Bushthink, and the Strength of Venezuelan Steel

Here's the latest quote from a White House senior advisor sounding like O'Brien schooling Winston Smith strapped to the rack in the Ministry of Love:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Bushthink's created reality is on display in The Weekend at Bernie's romp across Iraq of that feisty one-legged dead man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since most mainstream American organs purged themselves long ago of the remaining vestiges of oldthink, only a few on the margins of the respectible press recall the earlier pronouncements of his amputation and death, and the peculiar loss of his Jordanian accent on the notorious Nick Berg tape. (And Berg's own story, with his bizarre Oklahoma connection to Zacharias Moussaoui and the denial that he had ever been in US custody in Iraq, was subjected to its own vigorous campaign of Bushthink.) Seymour Hersh recently suggested that Zarqawi is a composite character, but according to Richard Perle's reality Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, so don't expect Hersh alone, this time, to overturn conventional madness.

Zarqawi may be a ghost, but to perpetual war strategists in need of a villain, he's a friendly ghost, and a valuable one at that. (His reputed oath of allegiance to al Qaeda couldn't have been more welcome, since it post facto resolves, according to the new reality, the problem of Iraq's lack of ties to the SPECTRE-like gang of Islamo-supermen bent on world domination.) So let's call him Goldstein 2.0, since the Osama release was quite buggy, especially in the kidneys.

But Bushthink hasn't carried all before it - there are still proletarian pockets which ought to be cleansed and freethinkers who need to be made sane. And Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is the loudest and surest voice on the world stage to affirm that 2 + 2 is still, and always, 4.

Though Chavez's threat of jail for governors who lose in the Oct 31 election but refuse to leave office certainly bucks the precepts of Bushthink, the latest example from Venezuela is the stubborn resistance of the East Tower of the Parque Central block to obey the new physics of the War on Terror. The 56-storey Caracas landmark has been burning since Saturday, and still hasn't folded neatly into its footprint, as we've been led to expect steel-frame structures are wont to do from fires in the post-9/11 era.



Ever since 9/11 changed everything, a steel-framed structure doesn't need so much as a passenger jet strike to make it topple. The collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, the third-steel frame high rise to collapse due to fire in history, and all on the same day, proved that. So what's the deal, Caracas? You're so far behind the times, it's not funny.

Of course, the usual thought criminals suspect Building 7 came down for other reasons. Such reasons as its tenants who, it's suspected, may have had secrets they wanted disappeared. Tenants of Building 7 included the CIA, which had a clandestine bunker on the 23rd floor; the Department of Defense; the US Secret Service; New York City's Office of Emergency Management (immediately replaced by the bigger, better FEMA camp established in lower Manhattan for the coincidentally scheduled "TRIPOD 2" biowar drill); a number of banks implicated in wire transactions to the 9/11 hijackers; and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which lost many irreplaceable filings in the collapse, including those pertaining to Enron.

These same sick in the head conspiracists persist in the belief that a video tape exists in which World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein said, about Building 7:

I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.



Since "pulling" a building requires the knowledgeable placement of demolition charges, and there was no time to wire the building on September 11, the charges must have been placed beforehand, in anticipation of the attack. Therefore, in Bushthink, this is all crazy talk and must never have happened.

But perhaps it was possible charges were set in other than the conventional fashion, though they would still need a lead time that preceded the crashing of airliners. For what it's worth, there's this new curio to add to the mix:

...the Chinese Companies in WTC tower that specialized in "Spray o­n Demolition Explosives" --called "Slurry Explosives" ..a company that also specialized in high rise demolition ...and it's connection with the company o­n the same floor that specialized in "high rise" fire extinguishing products which happens to have a secret formula that is highly effective to put out Jet Fuel o­n contact.

How fascinating that would be...the "airplanes hit"...the "sprinkle heads start to sprinkler a very foul smelling liquid.." according to some survivors? The jet fuel NEVER caught hold. The fire was from another source. Other explosions were detonated. Then the "slurry" explosives that were used to cover the interior girders of the building instead of the "spray o­n fire-proofing" that was contracted for by the Port Authority. Otherwise, what a silly coincidence for a "Chinese" company that just happens to install both "anti-jet fuel" spray o­n fireproofing and "spray o­n explosives for high rise demolition."

The company was working on the developement of remote control aircraft and on Sept 6th I recieved word that some of my people may have been released from China to work on a change over of ATC Radar. I was told they had been contacted to be in a work detail in the WTC which was being renovated.

Whatever the truth, it may be worth noting that the WTC elevator system was undergoing renovation in early September 2001, which would have provided access to the core columns.

Regardless, Cheney willing, someday the structural integrity of Venezuelan high rises will rise to match the spectacular performance of the former New York City skyline.