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I Just Love Conservative Largesse...
...magnamous though you may think it is.
This election wasn't about, "liberal," or, "conservative."
The election was about the use and abuse of language and the linguistic notion of conceptual frameworks. All this election has proven, if the numbers are allowed to stand, is that Machiavelli was correct: for every person who catches you in a lie, there are 100 more who would prefer to believe your lie. There is nothing new about what the neoconservatives have been undoing in our country; Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party accomplished the same thing with the German people before WWII using the same sorts of distractions and traumas.
The difference between the US and Nazi Germany is that the US won't have the excuse of feeling victimized by an entire world turned against it as a result of WWI. We have had nothing but the best for a good 150 or 200 years of history.
Conservatives have been able to dominate the media with sound bites and frames because they own all six of the corporations who peddle the swill that ends up on television. These corporations minimize the billions that these corporations steal from the US taxpayers and maximize the trivial, or prurient, behavior of a small segment of the population. The crap on, "Jerry Springer," and the perenially addicted, "Rush Limbaugh," is stuff that would not have gotten past the editors and program managers of the 1960's and 1970's. The media people of those days were more educated and understood the importance of a press that didn't have to cater to some corporate CEO's bottom line numbers. Rather, these folks understood what the numbers meant in terms that were, and I would argue still are, important to Americans -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as allowed for by the spirit, and the letter, of the US Constitution.
If you want to talk about what is wrong with the Democratic Party, we may have something to agree on. But I would caution you to note that the Anthrax found in the Senate Office Building where Tom Daschle had his office was weaponized Anthrax. That stuff came from Fort Detrick, Maryland...a fact that the right-wing owned media corporations pushed off the radar screen as fast as the information became available. So if Tom Daschle appeared to run and hide after 9/11, a big reason why was fear for his own life. The entire Democratic Party was in fear for their own lives.
There is something wrong with America and Americans when we find ourselves disagreeing over the utility of the principles as stated in the US Constitution. Alot of blood, sweat, tears and experience went into forming that document and this ignorant administration has all but wiped its behind with it. And what unnerves me isn't just the disservice we do to this nation's veterans who spilled hundreds of gallons of blood on the beaches of Normandy to preserve freedom; what really offends me is the unravelling of our constitutional democracy is being committed by a bunch of rich white people who have never known what it is like to live in fear of a church father tearing your tongue out with pincers for using language offensive to the church of the moment, or what it might be like to have your freedom taken away because the feudal lord wanted your wife for himself, and so he locked you up in a cold, dark dungeon until you died of pneumonia.
Our Constitution was written by a group of scholars who had a command of history and a command of the reins of power.
At no time during our country's history have Americans ever doubted the wisdom of the US Constitution and the protections it attempted to erect against the rise of tyranny. We could disagree on interpretation and the spirit of the law, but we never abandoned the visionary quality of the document we were entrusted with for safe keeping.
Don't tell me that 9/11 changed a damn thing. It didn't. Bush has done next to nothing to guard this country's ports and chemical plants; its water supplies and its food supplies. The Bushies have eviscerated what was left of our public education system and left for dead millions of mentally and physically handicapped Americans. The only thing the Bushies have done is use 9/11 as a pretext to launch wars with lesser nations to increase the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan and to secure the flow of oil out of the Middle East. And this is fine with me since I know that what occurred on 9/11 was theatre and a fiction. The entire project was orchestrated by Cheney and his minions so that they could manipulate us into following them off of a cliff into the abyss of tyranny.
What are YOU going to do when you wake up and realize that the one you were taught by your church to fear the most turns out to be the one you least suspected of being Caesar Neron? Will it be a liberal or a conservative crisis?
Or will it be a crisis of conscience where we are forced to look within ourselves to make the one last, final judgment foretold in the Apocalypse: the judgment that of ourselves we are a trainwreck waiting to find a place to happen. The realization that without our conscious knowledge and supplication to the Creator of the Universe, we can do little but elegantly plot our own destruction by our own hand. The Last Judgment can not be undertaken by the One who knows All; that would be a ludicrous mockery. The only one who needs to find the rest of themselves is the human species. Our Last Judgment will be that of ourselves we have none.
And the facts and the prophecy become as one in the Light of Understanding, not human authority.
posted by
Volaar
on November 15, 2004 at 7:01 PM
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Zogby has been suspect ever since he predicted in the Spring that
John Kerry would win the presidency. And I think he wanted Kerry to win on a personal level. No pollster with experience and a level head would have predicted a race so far out, or at all for that matter. I'm not even a pollster and I've seen elections, local and national, turn on a dime because of one event or another.
It happened in Michigan in 1990: Rain. Rain on election day kept many in the inner city home. I went to sleep and the Democrat was ahead and declared the winner but by the morning the underdog, a Republican, was the eventual winner in a squeaker.
The Republican then carried the vote in huge margins for the next two elections, finishing in a term-limited twelve years, all very possibly due to a rainy day.
So Zogby should know better, especially after 2000.
Here's my advice to any liberal, and this is a gift because I, and I believe the country, benefits by your unwillingness or inability to diagnose the problem[s] that led up to your election losses and therefore forego any treatment to the problem[s]. But face your problems as hard as they may be. It's hard I know, it takes a great deal of character and humility, but face what is wrong with liberalism so that you can fix it and go on to achieve success.
Just my advice.
Sean
posted by
itisdone
on November 15, 2004 at 3:56 PM
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No One Would Have Wanted Hitler In Office, Either...
...and yet the German people were hoodwinked into accepting his chancellory with the grave consequences that followed.
If the people of this country actually took the time to look at all the issues, they would have voted against 4 more years of Bush. No one wants to give any single-party the power to destroy what so many people fought and died for on the beaches of Normandy.
There is more to democracy than systematically dumbing down the electorate and then dominating a formerly free press. To say nothing of using Orwellian doublespeak to convince the uninitiated and ill-informed that they are actually supporting the OPPOSITE of what the Bushies claim to be in support of. The Bush Administration is the polar opposite of what their press releases claim they represent.
Who wouldn't be in favor of saving marriages? Who wouldn't be in favor of recognizing and supporting patriots? Who wouldn't be in favor of invading a country with an ax to grind against us if we knew they possessed a nuclear bomb? Who wouldn't be in favor of declaring war on terrorists if we knew which country sponsored them and where they were hiding? Who wouldn't be in favor of spreading democracy to other countries if we knew they could be interested?
No one would argue that these might be good things to bring to the world.
The reality, however, is that the Bush Administration could care less about saving marriages; they continue to support their corporate sponsors who think nothing of forcing both husbands and wives to work harder for wages that are lower, adjusted for inflation, than their parents worked for. Couples do not have time to spend with each other and they make matters worse if they decide to raise children. The stress Bush economic policies have placed on the majority of married couples in the country has been enormous.
The reality of the Patriot Act is that it promotes the disclosure of private, personal information to government investigators without judicial oversight. Those of us who studied history know what the FBI did with the little powers that it had during the 1960's and 1970's...giving them a blank check to investigate anyone at any time is a formula for unreasonable searches and seizures, massive invasions of privacy, and a host of unconstitutional abuses of power. In fact, the Patriot Act in its full form would have us spying on each other like the Soviet citizens did during the Cold War. This is Josef Stalin visiting himself on the US, not America protecting itself from foreign invaders.
The reality about the war in Iraq is that Iraq was KNOWN not to possess weapons of mass destruction and certainly no nuclear weapons of any type or kind. And yet the President has seen to the deaths of some 1100 young men and women and nearly one hundred thousand innocent Iraqi civilians. This is liberation? Going to war under false pretenses is an impeachable offense and a crime against humanity. The Iraq War violates the Nuremburg Accords which were ratified by the US Senate at the close of WWII, plain and simple.
The reality of the war on terror is that we hand-picked the terrorists using our own CIA and the lessons it learned from the Nazi psychiatrists regarding mind control and social conditioning. We set these CIA assets up and have used them to manufacture pretexts for various wars and conflicts, usually in areas of strategic interest to key corporate interests in the US. There is no war on terror; what there is is an opportunity to infuse key corporations with huge amounts of working capital at taxpayer expense. What there is is a rogue intelligence operation running the US government for the purpose of selling drugs and buying armaments in perpetuity. Completely ridiculous behavior unless you are one of the lucky few who gets a whiff of the trillions of dollars thrown in your direction. Then war and how to fund it most effectively becomes a really good idea whose time has come.
The reality is that the US has never spread democracy through invading and occupying a foreign country. What we have most always established are Soviet-style dictatorships for the benefit of a lucky few corporate clients. The dictators we place in power over the people of these lands can run amok with the local citizens provided that they continue to allow the corporate interests to operate in the manner they choose to.
The reality is that the Bush Administration has duped the American public. The key to this operation has been the systematic destruction of the free press through the misnomer of, "deregulation," and the ability of only a handful of corporations to gain a chokehold on all the media outlets used by the citizens of a formerly democratic nation.
It's not just sad that this has happened to the US; it is a tragedy of unimagineable (and therefore hardly perceivable) proportions.
posted by
Volaar
on November 15, 2004 at 2:40 PM
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My brother, who lives in Florida, told me that CNN reported that republicans were turning voters away at the booths. According to him, minorities were being told that they could not vote if they were not current in their utilitiy bill payments. He also said that a representative of the IRS was waiting in the wings to talk to "select" voters. Now once again, this was told to me by my brother who lives in Florida. As a resident of Illinois, I haven't heard or seen any of this in our news. But it does make you wonder, doesn't it?
posted by
Matos
on November 15, 2004 at 6:08 AM
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You want to run the bums out of office, but it seems
the people want more of them in office. The Republicans did not just win the Presidency here. They won more seats in the House and Senate also. Plus, they had many more gains in other bodies. Yet, no one has come forward with any proof these races were bogus. Again, you liberals are losing it, just like you lost the election.
posted by
sarooster
on November 14, 2004 at 5:59 PM
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Very interesting piece thanks for sharing it
As I wrote yesterday I am not sure if there was a conspiracy but there seems to be a lot of unswered questions on some weird happenings throughout the U.S. but mostly you hear of Ohio and Florida it is very strange.
posted by
scoop
on November 14, 2004 at 10:22 AM
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