OK, we are now entering Alternative Universe territory. According to Donald (Duck) Rumsfeld we are losing the war in Iraq…excuse me, he said we’re lagging “dangerously behind”, which isn’t exactly the same thing as winning…because Al Qaeda has better Blackberries.

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday.

And he really did, honest to god, actually say Blackberries:

The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

Oh, and Blogs too, notice how he mentioned Blogs? Notice he didn’t say Muslim Extremist Blogs but just Blogs? Study up on your Martin Niemoller boys and girls, it’s that time again.

This is phenomenal actually. This administration has managed over the last 6 years to convince Americans that this is the weakest, most defenseless country in the world which happens to have the World’s Greatest Military but can be brought to our knees by an enemy which is estimated to contain fewer active members than the population of Lichtenstein and not much better armed, on the whole.

And according the Rumsfeld this organization that is on the run and lightly armed has managed to bring us to our knees with their prowess with Blackberries and Blogger. Though of course we are the most technologically advanced civilization and culture in the History of the World.

But then their most effective weapon in their “war’ against us is fear and for that you need someone on the inside of our government, or many someones, to help spread that fear. Preferably as many someones as you can get to push the fear meme.

This is where the Bush Administration comes into the picture. Oh, they aren’t agents of Al Qaeda, not by a long shot. They have no desire whatsoever that Al Qaeda prevail. But Al Qaeda, and terrorists in general now that we’ve created our own breeding ground for them in Iraq, make marvelous boogeymen. Swarthy and dark and practicing an upstart religion that isn’t ours, they are the perfect nebulous but all-threatening monsters with which to frighten a shocked populace into compliance.

So they used them to their advantage. The best way to make people very afraid is to tell them not to be afraid, and tell them not to be afraid as often as you possibly can accompanied by as much vivid imagery as possible, Mushroom clouds will do nicely, as will apparently shoe bombs and blowtorches (the weapon of choice in the alleged terrorist plot to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches).

I am astounded at the boldness of this obvious plan of the administration, obvious by now because they have been engaged in seeing it through ever since 9/11. I suspect that the fear mechanisms they are using were already in place. Remember, before that September morning the Bush administration had spent much of its first year dismantling the intelligence capabilities focused on terrorists and had all but pulled out of the Middle East peace process, quite literally turning its back on the issue and shutting down the talks.

What they did do was to ramp up the high dollar budget aimed at Star Wars (aka Missile Defense) and begin to pump up the threat of rogue nations with missiles as the greatest threat to our borders. Notwithstanding that no “rogue” nation had missiles that could effectively reach the US, nor enough of a program to even begin to present a threat to us in any way.

And interestingly at the same time they also reduced our support of the operations in Russia and the former Soviet Republics that were designed to decomission the nuke warheads and render them useless, thus putting much of the old Soviet stockpile in the hands of under-, or un-, paid troops and scientists some of whom could be expected to realize the moneymaker they’d just been handed and make their toys available to the highest bidder, no questions asked.

It would not have been long before we would have heard and seen the ramping up of the fear of missiles heading over our horizon to turn us all to slag. But they didn’t need to work that hard, Bush’s God handed him a golden gift on September 11, 2001 and he had what he needed.

He could have been an FDR (”There is no fear but fear itself”) but instead he chose to be a Bush (daddy invaded Panama if you recall, a Profile in Courage if ever there was one…) and we quickly saw him and his sidekicks hard at work sowing the fear meme. (watch him sometime, whenever he says something like “so we don’t have to live in fear” he leans forward, smirks and gives that little head bob and stare that means “be afraid, be very afraid”).

So we have an administration that has managed to ramp up the hate rhetoric, fear mongering and lather of its most ardent supporters who scream about America’s Greatness and they’ve done it by convincing Americans that we are in more danger than we’ve ever been in our nation’s history…from the equivalent of Lichtenstein.

The Bush Administration doesn’t hate America, or Americans. It’s worse than that, they disdain them.

Oh, and check out the quote a little later on in that piece:

He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of “Saddam Hussein’s mass graves.”

….we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences.”

Interesting yes?  He begins by talking about the technological threat now posed by Al Qaeda by saying they are better at getting their message out to the public than “we” are.  Notice how he then morphs the terrorist threat neatly in a criticism of the media.  That’s clear code language to their ever shrinking base (Kate O’Beirne for example) that the real enemies of Americans  have their bylines on the front of pages of their newspapers and in the anchor chairs of all the networks, save one of course.

These guys are positively parasitic.