08.07.11
Where the bin Laden dividend went
Most seem to have noticed there’s been no dividend to the middle class. Bin Laden is offed and everything goes on as usual. The obvious wars continue. Secret operations escalate. The new secretary of defense and the head of the Pentagon go on television to complain that if the triggers on the terrible debt deal are ever allowed to activate, it will ruin them and threaten their ability to defend our freedoms from so many enemies.
All rubbish. They’re smart people and they know the only freedoms defended, not that everything is rotting out at home, are the freedoms to keep sending really big checks to the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons.
So where is the bin Laden dividend? Besides a week of celebration, the granting of access to the superdog on the trip — Cairo, and a story I declined to read in the New Yorker because it had been summarized so well everywhere else? Where did it go?
To Hollywood, of course. But you knew that something like this would happen:
The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker??? will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.
The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.
It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.
Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished??? glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.
Dowd can’t quite put her finger on what that “something” was.
It’ll be a great movie to watch, no doubt, after putting the price of the ticket, pop corn and soda on the credit card because your bank account is empty. We got the bad guy. They’ll be catchy and inspirational lines — lines no one actually said — at climactic moments. Some big deals in Hollywood will get to be even bigger deals in the winner-take-all great society. Yay.
João said,
August 7, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Yep. Yay,Yay! (not really).
So have you seen this http://youtu.be/3RcbpYR5Joc ?
Its called “The End of America”, and is quite disturbing, it details the, lets say, “fascist agenda” of the Bush administration, and as it seems, it hasn’t improved in this last years.
As a person the was born in times of fascism and dictatorship and had the chance to grow up with freedom I see the coming times in the US with great concern.
keep rocking
J.
George Smith said,
August 8, 2011 at 7:34 am
No. It didn’t get much play in America, was superseded by events. I’m watching it a bit now but when she comes onstage comparing the US of 2005 or 07 with Nazi Germany, it’s a bit superficial. There’s no Hitlerian leader in US recent political history. The economy is deindustrialized except for military manufacturing and in a liquidity trap. The second can be solved, the first first can’t particularly easily. Pre-war Germany was quite a bit different.
Anyway, what everyone missed — and it was easy to do — were the consequences of putting right wing extremists in the Tea Party in 2010. Hardly anyone seemed to realize how bad they could make things.And that was a political choice made by the voting public. Not one which was directed by the homeland security/national security structure.
Paradoxically, the Tea Party people are generally antagonized by things like the Patriot Act and way too much homeland security. But they’ve become the engine for national instability because of the power to stop the US government from acting responsibly on anything by choking off all spending.