On the 9/11 Tragedy and the Fugue State Known as Boy George's Magic Kingdom

I spent a good part of my birthday today attending the Internet Telephony Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center. While I was catching up on current VoIP trends, I came within a hair of finally winning the iPhone I promised my landlord and good friend Joe I would win. Needless to say, it's back to the drawing board.

As always, I kept num about 9/11 being my birthday, questioning the propreity of even acknowledging it as over 3,000 peopel perished in perhaps the most insidious terrorist attack carried in our own back yard.

Given what has transpired since then, here is my personal take on exactly what happened: Those within the Bush II administration have known, or should have known, that a terrorist attack was being planned, despite red-flag warnings from the likes of then-FBI agent Colleen Rowley. It is my personal belief that those within the administration allowed the attacks to happen so they can opportunistically take advantage of the traumatic situation and use it as a smoke screen to impose repressive measures (i.e. the "Patriot Act") so that they could consolidate and expand its power and control over the rest of us. That Congress and the media proved itself so cowardly supine in allowing themselves to do the administration's biding would only serve to embolden the knaves within the administration to where those who dare to dissent would be targeted for retribution or worse.

It all boils down to this: we were sold a false bill of goods -- Saddam Hussein did not have any wapons of mass destruction all along -- and now we are engulfed in a quagmire in Iraq where ulterior motives are driving the administration's agenda (Remember back in the 70's, when Henry Kissinger once suggested we wage a war in the Middle East to drive down the price of crude oil?). It wasn't until we awoke from this fugue state we were operating in (a.k.a. Boy George's Magic Kingdom) and the Democrats finally regained control of both houses of Congress, that we are now discovering the very tip of what is now proving to be a very ugly iceberg.

The corruption in the Bush administration is epidemic, it is endemic, and our government is now so profoundly subverted and compromised to where it adversely affects many, if not all aspects of our lives. Case in point is our Justice Department, where it become so politicized to where federal prosecutors like Carol Lam, David Iglesias, Paul Charlton, and others were targeted for retribution because they dared to prosecute Republicians like disgraced former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham for criminal activities even as Democrats like ex-Alabama governor Don Siegelman was targeted for prosecution on the basis of one's political party. And for all their talk about the Clinton White House turning the Lincoln bedroom into a pay-for-play bed & breakfast operation to reward their donors, the Bushies turned our government into a bordello, where people prostitute themselves and professional incest has compromised our government's ability to function.

Like Teapot Dome and Watergate before it, this was a scandal that kept festering and simmering beneath the surface, waiting to explode like methane gas seeping out from beneath the ground. There's now so much corruption waiting to be exposed that it's easy to understand why President Boy George and his Bushies are playing "I've Got a Secret" by hiding behind its incessant claims of executive privilege. Clearly, they have something to hide, and everybody within its very orbit is indeed guilty of something.

There is a word that describes Boy George's Magic Kindgom ("I don't want realism, I want magic," to borrow a famous line from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire), yet it's never used in a socially acceptable context...outside of the Marine Corps: clusterfuck.

Let's hope this national nightmare finally comes to an end, sooner if not later. And while we're at it, how about throwing a big blanket over our nation's capital and start fumigating.