- "[A]s we gather tonight, our nation
is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world faces unprecedented
dangers . . . the state of our union has never been stronger." ~George
W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2002-
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- February 7, 2002-Bush the Second uttered
this stunning contradiction and received thunderous applause from the gathered
politicians and guests in the Capitol. Why? Over the past year portions
of our Constitution (that document that has been held up as a beacon of
enlightenment throughout the world) have been shredded wholesale, while
John Aschcroft orders concealment of the anatomy of Justice.
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- At Bush's direction, America has turned
its back on every agreement with our friends, enemies, allies, and neighbors,
except those that cooperate in a pact of war. Thousands, if not millions,
of Americans have lost their jobs, thousands more have been killed, and
even thousands more have lost both their financial and personal security.
The national coffers have been raided, and Social Security is about to
become a distant memory. Where it looked, only a short time ago, that we
would pay off our national debt in only a few years, we are now screaming
toward massive deficits, to be followed by the return of long-term corrosive
red ink. Our individual patriotism is brought into doubt if we ourselves
question undefined threats of never ending war at home and abroad. Like
a dog infected with rabies the Bush government, snarls, froths and foams
at foreign enemies and friends alike.
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- Now, in this new age, war, recession,
and unprecedented dangers, all couldn't be better. They are worthy of a
standing ovation for an aging frat boy who still develops boils on his
face, mangles the simplest of ideas that aren't written down for him well
in advance, and vacations almost more than he works. He stands at the national
podium and waves this divisive "trifecta" like a little leaguer
who has hit his first ever home run. The press, and the representatives
of We the People applaud.
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- The specter of Enron stands in a darkened
corner like a family secret, oozing toxicity that few in the press want
to discuss, but none can ignore, while pundits debate whether it represents
a business or a political scandal. The press, the White House, and a majority
in Congress obfuscate that it is far more than either. It is likely the
most corruptive scandal in the history of this nation. Like a cancerous
tumor that channels its poison through the bloodstream of its host, Enron
has left its disease in every portion of the corpus of our freedom, and
turned our protective institutions against our own survival. Enron money,
and the money of yet to be discovered tumors, tainted by larceny on such
a grand scale that it requires a new word in the vocabulary of man, signals
the greatest collapse of an empire since the fall of Rome. Nero only fiddled
while Rome burned. In Washington, DC, a quartet entertains, with George
W. Bush on violin, Congress harmonizes on viola, justice groans an undercurrent
of bass, and a prostituted press eagerly wraps its legs around a cello.
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- After a six-year investigation of former
President Clinton, which cost taxpayers a measurable percentage of our
national budget, proved that he may have been one of the purest presidents
in our history (he only committed adultery and lied about it), Bush promised
to raise the bar for the Oval Office. He promised a renewed sense of "values."
It appears that he meant to offer scandals befitting the world's most powerful
position. Clinton committed crimes against his family, but only Bush is
qualified to commit crimes against humanity.
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- Elevating the art of "newspeak,"
Bush has transformed Orwell into Nostradamus. "Deregulation works!"
thumps the executive branch, charged with enforcing our laws. The White
House did nothing, and an incompetent business failed. Greed driven corporate
executives picked the pockets of American taxpayers, as well as their employees
and shareholders, and funneled their plunder into offshore accounts, aided
and abetted by White House policy. The victims should not whine or complain.
If they are concerned about the welfare of their families, they should
display the type of initiative exemplified by Ken Lay, and buy politicians
and members of the press, creating their own enterprises based on the Enron
design.
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- Hot is cold, and green is purple. Not
counting the votes of the people protects democracy, stripping the Bill
of Rights from the Constitution protects liberty, and governing by executive
order provides bipartisan advice and consent.
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- And the religious right wing is every
bit complicit in this charade. They trumpet Bush as a shining example of
a return to American culture and values. Clinton shamed us by an affair
with an intern, but the Bush family solicits respect throughout the world.
George has been arrested three times that we know of, for both drunkenness
and violence. His daughters, alcoholics themselves, have been arrested
at least twice each. His sister-in-law has been arrested for attempted
smuggling, and each of brother Jeb's children has been arrested for crimes
ranging from breaking and entering to forgery. His brother, Neil, sat at
the center of the savings and loan scandal, and his father directed the
Iran/Contra affair, pardoning the criminal perpetrators as he left the
Oval Office. Grandfather Bush traded with the most evil government in modern
history after war had been declared, and promoted the Nazi regime's most
repugnant tenant by using the treasonous proceeds to fund research into
the despicable "science" of eugenics.
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- Congress, owned and operated by corporations
like Enron, will not spend too much time investigating government corruption
because such knowledge, even if the corruption is routed out, can cause
Americans to lose faith in their leaders. Yet, they will spend endless
resources investigating the privacy of sex. Where we once had faith that
the press would serve as our watchdog of government, the media have now
joined the Republican/corporate cooperative, supporting anything, no matter
how outrageous, that furthers deregulation. It has recently been revealed
that many of our "journalists" in the once mainstream press,
such as William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, were secretly on the payroll
of Enron to promote deregulation and politicians sympathetic to deregulation.
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- Like a battered spouse who continually
proclaims, "He only beats me because he loves me," we as citizens
should now consider ourselves enabling fools if we fail to continually
question the integrity of every member of the Fourth Estate who appears
to promote policy or politicians, and every politician who fails to promote
publicly funded campaign financing.
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- The radical right wing has learned that
the surest way to electoral success is to minimize the turnout in national
elections. The right wing punditry, displaying an electoral map that is
more red than blue, pushes the moronic notion that property, not people,
elect presidents. Michael Reagan, the mentally abused child of the ex-president,
sells on television T-shirts that display the map, brazenly portraying
the map as information covered up by the insidious left, and ignoring that,
in spite of the disenfranchisement of perhaps millions, Al Gore won the
last presidential election by more than a half a million votes.
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- As John Ashcroft, and others in the government,
make every attempt to scare the people with phantoms of terror, the flavor
of this commentary is not just a warning but a prediction. Very possibly
in 2002, but certainly in 2004, the polling stations in America's blue
zones, such as New York City and San Francisco, will be bin Laden targets
on election day. We will be told of "specific and credible evidence,"
with no indication as to what that evidence is, that "terra"
has targeted democracy in the blue zones, just as "terra" has
targeted only liberal Democrats as recipients of anthrax letters.
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- Bush has made every effort to explore
the limits of citizen outrage, and he will continue to do so until slapped
down by an angry majority of the people and Congress. The theft of an election,
and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore caused barely a rumble.
Bush understands that he can go much further. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld has recently sent up trial balloons to test the notion of mobilizing
the military within our own borders, assigning regional sub-commanders
in chief to prepare military mobilization into our cities in case of an
"emergency." When an election day "threat of terror"
is announced, armed troops will surround and occupy strategic polling stations,
and as the war against terror spreads to Somalia, Ashcroft will claim a
legitimate excuse to racially profile African Americans. In November 2000,
the media ignored disenfranchisement to the extent they were able, but
on this autumn day in 2002 or 2004, the media will ride over the stormy
waters like a duck, hailing the Bush administration for leadership in protecting
the lives of Americans.
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- When all four estates of our society
speak with one voice, further promoted by the advertising dollars of mega
corporations, all that stands in the way of a totalitarian regime is the
free flow of information on the World Wide Web and a free foreign press.
But when the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government
are safely in corporate hands, with the complete cooperation of our national
media, censorship of the Internet and the exclusion of foreign journalists
unfriendly to the Bush regime is a small matter indeed.
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- If you think me paranoid, well, perhaps
I am. I assure you that I take no pride in this prognostication. In fact,
I would take great joy in being proved embarrassingly inaccurate. But the
reality is that we have never, as a nation, walked so close to the cliffs
of fascism, where all of the necessary elements interact with this measure
of cooperative harmony. The theft of election 2000 sounded an alarm that
was heard in every part of the world, but the alarm was successfully muted
to near silence in the USA. If that alarm is not answered by 2002, or 2004
at the very latest, the damage from the fires of fascism will be irreversible.
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