Friday, June 15, 2007

Why the President is a Puppet

To understand why the President is a puppet, it is important to think of the President as primarily a communications hub. The volume of sensitive information passing across the President's desk makes the President a valuable intelligence-gathering target.

This is why the President is always surrounded by so many people: it is important to pass information directly from person to person because, for many communications, the use of communications technology is a counter-intelligence liability.

The President probably doesn't carry a cellphone all that often. Since the FBI can access your cellphone's GPS chip, or can remotely activate the microphone, so can some disgruntled Nokia or AT&T employee. The President needs to have many person-to-person communications for security reasons.

COINTELPRO AND THE PATRIOT ACT, THE WTO, CLIMATE CHANGE, THE GREEN RUN, PROJECTED OIL RESERVES, ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, THE 1996 COMMUNICATIONS ACT, NOAM CHOMSKY, SEVENSTORIES, THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENTS, HOWARD ZINN, USA WEAPONS EXPORTS, LAND MINES, OIL AND WARS, HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES, TORTURE, PSYOPS COMES HOME , POLITICAL PRISONERS IN THE USA, THE CREEL COMMISSION, MEDIA CONSOLIDATION AND FREE SPEECH, THE BILL OF RIGHTS, GREG PALLAST, BBC WORLD, FEED THE CHILDREN, DEMOCRACYNOW.ORG, LABOR RIGHTS, SIAPAM AND DELAY, RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK, NATIONAL DEBT, LARGEST EXPORT OF THE USA, MISSLE DEFENSE AND THE ARMS RACE, THE MILITARY BUDGET, THE MITLITARIZATION OF SPACE, BIOTECH, WHITE PHOSPHOROUS AND FALLUJAH, WARS CRIMES OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, NEWS CORP AND MEDIA CONSOLIDATION, WHAT DO ATTORNEY GENERALS DO?, BILL CLINTON AND THE WTO, AND BILL CLINTON AND THE 1996 COMMUNICATIONS ACT
The content of the communications with which the President is entrusted contain implicit or explicit instructions regarding how the President ought to behave. Either a piece of information is not to be divulged, or it may only be divulged under certain circumstances. Every communication the President receives says either "do this" or "don't do this," and the President is entrusted with skillfully discerning and faithfully following these instructions.

In many instances, specific phraseology is important. Between the nuances of jargon, inner-circle meetings, and the spin-doctor's propaganda marketing prescription, one word or a few letters can make a world of difference to different people. "At the end of the day," "make no mistake," "going forward," "support the troops," "family values" -- people pledge allegiance to these terms. The President needs to identify which phrases serve as proper nouns, which as verbs, which as convenience, which as ornament; and the President needs to know how to act accordingly.

In many instances, the President may not know what a specific phrase means to a specific group of people, although the phrase may fit quite comfortably inside a sentence of otherwise ordinary speech. The President just follows orders. It was no excuse at Nuremberg, but it's how our present government operates. This is why third-party candidates have difficulty breaking into Washington politics: third-party candidates are outsiders who don't know what phrases motivate various interests, or which phrases tell various interests "I understand what you really want, and I'll help you get it." The consolidation and perpetuation of this pass-phrase system is why the central government seeks to expand its influence into local realms.

Most of the Administration doesn't turn over every four years. The phraseology and popular parlance of various departments have a life of their own, to which any new President must adapt. The concept of "Homeland Security" was already in use among various military circles in the 1990's. This is a concept which has lived in the Administration for years. Sami G. Hajjar discusses "homeland defense" in the 1998 report, "Security Implications of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East." The Department of Defense Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstration program proposed the Homeland Security Command and Control several months prior to September 11, 2001. Although I can't recall ever thinking of my country as my "Homeland" until after 911, it would seem a good number of military professionals have been working out this doctrine for some time. The Department of Homeland Security is not something the President thought up in a pinch, it is something the President assembled for entrenched political interests. The President may not be fully aware of the scope of the communications he issues, but one thing is clear: whenever the President talks about "homeland security," there are groups of people all over the place who behave according to decades of doctrinal development.

And so the puppet is also a puppeteer, albeit one with a limited understanding of the drama that is unfolding. And so this is why a Washington outsider would serve the American people better than a career politician from the ranks of the political aristocracy: an effective outsider would need to ask all sorts of people what they mean when they speak, whereas a Crown Prince who has lived his life immersed in the secret incantations need not understand them to see how they are used.

2 comments:

-blessed holy socks, the non-perishable-zealot said...

Wonderfull. You go, girl!! Take down the smelly BO through Civil Disobedience. Won't you join me in Heaven Above, too, where I can kiss your adorable feet and snuggle with you for the length of eternity? God bless you. Meet me in the Great Beyond.

-blessed holy socks, the non-perishable-zealot said...

Whoops. I thot you was a gurl. My fault. HawrHawr