(DV) Amr: Operating America From a Bingo Hall

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Operating America From a Bingo Hall
by Ahmed Amr
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 24, 2004
First Published in NileMedia.com

I am starting to believe that America is currently operated from a bingo hall in Florida. If this sounds outlandish, just pay a little attention to the neo-con lads who now infest the corridors of power in the Beltway.

Most Americans don’t know what a neo-con looks like. You could load all the neo-cons in America on a Greyhound bus and still have room for a dozen US marshals to accompany them to their treason trials. Statistically, you are more likely to meet an American Maoist than a neo-con of any nationality. If you think I exaggerate the minuscule size of this political "movement", than how come you’ve never met a real live neo-conservative? Just because these freaks are constantly beamed into your living room by FOX doesn’t mean they actually exist. In the real world you can’t find a trace of them on the political landscape of America’s heartland. In political parlance, they have no footprint, no constituency and are not a political party.

Your average American probably thinks neo-cons are wise guys that fleece the public with new and improved Three-Card Monty scams. But among the cultural elite, the word neo-con is short for "neo-conservatives". They added "neo" to their political label because the authentic American conservative movement considered them too suspect to embrace when they defected from the left wing of the Democratic party. In fact, the vast majority of conservatives resent the fact that a few dozen Likudnik activists managed to hijack their political creed by simply adding a three-letter prefix to the conservative logo.

Over time, we all encounter real live Americans with views that span the whole spectrum of every political doctrine developed since Adam and Eve. The vast majority are likely to identify themselves as Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, Right Wing, Left Wing, Libertarians, Greens, Independents or uninterested.

Once you veer to the fringe of the mainstream spectrum you encounter other political subcultures. They come in two varieties; the single-issue activists and the ideologically impaired. Single-issue groups are folks who identify themselves by such labels as environmentalists, pro-life, pro-choice, minority rights and civil rights activists, feminists and so on. Moving to the ideological margins, one finds small clusters of Maoists, Monarchists, Marxists, Michigan Militia members, Gray Panthers and Flat Earth agitators. In actual body count, even the tiniest most marginal American political movement outnumbers the neo-conservatives.

The neo-cons are unique in American history in that they did not rise to power on the strength of a grass roots constituency. Rather, they came to rule the United States by deploying a few high caliber think tanks in the nation’s capital.

We will not go into the details of the neo-con coup de etat. That story has already been well documented by quite a few independent journalists including Jim Lobe, Justin Raimondo and Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel. In their very informative articles, they point out that most of the neo-con tribe can trace their origins to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and JINSA, The Jewish institute for National Security Affairs.

The largest contributor to the AEI is Irving Moskowitz, a bingo hall operator from Florida. He is a militant supporter of the Jewish settlement movement in Israel and the occupied territories. Going down the list of Bush Administration foreign policy gurus, one encounters dozens of graduates of the AEI, a pro-Israeli lobby group that camouflages itself in the garb of a pseudo-academic ‘research’ establishment. In fact, the only thing they research at the AEI is the best marketing strategies for selling Sharon’s real estate fantasies with a ‘made in America’ label.

The AEI is not Harvard or Yale or even South Seattle community college. They don’t have a campus and their website warns visitors that they might have parking problems on a visit to their offices. In fact, in the lobby business, the AEI is not that extraordinary. It has a budget of about $30 million, a staff of fifty or so Likudnik operatives puffed with fancy labels like “resident scholar” and “AEI fellow”.

So, how did this bingo hall financed ‘enterprise’, a lobby working for the account of a foreign government, end up placing over twenty of its graduates in the most sensitive positions at the Pentagon and the State department? The short answer is they rode into town on a Trojan horse named Dick Cheney. His wife still draws a paycheck from the AEI. The Vice President along with Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, John Bolton and Elliot Abrams all have long standing ties to the American Enterprise Institute and other institutions under the Israeli Lobby umbrella.

After placing so many of their operatives in such sensitive second tier positions; the next step for this bingo hall subsidized cabal was to project their presence on the national stage. For this task, they recruited mass media operatives like William Safire, who boasts about writing Sharon’s speeches and Charles Krauthammer, a designated OSP leaker. Some of the other neo-con media personalities are Judith ‘WMD’ Miller, Wolf ‘War Room’ Blitzer, Aaron ‘arson’ Brown, Andrea Mitchell (a centerfold on AEI’s web site) and Ted Koppel, a family friend of Netenyahu. By far, the most formidable part of their media arsenal is Rupert Murdoch’s neo-con gang at FOX. The Weekly Standard and the New York POST.

On account of their friends in high media places, the neo-cons were given a virtual monopoly on using the giant podiums at CNN and FOX plus open access to the editorial pages of the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Newspaper syndicates further amplified their message by distributing neo-con editorials to every major municipal paper across the country. So, if you missed them on FOX, you were certain to read their opinions in your morning paper.

Consider the strange case of Richard Perle. Believe it or not, he is not even a government official. Still he roams the globe issuing threats to the French, the Turks, the Russians and the Arabs like he was the uncrowned emperor of the realm. He shows up in Jerusalem with the likes of a bigot like Daniel Pipes to swear allegiance to the vision of a ‘Greater Israel’. Yet Perle’s only connection to the government is that he belongs to the Pentagon equivalent of the PTA, the Defense Policy Board. What kind of education programs would we have if a member of your local PTA could usurp the power of the Department of Education? Among other things, this extremist Likudnik chickenhawk arrogated to his neo-con cabal the power to dress down four star generals on battle strategies. He proclaimed that troop deployment requirements were a “political decision that they were not qualified to make”. Maybe we should close down West Point and open the Richard Perle Center for the Advanced Study of Middle East Invasions.

Moving on to Paul Wolfowitz. Since when did a Deputy Secretary of Defense have such a high public profile? Can you name a single Deputy Secretary of any Department since George Washington? How exactly did the position of a Deputy Secretary evolve to the point where he could usurp the power of the State Department? How about Bolton, the man who doesn’t “do carrots”? It is an open secret in Washington that his role at the State Department is to watch over Colin Powell and make sure that Foggy Bottom marches to the beat of the neo-con war drums.

While projecting themselves as a political movement, the neo-cons went shopping for a ‘real’ constituency. They found willing allies among the millions of Americans on the Christian Right who believe Armageddon is around the corner. All it took to convince them was the promise that the neo-con agenda would speed up the end of times. The pitch was that Sharon’s repression of the Palestinians was part of the All Mighty’s plan to bring on the final days.

Now that their war games have unraveled, the neo-con cabal is smearing their detractors as anti-Semites while canvassing the exit doors. Once they regroup, you will probably find them in Florida gathered around Moskowitz, their patron saint. After a little rest, they will be back in the business of writing new manuals for operating America. Believe it or not, some little old lady in Miami is marking a bingo card and changing the history of the world.

Ahmed Amr is the Editor of NileMedia, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at: Montraj@aol.com.