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“What this suggests about the people running America is far worse than if they were simply malevolent super-geniuses: They don’t know the backstory and couldn’t care less. It’s as though we’re riding in the back seat of a car driven by people who demanded the wheel but aren’t sure what the gas pedal does or what a stop sign actually looks like.”

- from Jonathan Schwartz’s reflections on Bill Kristol’s March 28, 2003 debate with Daniel Ellsberg on CNN

No, I think maybe they actually are malevolent. I can’t seem to distract myself from the perspective of God in the Final Judgment. We gave them napalm! That’s pretty much malevolent’s very definition, yup.

Back up. This is a quote from Jonathan Schwarz’s wonderful article in TomDispatch.com, “The Lost Kristol Tapes,” first seen by me on commondreams. This article is wonderful because it slaps back into his seat that petulant man-baby, Bill Kristol, who wants so bad to get his hands on the launch codes, but somehow (God, maybe?!) keeps getting held back into position as “journalist,” or “advisor,” or, once, Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. Maybe the neocons are smart enough to know that certain people, if given absolute power, would destroy the whole sand box.

This quote hit me for the power of its imagery, but as I went to insert it into the rotation on my random-quotes generator, I realized that I don’t necessarily agree with it. (And a basic criterion for inclusion into my random quotes list is that I whole-heartedly agree and couldn’t have said it better myself.) The reason I don’t agree with it completely is because of the compelling case Naomi Klein has built in her book, Shock Doctrine, which I’ve written about already here. Klein’s case is that the bad guys in charge of things are doing bad things because they’re bad. And that they have their media megaphones blaring that they are not bad guys, they’re just incompetent; nice covering fire in their war on our freedoms.

In the course of the debate, Ellsberg makes the by-now-common-knowledge point that the CIA put Saddam Hussein in power as the dictator of Iraq, presumably because the guys in charge back in the 1960’s felt that Saddam was the lesser evil. Brilliant reasoning, but it works for these guys. And according to those Ba’athists then who are writing books about it now, the U.S. gave the new CIA-friendly regime napalm in order to put down an uprising by Kurdish rebels. Yes, the same people who died later by Saddam’s use of chemical weapons technology supplied to him by…. guess who. Yeah, that’s right: the bad guys.

“They hate our freedoms;” that’s been a popular meme injected into public consciousness this war ’round. They should take more care of their choice of words; we’ve all read Orwell, after all. As Shock Doctrine makes clear, the only ones who hate our freedoms are the wealthy disaster capitalists who have lied their way to the top and intend to quietly take away all those freedoms we have to knock them down from there, and kick them back into their smoke-filled back rooms. THEY, the bad guys in charge of American political and financial power at the moment, THEY are the ones who hate OUR freedoms. They are, according to their own bad attempt at manufacturing consent, the real terrorists. They rule by fear, they hate our freedoms; let’s start a war on terror that takes down the true Terrorists. We, The People, simply own too much power for the comfort level of those who insure their future luxuries through the practice of such crass, greedy, meanness that Machiavelli would take it all back.

The beauty of our War on Their Terror is that it’s waged in our courtrooms, in our ballot boxes, and in our House, the Congress. Act, America, before all your freedoms are permanently sacrificed on the altar of the pleasures of powerful elites.

Read the links, and you decide.