Seymour Hersh, one of the few professional journalists who hasn't had a full-frontal lobotomy, was on The Daily Show the other night, and even Jon Stewart couldn't make Seymour laugh. Because Seymour has seen far too much. He's had the laughter wrung out of him.
He also spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and, among other things, compared the Bush administration to a cult. Here are a few gems:
On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists.
He goes on, and you can read it all courtesy of Democracy Now!, or just continue reading below for some of the best quotes.
...the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don't do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib.
Hersh's reporting on Iraq has the ability to look at both the big picture and the small picture at once. And as he has made clear, both pictures are dreadful. Here's some more truth-telling from Mr. Hersh.On the bogus, White House-created, media-adpoted term "insurgency":
Let's all forget this word “insurgency”. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against.
On the wounded troops:
...you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous.
On our economic situation in terms of the rest of the world:
Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here.
History will not smile upon Bush, or the millions of dumbkoffs (note my use of German! It's purposeful and ironic!) who support him and who, like him, refuse to read, to learn, to empathisize, to SOLVE PROBLEMS.