[A-List] Bush Declares Self 'Mega Decider'

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New documents ensure Dubya will rule America, should calamity strike.
Free balloons!

by Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

http://SFGate.com (May 30 2007)


It's just one of those obscure little unreported-upon conspiracy
theory-ready hunks of floating White House detritus, a couple of odd,
sticky, foul-smelling documents no one really wants to touch and no one
knows quite what to make of, probably means nothing, probably being
misread anyway, all a bit overblown and strange and not all that
important and not all that different than the way things are now.

Unless, you know, it's not. Unless the violent twinge of queasy paranoia
crossed with that uncontrolled bout of colon-clenching sighing you
experience is deadly accurate and your radar for all things sinister and
Rovean is right on target as you read about the delightfully titled
National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland
Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, wherein it is calmly and
furtively revealed that, in essence, George W Bush owns your sorry ass.

Or, to put it another way, it looks like the Bumbling One just gave
himself ever more power. Power to control and dictate the entire
government, power to really spread the gospel of happy GOP incompetence,
power to command the entire wobbly American universe should some sort of
epic - or not so epic, as the case may be - calamity strike the homeland.

It goes something like this: Should any "decapitating event" occur in
America that somehow incapacitates the DC power structure, should "any
incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels
of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the US
population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government
functions" take place, well then, all power and decision making would
devolve to the White House, which would then attempt to orchestrate our
very survival and oversee all essential governmental functions with none
other than the president himself as, well, Super-Mega Lord Decider. With
extra crayons.

You know, a dictator.

Wait wait wait, I hear you moan through your first pour of wine for the
day, a futile attempt to stave off the sucker punch of doom you received
from that last paragraph. There is nothing really new here. Hell, we've
had a silly, ominous, "Terminator"-tinged master plan for
post-apocalyptic America in place since Reagan was knee-high to a
simpleminded jellybean, plans for a scowling "shadow government" to run
the joint should, say, Russian nukes blow up all our Safeways or China
secretly buy up all our Skippy peanut butter.

And more recently, this plan was transferred into the hairy, pockmarked
arms of our own Homeland Security Department, which seems entirely
appropriate, given how you like to imagine such a plan living alone in a
dark and musty Pentagon subbasement stocked to the rafters with rusty
Winchesters and shiny bayonets and giant shoe box-sized satellite phones
from 1987 and a small mountain of vacuum-sealed emergency meat rations
that will last through 2197, or at least the next season of "24". Cool.

But now, Shrub has seen fit to dust the thing off and make a few, uh,
"revisions", most notably the one that appears to shift the
decision-making process away from Homeland Security (which was then to
disperse responsibility to various agencies and emergency services),
straight to the Oval Office itself because, hey, who better to decide
who gets to do what to whom when the s--- hits the fan than the most
secretive, warmongering, "never saw an illegal power grab it didn't
like" administration in American history? Gives you that warm, fuzzy,
well-protected feeling all over, doesn't it? Like a rash? In your spleen?

Even more heartwarming, "catastrophe", in the vague, nearly useless
language of these documents, could mean, why, just about anything at
all. Hurricane? Flood? Low polling numbers for Giuliani? A bad tattoo of
Alberto Gonzales' smirky face on Jenna Bush's sacrum? You bet! Because
who gets to decide what constitutes a "catastrophe"? Why, Shrub himself,
that's who. What's more, the event doesn't even have to occur in America
(see "regardless of location"). Such a perceived "disruption" can happen
anywhere in the world and with a press of the shiny red button next to
his bed, Bush kicks the Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) into
gear. Neat!

I know what you're thinking. And I completely agree: Such secret plans
are one of the most adorable, comic-booky aspects of dumb,
ultrasecretive administrations. After all, do many 'Merkins not love to
swoon and polish their NRA memberships as they imagine all those White
House suits suddenly turning into patriotic superheroes at the first
sign of a meteor strike or an attack by an alien super race or maybe
just if Iraq gets a bit too uppity and starts bootlegging illegal DVDs
of "The Office"? You bet they do.

And then boom, the nation goes into lockdown and it's a strict military
state and Lynn Cheney starts enjoying sweaty night visions of Dick
lumbering purposefully through the White House halls deciding who to
nuke next as Dubya quivers in the corner and the flying monkeys prepare
the escape pod. Just like in that Will Smith movie! Neat!

Let us now be serious for a moment. Let us hold back the sarcasm and
step back and breathe a sigh of relief because I'm sure Dubya's changes
to NSPD 51 mean a whole lotta nothing. I'm sure it's just another
standard - albeit a bit weird - governmental procedural, boring and
forgettable and just one of thousands of such indecipherable, hazily
unconstitutional legal quirkballs in the Pentagon's creaky file
cabinets, and Dubya's recent changes are just an honest tweak to what
really amounts to a rather ridiculous, fantastical document in the first
place. Yes, surely it's just a bunch of silly leftist paranoia to think
that something dark and nasty could result from such a move.

After all, Shrub only has a year and a half left in office. Plus, his
power has been severely truncated by the Dems. Why would he care to try
for such a thuggish, cagey power grab now? What would be the point?
Except, you know, to savagely tilt the next election and to further the
new 'n' brutal neocon agenda of perpetual war and as a desperate,
last-gasp move to prove he actually has the cojones to do something so
appalling, so perfectly megalomaniacal, it's sure to rescue his rotten
legacy from history's compost pile? I mean, besides that.

_____

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him at mmorford@xxxxxxxxxx .

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday
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(c) 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

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