Xarker Manifesto: Bush & the neo-cons

The neo-cons and President George W. Bush

1. The Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and deliberately led the country into war based on a premeditated lie. This is a rational observation which, on its own, represents neither a liberal nor conservative point of view. People who strongly disagree with this statement should probably move along without bookmarking Xark! April 22, 2006 edit: I've been giving this one a lot of thought in recent months, and I've decided I was wrong when I wrote this in June 2005.  Today I offer a new statement: The Bush administration never seriously investigated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, because its stated reasons for going to war  never reflected its true reasons  for conducting the invasion. Those actual reasons remain a matter of conjecture. The callous, calculating dishonesty of the Bush administration's  case for war in 2002-03 is not. As  indicated by The Downing Street memo, facts were fixed to fit the case. Did the president know there were no weapons of mass destruction? A better question turns out to be, Did the president even care? And the answer is, no, he did not. 
2. George W. Bush was selected as the GOP nominee in 1999, before the party's primaries began in 2000, because of his willingness to carry out the agenda of the men who recruited him as their candidate. These men were not interested in his qualifications and didn't want to hear his ideas. They wanted only his obedience and electability. We call this  cabal --  the RAND/Carlyle Group/PNAC/Halliburton wing of the conservative movement -- "the neo-cons."
3. Today's America is out of whack thanks to  the co-opting of the federal government by the neo-cons on behalf of their corporate clients. By dismantling conventions, institutions and regulations that prevent the out-of-control concentration of wealth and power, the rich have embarked on a dangerous course that seeks to make permanent their temporary anti-democratic gains.
4. Bush ascended twice to the presidency because of election fraud. His victory in 2000 was not the first time that a presidential election was determined by corruption and thievery, but it was the first time that the son of a former president delivered the White House to his brother on behalf of a power structure that had circumvented the democratic process of its own party.
5. Because the neo-cons did not consider G.W. Bush capable of performing the job to which they were anointing him, he was given a running mate with the intelligence, experience and authority to handle situations in which decisions must be made without consultation. Consequently, in crisis, Dick Cheney runs the government while the President rides his bike or reads My Pet Goat.
6. The modern GOP is an unholy alliance between Christian conservative footsoldiers under the control of neo-con political leaders who manipulate their loyality on behalf of corporate paymasters. Though a successful partnership, it is fundamentally volatile and fated to implosion.
7. The neo-con agenda: Dismantle the vestiges of our capitalist democracy on behalf of a new system, one that combines economic power, overt militarism and totalitarian kitsch. It is the agenda of empire.

Editor's Note: The original Xarker Manifesto was published on this site on June 29, 2005. Subsequent changes and additions appear with a date attached.

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