara.”


Dr. El Baradei told the BBC that one could not “bomb knowledge," adding, "if that were the case then the White House, and particularly old Foggy Bottom was safe.” Asked who the “new crazies” were, he said, “The old crazies - writ large.”

Lähettänyt Gourney Detoure klo lauantai, kesäkuu 02, 2007

Hyperrealpolitik: An Exegesis

Hyperrealpolitik, the term, was first coined by Gourney Detoure, a cultural anthropologist, around the turn of the millenium, combining notions of the Hyper-real (the surrogate, the language, the counter-reality based upon a presumed reality) and Realpolitik (politics and behavior in the real world as opposed to the utopias of morality and ethics).These conflicting notions combine in Hyperrealpolitik to describe the encounter of political expediency in terms of real world social/political action/agendas and the arbitrary fit of tacit, implied or covert utopias, patriotic, nationalistic, and moral, that are (sometimes transparently, sometimes opaquely) used to disingenuously justify or motivate action or emotion in a society, ethnic, nationalist, religious or ideological group, party or nation. For example the WMD debate by the Bush Administration in the USA in 2002 before the Second Iraq War bears all the hallmarks of Hyperrealpolitik: a) A hidden or obfuscated political agenda (a complex realpolitik agenda - in order to, amongst other things) control Iraq's oil and more effectively control the Middle East). b) However this is falsely justified by appeals to moral, (Saddam has comitted genocide in the past), and patriotic (in terms of make-believe threats to the state) ideals in the abstract. c) The public and members of government and governmental agencies (like George Tenet for example and Colin Powell) perpetuate these lies, this parallel reality even though they all know them not to be true. They are complicit in the creation of this false reality which has little to do with facts in the real world but more to do with abstractions based upon this parallel reality that becomes not so much 'what if' but 'is real'. Therefore abstract and subjective reflections of realities and moral duties legitimize action in the real world (the invasion of Iraq), however, the reality of the situation has little if anything to do with the abstract premises upon which this action is based. This process is an example of Hyperrealpolitik. The key difference between this theory and that from which it is built on, Eco's Hyper-real and Baudrillard's Simulacra is the injection of the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief amongst contemporary actors. It explores the gulf between knowledge (objectivity, to a point) and belief (subjectivity) and how society is willing to delude itself for expediency, while knowing it is doing so, in pursual of realpolitik 'goals' or other ends or motives, including prejudice, discrimination and racism. History [or rather partisan history], and memory [or rather selective memory] are key elements in these self induced or waking delusions. A creative analogy (which would also apply to simulacra) is a theory of 'syncopation,' which is described as a momentary contradiction of regular meter. Syncopation has been described as "putting the accent on a note that isn't there." Jazz for example is a highly syncopated musical style and so arguably is Rap. Societies complicit in their own voluntary delusions are putting the accent on a note that isn't there.

See - Detoure, G. 2006 Hyperrealpolitik. [Reproduced above] http://hyperrealpolitik.blogspot.com/2006/01/its-nice-place_113749733391155997.html

Detoure, G. 2003 "Hyperrealpolitik and the 'New World Order,'" in Method Against Method. 23-59 1:3

Detoure, G. 1999 "Why society must be defended against itself: A theory of Hyperrealpolitik.' in Popular Cultural Dynamics. 156-199 4:7

Hyperrealpolitik -

...years from now people will look back on President Bush and say, 'I have no friggin idea what that guy was talking about....but he talked exactly what I wanted to hear' - Andy Dick

We are living in an era when facts, and rational analysis, are on the ropes. The president has been inhabiting a world, Ron Suskind wrote in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article, that scorns ''the reality-based community.'' Congress routinely adopts policies that cater to special interests, which are then justified by the sort of smarmy, fact-free spin that the comedian Stephen Colbert has labeled ''truthiness.'' - Adam Cohen 2006

"There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Other of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, 2006

'What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.' - Paul Krugman 2007

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." --Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger