Until today, gross incompetence, abuse of power, corruption, corporatocracy, and federal insolvency could be checked and reversed by balanced and separated governmental powers, and at the ballot box by a citizenry informed and provoked by an alert and independent media. Now all branches of government and the mainstream media are dominated by the wealthy elites in control of a single political party.
Can you believe this? If not, you are in the company of a majority of Americans who might respond to the above jeremiad with Oh cmon now, it cant be as bad as all that! Weve always had incompetence, corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, and stolen elections are as old as the republic. Its no different now.
So long as that majority of Americans believes this, the rule of the Busheviks and its successor oligarch regimes will be secure. Thus Bush, Inc. and its obedient mainstream media are desperately endeavoring to nourish and sustain this illusion of normality.
Elections? Get over it! The refusal of the public to believe that national elections can be stolen, validates the claim of the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress to political legitimacy that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. (Declaration of Independence). The evidence clearly indicates otherwise. (For an excellent summation of this evidence, see Dennis Loos No Paper Trail Left Behind. See also The Crisis Papers pages on Election Fraud, 2004" and Electoral Integrity.). On the other hand, the evidence for the legitimacy of the elections is virtually non-existent, due to the secrecy of the software and the absence of paper validation. So all that the defenders of the legitimacy illusion have is ad hominem insults of the challengers conspiracy theorists, paranoid, get over it! The mainstream medias response is, no response, with the apparent hope and expectation, so far successful, that if it is ignored, the ballot fraud issue will go away. The primary aggrieved institutional victim of the fraud, the Democratic Party, simply wont touch the issue, which can only serve to strengthen the illusion of normality. Thus allegations that the elections were stolen and thus that the government in power is illegitimate are confined to the alternative media and the internet.
And so the Democrats carry on as if the upcoming elections of 2006 and 2008 are normal, as they diligently solicit more votes and cheerfully look forward to taking back the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 as if the same normal rules and conditions apply as they have before. Those poor, naive saps! Dont they realize that once again, Republican operatives will count the votes!, and that the results will be just what the GOP wants them to be, regardless of the wishes of the electorate? Unless. Unless, very soon, the people demand reform and restore the integrity of the
ballot box.
public believes this myth because it is repeated so often not, to be sure,
on the strength of the evidence which clearly proves otherwise. Two brief
examples: In October, 2004, immediately before the presidential election, the University of Marylands Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) released a report that among Bush supporters, 75% believed that Saddam Husseins Iraq government supported al Qaeda, and 72% believed that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction, or active WMD programs. In addition, the Bush supporters said that the US should not go to war if it were known that Iraq had no WMDs. Which means, to put it bluntly, that Bush owes his election to this WMD lie (among other lies, but those require separate arguments). Now where did the Bush voters get this misinformation if not from the mainstream media, which obviously passed it on uncritically from the Bush administration. Example two: On CNNs Crossfire, Paul Begala reported the following results of a Nexis-Lexis Search:
"There were exactly 704 stories in the [2000] campaign about this flap of Gore inventing the Internet. There were only 13 stories about Bush failing to show up for his National Guard duty for a year.
There were well over 1,000 stories -- Nexus stopped at 1,000 -- about Gore and the Buddhist temple. Only 12 about Bush being accused of insider trading at Harken Energy. There were 347 about Al Gore wearing earth tones, but only 10 about the fact that Dick Cheney did business with Iran and Iraq and Libya."
The advantage of the myth of the liberal media to Bush and the Republicans is enormous. To those who believe it, if a story favorable to Bush and the GOP appears, the response is it must be true, since even the liberal media reports it. And critical stories? Dont believe it, its just the liberal media dissing our President again. Conversely for stories about the Democrats and progressives. (For more about right-wing and pro-Bush media bias, visit the website of FAIR).
Torture? We wouldnt do that, were Americans and It was just a few bad apples. Few Americans appreciate the depths of moral depravity that are are plumbed by this administrations justification of the use of torture of prisoners captured in this war on terror, and by its official violation of the Geneva accords ratified treaties that have the status of US laws. Nor are many of our fellow citizens aware of the disgust and hatred of our countrys government engendered throughout the world as a result of these policies. And why not? The mainstream media do not accurately report the tortures, assess the treaty violations, or inform the public of international opinion. Attorney General Gonzales has effectively abolished torture by defining it out of existence, yet the tortures still go on. The Geneva conventions are evaded by the invention of a category of prisoners, enemy combatants, that is unrecognized by international law. In effect, the government of the United States of America, our country, is an international outlaw. The Busheviks do not care.
And sadly, the American people, by and large, do not know. They believe that our treatment of prisoners is justified, and that the opinion of us abroad, are normal. It is an illusion.
The President, his cabinet, and the Congress will, as they have all sworn, protect and defend the Constitution. In fact, American citizens are now being held indefinitely, without charge, without counsel, without trial, in violation of four of the Ten Amendments to the Constitution (The Bill of Rights). The President claims the right to designate any American citizen as a terrorist suspect and to arrest and confine that citizen in similar violation of law and the Constitution. The same Constitution stipulates that Congress declares war, yet this war on terrorism is undeclared. This is but one of many clear violations of law by the Bush Administration (enumerated in my The Bombs in the Basement"). The conventional attitude that they all do it just doesnt begin to excuse the unprecedented lawlessness of this regime.
The policies of this administration are based on sound science.
The term sound science and its antithesis, junk science, are inventions of that semantic genius of the GOP, Frank Luntz. So too those Orwellian names, Healthy Forests, Clear Skies Initiative, The Death Tax. The conclusion of more than 2,000 world scientists concerning global warming? Junk science. So too the warnings of geologists that the world is approaching peak oil production. Industry sponsored reassurances that mercury emissions from coal-fired plants are not harmful? Sound Science. The fact that virtually all peer-reviewed scientific studies disagree seems not to matter. For every Ph.D there is an equal and opposite Ph.D if the price is right. The public believes the news it is given, and does not pay attention to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, or other professional scientific journals and
associations. Nor is the public much concerned with the fact that this administrations war against science is costing us our long-established lead in scientific research and development a foundation of our economic prosperity.
And the list continues: record federal deficits, a widening income gap between the very rich and the rest of us, corruption personal enrichment at public expense, corporate purchasing of legislation and regulatory relief through campaign contributions. Massive. Unconstrained. Unprecedented. Unbelievable. And so most of the public is unwilling and unable to believe it.
Add to this the enormous stake that the Administration, the Republican Party, and their corporate patrons have in perpetuating this illusion of normality. Billions of dollars of public funds have been snatched from the federal treasury and billions more from the investments, retirement funds, health benefits and social services of private individuals. Add to that the deterioration of educational facilities and public infrastructure. Some of this has been done through the cover of legitimate congressional legislation, and some of it through outright criminal activity. Remnants of our criminal justice system are pushing back. Today, David Safavian, Jack Abramoff and even Tom DeLay are under indictment. Soon Patrick Fitzgeralds grand jury will hand down their indictments which, it is likely, will reach into the White House. Hopefully, that will be just the beginning.
In short, the malefactors are facing not only the loss of their ill-gained wealth but perhaps federal prison cells. And dont suppose that they dont know it, and that they are not prepared to take extreme measures to avoid it. The injured and cornered beast is the most dangerous, and these critters have some fearful resources at their disposal.
But they are up against the most formidable and unyielding of adversaries:
the truth an adversary that they have abused and repressed throughout their reign of error. And as they must eventually discover, reality bites. Truth crushed on earth, wrote William Cullen Bryant, will rise again, and it will rise, no matter how many millions are poured into the budgets of think tanks or into the pockets of whore-scientists. Truth will rise again, if not here, then abroad, and if not now, then eventually.
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