Things Look Different From the Top

I know we're kind of a laid back blog site but this story is really an important one. I found it over at War and Piece, Laura Rozen's journalistic site, but I would have encountered it eventually because I know people who work for BAE and I was just talking to a Channel Four newscaster (hello Jon! If you are bored in Iraq and surfing the web!) about them. In a Nutshell, this is the story of how politics and political decisions really get made up at the top. When a bribery and military industrial complex scandal got too close to the House of Saud, they literally blackmailed the Prime Minister of England into dropping the case using the threat of major terrorism against an English city.

People have written a lot of silly stuff about what they would have done if they'd been, for example, HRC in the run up to the AUMF and what they think Obama will or won't do when he gets into power (g-d willing.) I've tried to point out something that democrats and the man on the street just don't seem to get--power and danger look differently to you when you are at the top of the power pyramid and not at the bottom. I have no doubt that on Obama's first day in office he will be shown, by some cabal of *&^% wise men that includes the corpses of Kissinger, Negroponte, and a host of the other undead militarists, jingoists, baby rapers, nun torturers, clapped out whores of the carlysle group and pimped up blackwell mercenaries a series of paper threats that will be a combination of true and untrue, very serious and utterly spurious. And Obama is going to have to sort them out and take the chance that he is wrong on some big thing even if he is right on a host of little things. None of us know what he will do. And for darn sure none of us know what we would do if we aren't strong enough to keep the cockroaches from the oval office in the first place.
aimai