Bernard Weiner: BS Away! - The Miracle Truth-Spray

A scientist friend from Silicon Valley, who has been working on a top-secret project for the past three years, permitted me to visit his laboratory the other day to witness the results of his labors. He's calling his patent-applied-for invention "B.S. Away!"

He's sworn me to secrecy about the details of how and why it works, but, since he's about to bring it to market, he said it's OK for me to describe its essence: You can either spray it on the person engaged in B.S.ing, or on printed matter (and even on the computer screen) that carries the bullbleep. Instantly, it transforms the B.S. speech into simple English truth. It's amazing!

Let me give you an example. Bush, who always claims he wants folks to accept responsibility for their actions, is incapable of ever admitting that he might have made a mistake, and even more so these days in the run-up to the November election. You've heard and read all the many assertive statements over the months -- by Bush and his chief cohorts -- that the administration absolutely, positively KNEW the weapons of mass-destruction were there in Iraq, and even the exact areas where they were to be found.

Now we push the nozzle and the "B.S. Away!" sprays out. Voila! Here's Bush's truth version:

"My most important advisers -- including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and the whole PNAC crew -- were out to get Iraq even before we took office. We sorta knew that Iraq was going to be a pushover in the war. That's why we chose to bomb and invade it, so that we'd have an easy time establishing a military foothold in the Middle East.

"We didn't feel we could get Congressional permission to invade Iraq if we told the truth -- that there were strategic, political, corporate and natural-resource reasons to conquer that country -- so, since the CIA wouldn't give us the WMD report we wanted, Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans cherry-picked the raw intelligence to get the WMD justification. We hyped it to the press and public, and the invasion began. We were hoping we wouldn't get caught out -- that there would be lots of leftover WMD there to justify our propaganda -- but, unfortunately, nothing showed up. The lies and deceptions and manipulations were out there for all to see.

"On top of that, we grossly underestimated the resistance we'd get from huge segments of the Iraqi population, who chose to see us as their Occupiers rather than their Liberators -- we got played big time by the Iraqi exiles -- and how an ongoing guerrilla resistance over time would build a sophisticated network to attack our soldiers and those Iraqis working with us. Our troops had no nation-building Plan B and became, and remain even today, easy targets for those wanting to force us out.

"If the Iraqis will just cool it for awhile, we'll be out of the main fighting areas by July, when we'll return a manageable kind of 'sovereignty' to the Iraqis (our military forces still will be there, at our bases, as a warning not to go too far). Well sure, that July timetable has more to do with our own election cycle in this country rather than what's happening on the ground in Iraq -- but we've simply got to defuse the Iraq issue before the election; I'm being battered on our Iraq debacle daily from the Democrats. After I win in November, everything can be rethought and reversed, if we choose to. We'll have four more years to work our will, and there isn't anybody strong enough to stop us, inside the U.S. or out."

KERRY AND HIS WAR-VOTE

Want to see another example? Take John Kerry's wishy-washing fudging and waffling on his vote to authorize Bush's war in Iraq. He says that he voted for the resolution because he believed that "the Administration would wait for U.N. authorization" before it launched its attack.

I'm spraying "B.S. Away!" on my computer screen now. There it is -- Kerry's move into truthtelling:

"I want to clear up the whole Iraq-vote business, right here and now. My fellow Americans, I was wrong, horribly wrong. I let my political ambitions box me into a corner -- wanting not to appear 'unpatriotic' -- instead of standing up and saying, as only a few did, that this war had no rational justification, and yet we were willing to spend untold billions to send our young men and women into a rat's nest of little-understood tribal and religious complexity. I permitted myself, and I wasn't the only one, to be snowed by the neo-con arguments and didn't even stop to consider the parallels with the war that made my reputation, Vietnam.

"So I apologize for my vote. I should have known that Presidents lie, and that this President, who'd already made up his mind long before to go to war, was not about to return to the U.N. for authorization. I vow never to permit myself to be rolled so easily, and always to remember the lesson from Vietnam: never get our military involved in a ground war in Asia, especially in countries and cultures we don't really understand."

Want a couple more?

CONDI RICE AND 9/11

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that Bush/Cheney and their national-security team "had no idea" that hijacked airplanes might be used as weapons. She also said the August 6, 2001 Presidential Briefing Report -- which contained warnings about an imminent, massive Al Qaida attack -- referred only to their activities abroad, not to any terror plot heading our way.

Here, have a misting of "B.S. Away!", Condi.

"Well, OK, I lied. We had been receiving reports all spring and summer of 2001 that Al Qaida was coming, and that hijacked airplanes would be employed, probably aimed at icon American targets. That's why Bush hightailed it to his Texas ranch for a whole month, and Ashcroft and others stopped flying on commercial airlines.

"The point is that in order for us to initiate and have any chance of carrying out our domestic and international agendas, we needed to have a compliant, frightened American populace, who would be willing to giving us all the power we needed. Since Al Qaida was coming anyway, we chose to do little or nothing and use 9/11 as our launching point. But, please believe me, we had no idea of the full magnitude of what Al Qaida had in store for our country.

"Because we were dissembling to begin with, the coverup just naturally followed. Cheney requested of the leaders of Congress, especially Daschle and Gephardt, not to investigate the pre-9/11 knowledge of the Bush Administration, for 'national security' reasons. They obliged. But eventually we couldn't ignore the growing calls for an independent investigation, so we delayed and postponed and stonewalled their requests for information -- hoping that there would be no definitive report on our pre-9/11 activities, only incomplete surmises. We're still covering up, since nobody has to testify under oath, and we'll probably get away with it."

BUSH AND THE AWOL SCANDAL

Bush has stated unequivocally that he "fulfilled his duties" in the National Guard in the early-'70s, that he served with honor, that he got an "honorable discharge" -- and that's the end of it.

Spray on some "B.S. Away!", and here's Bush's truer version:

"I was a wild, spoiled kid, who spent a good share of my 20s drinking, smoking, snorting and chasing skirts. My family and their wealthy friends always bailed me out. My dad's clout -- he was a Congressman, and then U.N. ambassador -- got me skipped over 500 other applicants anxious to avoid service in 'Nam and I joined the Guard. I trained and flew for awhile. I didn't want to have to take the annual medical exam, for reasons that probably are obvious. (Because I wouldn't submit to the exam, that meant I couldn't fly anymore, dammit!)

"So, sure, I didn't show up in Alabama very much...well, hardly at all. But the paperwork got filled out and I received an honorable discharge -- it was fairly easy to arrange all that in those days -- in case I ever ran for office. Oh yeah, we 'cleansed' the files later, I think it was 1998, so there would be no embarrassing revelations about my Guard duty and my brushes with the law.

"I don't know why I just didn't fess up about my missing Guard duty when I first went into politics -- just tell folks right out that those were 'youthful indiscretions.' Usually, Americans are very forgiving to those who sin and confess, especially when they're young. Coverups always are worse than the crime, and they drag out endlessly. Clinton knows that, and I now know that."

RUMMY AND THE MIDDLE EAST

And, here's one from Donald Rumsfeld, who has denied that the U.S. has any "imperial ambitions" either in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East. Give that man a spritz of "B.S. Away!", and here's the truer story.

"Cheney and I and Wolfowitz and Perle and the rest of the PNAC crew are not about to give up on our dream of a modernized, 'democratic, free-market' Islamic world in the Middle East -- which, of course, means one run by regimes we can easily influence and control. We'll pull in our aggressive horns for now, to get Bush elected in November, but after that, it's full steam ahead. (By the way, hot diggety, we got one of our PNAC founders appointed to the commission examining pre-war intelligence on Iraq!)

"We're already starting to quietly propagandize against and undermine the regimes in Iran and Syria and, if they don't agree to our terms next year -- in terms of oil production quotas, bilateral projects with American companies, malleable governments to our liking, and so on -- they'll learn there are severe consequences to pay. The transformation is liable to be messy, but if it has to be done, by suasion or by force -- and a return to drafting young soldiers -- we'll do it.

"The liberals and the Europeans may scream and holler in the short run, but in the long run, they'll thank us for our willingness to think big and to do the heavy lifting. And provide their citizens with a stable source of oil for the foreseeable future. Of course, it doesn't hurt any that our huge corporations -- oil and energy and construction and otherwise -- stand to make a good deal of change in this Middle East transformation, a good share of which will come back to the GOP to keep this neo-con machine running forever."

ASHCROFT ON THE PATRIOT ACT

And, finally, here's John Ashcroft, who wants to amend the Patriot Act to give the government even more police powers. He says the "war on terrorism" justifies all the drastic actions. Here, have a full blast of "B.S. Away!", John.

"Look, virtually every one of the extreme police powers in the Patriot Act were proposed in bills over the years, and the namby-pamby Congress, citing 'Constitutional protections of due process' or some such horsemanure, turned them down. Once 9/11 came, it was easy to collect all those powers and put them into the Patriot Act, and get it passed nearly unanimously; of course, it helped that few if any of those Congress types got a chance to read the final version of the bill, which we whipped through at the last minute.

"I love my job. And I have no qualms about locking people up, sending them to detention camps, violating attorney-client privilege, reading their email, authorizing blackbag jobs -- whatever it takes to deter and capture 'terrorists,' and those pinko liberals who support them, I'll enthusiastically do. There still are too many 'civil-liberties' holes in the Patriot Act, though, and I need more police powers to clamp down on dissenters, revolutionists, and immoralists. Martial-law might work better; maybe if Bush is still down in the polls in late-October, we can postpone the elections along those lines. Red terror alert, that sort of thing."

Well, based on those quick examples, you get the idea. "B.S. Away!" is a wonder product that is amazingly useful when dealing with politicians. It's also helpful in personal relationships. Want to hear this "Dear John" letter I got the other day, and then the truth version after spraying "B.S. Away!"? Well, OK, maybe another time.

But if you're interested in getting in on the IPO for "B.S. Away!", talk to your broker. Things are going to start popping quick. Unless Ashcroft confiscates the entire stock of prototype cannisters because they look too phallic.

- Bernard Weiner is a poet, playwright and journalist, formerly with the San Francisco Chronicle. A Ph.D. in government & international relations, he has taught at various universities and currently co-edits the progressive website The Crisis Papers ( www.crisispapers.org)

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