philosophic infamy IRONIC It is estimated more than 80% of Americans purchased a flag after 9/11 but only about half that percentage of registered voters participated in the recent elections.
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TOPICpolitics
start paying attentionIt's been an ugly year in politics. The GOP now controls the whole shebang. Hold onto your hats. From the White House to both houses of Congress and including the Supreme Court... the insane are running the asylum. When I read the headlines every morning I'm not even mildly surprised anymore when something totally absurd is announced in Washington. In fact it frightens me more now when an apparently reasonable idea comes out and I can't immediately discern the sinister reasoning behind it. Fortunately that never happens. Even slightly reasonable ideas are rare and the evil behind them is usually quite apparent. It's as if the entire constitution is being rewritten or at least reinterpreted and no one seems to care. Separation of powers is eroding. Civil rights are falling daily. Even the separation of church and state is going away. And the scariest part of all is that so many Americans are OK with that. In fact they don't even care enough to pay attention to it. Perhaps the real evil of TV and our rapid-fire media is not the incredible level of violence but rather that it has programmed Americans to interact with their world in sound bites and the GOP has found the perfect talking head in George Bush to preach to the automatons. Duhbya cannot speak in sentences, only in short weird phrases perfect for our channel surfing society. He repeats himself over and over and the disinterested catch only a few words here and there... terrorism... Saddam Hussein... weapons of mass destruction... it's simple subliminal conditioning. And its so effective that many attention-span-deficient "patriots" are willing to send their sons and daughters to fight and die because of it. "Credible sources say Iraq provided a chemical weapon to Al Quaida" was the frontpage headline across the nation. "Chemical weapon story found to be not credible" was a 2-paragraph note on page 21 a few days later. What percentage of Americans heard the first soundbite but not the latter? One was repeated thousands of times on TV, the other had to be read deep inside the newspaper beside the Macy's Christmas Sale ad. We as a nation need to begin paying attention. We need to seek out information about our world and our government and question what they are doing. Are you ready to get your small pox vaccination? Are you ready to send your son or daughter to go fight and kill Iraqis and perhaps die in the desert so we can have cheap gas for our SUVs? Will another tax cut really revitalize the economy? Is Trent Lott the only closet racist in the GOP? Will relaxing clean air regulations and cutting the budget for alternative fuels research really help us to be independent of foreign oil? Was the west's energy crisis really Gray Davis' fault? Why won't Cheney tell us who helped shape our energy policy? We need to ask these questions, actively seek out answers and pay attention. Patriotism takes more effort than putting a flag sticker on your car. UPDATES politics | 01/19/03 | deep thoughts – Helen Thomas: At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world?... | dave politics | 01/12/03 | smoking gun – So far the UN weapons inspectors have found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, no smoking gun, as it were, in Iraq... | dave politics | 01/01/03 | Iraq is toast – I was wrong. Gee Duhbya didn't invade Iraq in October. I really thought he would but it turned out to be politically unnecessary. Lucky for the Iraqis... | dave politics | 09/23/02 | the october surprise – Ready for war? It should start sometime in mid-October I figure. That would be to greatest political advantage for the resident, or so he thinks. It will be the October Surprise that won't surprise anyone at all.... | dave politics | 03/08/02 | diligence – We are a nation at war. A war on terrorism they say. My Mom and Dad told me some about their experience with war. They were very young children in Hawaii, December 7, 1941... | dave politics | 03/08/02 | the secretive mr. cheney – The GAO for the first time in our history has sued the Vice President of the United States... | dave politics | 03/08/02 | in the shadows – So our feckless leader has put a shadow government in place in case he and the rest of the Washington brain trust get taken out by terrorists.... | dave politics | 08/27/01 | what's mine is mine – Embryonic stem cells. The average person has no idea what they are or how they can be used in research and I guarantee Gee Dubya doesn't. He could probably tell you what part of a plant they come from but beyond that... | dave politics | 05/01/01 | goodbye christie whitman – Still more backward GneWs. Cheney introduces the EDPA | dave |
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STORIES politics | 04/26/01 | GW warns China – More backward GneWs. What if we were talking about Cuba instead of Taiwan? | dave politics | 04/11/01 | spy plane crash – What if the news were backwards? Reversed so to speak. You would have the GneWs. This is a GneWs story about the recent spy plane crash. | dave politics | 03/30/01 | new imperialism – "We're certain there are madmen in this world, and there's terror, and there's missiles..." | dave |
RESOURCES The American Prospect – ...a renewal of America's democratic traditions... Bush or Chimp? – you make the call The Nation – southpaw reading The New Republic – a little more from the left |
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