Hightower Lowdown

Wow, has it really been five years since "Mission Accomplished?" It seems like only yesterday that our Glorious Leader was strutting around in a top-gun outfit, cockadoodling about American prominence in the world and wallowing in job-approval ratings of 28%. [ read more ]

LOOK OUT--HERE THEY COME AGAIN! Bush & Buckshot are riding their little stick horses, waving the bloody flag of 9/11, demonizing another Muslim nation, shouting warnings about weapons of mass destruction, bellowing for regime change, and generally trying to whoop up a new war. Having done so well in Iraq, George W and Cheney are pushing feverishly to hype up a national-security threat and commit our nation, our bedraggled military, our depleted treasury, and our country's already-tarnished name to another of their fantasyland, neocon, preemptive invasions of a sovereign people who are doing no harm to us. Their target this time: IRAN.

You might be thinking, oh, come on, Hightower, surely not. You're paranoid--even the Bushites aren't that crazy. I wish.

The drums of war

For such leading neocon zealots as Norman Podhoretz, bombing and even invading Iran are about protecting "our" Mideastern oil, strengthening Israel's regional power, and continuing Western control of the restive Muslim majority in the Middle East. Podhoretz and other true believers assert that there's an urgent need for Israel and the West to crush Iran's Muslim government now, frantically wailing that it intends to destroy America and control the world. Even though Iran has made no threats to the U.S., the neocons see regime change there as the key to winning "World War IV" (they insist that the Cold War was World War III) against what they have dubbed "Islamofacism."

How nutty are they? Podhoretz concedes that by attacking such an influential Islamic nation, Bush would "unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a lovefest." Yet this Dr. Strangelove maniacally declares, "I pray with all my heart that he will." Now there's a prayer to a truly fiendish god! [ read more ]