Evil comes in many forms. Look at Rupert Murdoch. His life has been devoted to the rapacious pursuit of power, wealth, and influence. Is the world a better place for his having lived in it? Is there less hate? More compassion? More honesty? More basic goodness in humanity?
Imagine Dubya's funeral as covered by Fox News and Murdoch's worldwide media empire!
No. We simply must continue to do what we have been doing -- communicating what is right and what is wrong, naming the evil, identifying the wicked, uncovering their motives, uncovering their methods.
Yes, it ... is .... so ... slow .... -- On a day-to-day basis, agonizingly slow.
But look at the progress over the past two-and-a-half years: It is now widely acknowledged, even by former Bush supporters, that both the elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen. It is widely acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq was a horrific mistake.
Yes, I knew it in 2003. And I’d dreaded it in 2002. I felt the weight of the lives about to end -- but enough Americans chose to embrace the propaganda that we who opposed it were labeled traitors and worse.
Ask those same people now. I took a horrendous amount of ridicule from "patriotic Americans" in 2000 because I refused to vote for GWB and his cohort. Some of those people were at a military base in Germany. I would like to ask them now what they think of what I told them.
That young black woman who told me she was voting for BushCheney because "what have Democrats done for us anyway?" What does she think now that the Bush appointees on the Supreme Court have undercut decades of progress in desegregation and had the gall to cite Brown vs. Board of Education in doing so?
The military itself embraced the war against Iraq. The soldiers themselves were so propagandized that they were eager to enter the fight. Eager to vote for Bush and eager to fight.
Ask them now.
Ask them what they think now -- now that so many of their buddies have died. Ask them now, when the wounded have been treated so shamefully.
Ask the parents who waved their children off in their Humvees and Bradleys as they left the local National Guard armory on their way to Iraq, telling the reporters "how proud it made them to know their children were defending America."
Ask them now if their sons and daughters died defending America or enriching Halliburton.
Yes, it's been six and a half long years of fighting the good, non-violent fight -- but look at the bright side (yes, there is a bright side) -- for decades, starting with the John Birch Society and the Goldwater Republican movement, these so-called, self-styled conservatives have been claiming that they could run the government so much better. Their blather filled the newspaper columns and the airwaves for decades. They blamed the government for doing this wrong and doing that wrong. They blamed the majority Democrats in Congress for failing here and failing there, and asserted boldly that they could and would do better.
After the breathtaking incompetence, the politicization of even the most lowly federal agency, and the catastrophic rise in the national debt, is there any thinking American who now thinks the GOP has done a better job of running the government, providing needed services, managing the federal budget, funding scientific research for the future, defending our country against attack?
Is there any thinking American who does not honestly believe we were better off when the Democrats were governing this country? [I'm not saying they were perfect; I'm just saying they were infinitely more competent.]
