Our friend Noah proffers us cheery tidings from Aldous Huxley, and fleshes out his suggestion that the ISG folks are engaged in an "intervention"

We were just talking about Cassandra, and in that happy tradition our friend Noah sends along a cheery:

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing overorganization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms--elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest--will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial--but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)


AND BACK ON THE SUBJECT OF THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP:

Noah fleshes out his suggestion yesterday that what we're really dealing with here is "an intervention"--"by the people who, along with the media, put W in the White House in the first place":

Look at the make up of the ISG. Among others, both Democrat and Republican, you have: 

1. Lee Hamilton--former Democratic congressman (Indiana), and a leader of the 9/11 Whitewash Commission
2. Lawrence Eagleburger--Daddy Bush's sec. of state 
3. Mean Ed Meese--Reagan's atty. general 
4. William Perry--sec. of defense under Clinton 
5. and perhaps the most ironic one, Sandra Day O'Connor, the former "Supreme" Court justice, who stated that she hoped W, not Gore, would win the 2000 election, so she could retire, then of course voted to install W in the "Supreme" Court's very un-American 5-to-4 decision.
 
Most, if not all, of the members of the ISG have a vested interest in the status quo of American foreign policy that W has willfully trashed so badly. The overlying factor is, of course, how healthy was that foreign policy to begin with? But that was no reason at all to stir the coals and pour gasoline on the fire. The members of the ISG at least have knowledge of how things work, no matter how corrupt the system, and no matter what better ways might exist. It takes a special uneducated arrogance to think you can just come in and trash the world in the name of some warped, delusional view of neocon-artist reality. That's what we have in our White House, and our country and world are suffering for it. 

On-the-job training for the mentally unstable is not the way to go, yet that is what our media and the power brokers have stuck the world with. We will need a whole lotta luck, and love, to recover, if we even can.--Noah