I just blew a load.

The psychosis thus far: a recent poll states that one in two Americans believe Saddam Hussein is responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. Sixty-nine percent of women think that Iraq possesses a nuclear device. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, gesticulates wildly before the Washington Steno Pool that it doesn’t matter if the UN inspectors fail to find any weapons. American troop build-up in the Persian Gulf said to be nearing 150,000 souls by February.

Is anyone paying any fucking attention?

It drops the jaw and numbs the mind at how blasé the electorate is about all of this. While an ocean of cyber-ink has been spilled across web sites denouncing the impending “war” with Iraq, the Newspeak organizations are silent on any war protests going on. What little mention they receive belongs to the “news of the bizarre” segments and is done right before the latest updates on J.Lo and Ben.

Meanwhile, back in Dodge, there continues to be a steady stream of not-ready-for-primetime missteps emanating from the White House about whether or not we are going to invade. Well, missteps is too kind a word: how about an outright diagnosis of speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth. Has no one noticed that one day it’s this, and another day it’s that? That pResident Bush tries to be calm and insist that the Iraqis have time, but next week blusters at how he’s getting tired of these Iraqi games and that time is running out? Or Pentagon briefings wherein the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove just openly admits that whether or not the UN inspectors actually find something hidden in Iraq is immaterial? He almost seems exasperated that anyone would bother to care what the UN finds or doesn’t, but maybe what’s even more exasperating is the stunning silence of the Newspeak organizations. You can hear a pin drop in any given news consference.

But what they are intent on is engaging in preparing everyone for the conflict. It’s all a part of subtle propaganda: endless talk of conflict eventually softens up a skeptical (and let’s face it, intellectually dead) public to the inevitability of that conflict. It’s one of those, “it’s beyond our control” gestures that John Q. Moron easily affects before heading off to the mall or the movie theater. While network Newspeak infotainment shows like “CBS News” or “ABC News” have wider audiences than cable Newspeak shows, the latter has been on the vanguard of preparing us for war from the get go.

It’s pretty much all in the bumpers: those slick, cool graphics that explode on our death ray, er, television sets before the newsreader launches us into the absolute latest information. “Showdown with Saddam” or “The Road to War” create an impending sense of doom with their urgency, but they also contribute to a perception that war is a fact. There is the requisite wriggle room here (sometimes putting a question mark at the end of some tags, like “The Road to War?”) but the never-ending barrage inundates and sinks in slowly.

And that brings us to the constant use of the word “war”. It’s used so easily in describing this “conflict” that for the few remaining Americans with a pulse, the word seems curious. We all know that you can have a war between adversaries that are not evenly matched. But describing our rush to destroy Baghdad doesn’t quite seem like a war, because the Iraqis are easily outgunned, if not exactly outnumbered. Most of strategy (apparently) relies on “surgical airstrikes” that is designed to, well, blow the fuck out of everything on the ground. This paves the way for the ground assault that will undoubtedly lead to downtown Baghdad. And of a lot of people getting killed, but they have funny names anyway.

But no matter how much resistance the Iraqis give, or how easily our forces take control of the country, “war” still seems wrong. This is an invasion, pure and simple. This is the filthy euphenism of effecting regime change, not assassination. We are going to invade and occupy Iraq, and that is the only real fact one can count on. Well, you can also count on the central dumbness of the American public to treat this as nothing but spectacle, but no one pretty much cares. The Newspeak organizations have done an admirable job prepping us for “war,” and creating a sense of urgency, doom and looming deadlines. As Newspeak outlets have jettisoned such bothersome concepts as “analysis” and “reporting,” it becomes easier to stoke the fires of a conflict that ends in war.

And end in battle it will. It is impossible to engage in so much foreplay and then declare you’re not in the mood. The Administration’s swaggering penis has already been unsheathed: what would the guys say if you chickened out at the last minute? “I changed my mind?” Guys don’t talk like that unless they’re weak. Abetted by the Newspeakies, we are in the mood for battle and we’ve hit the point of no return. No pulling out here, it’s full steam ahead!