It's September 12th and I am fed up. Not much surprise there, I usually feel a bit cheeky on this day. I wake up with my annual post-11th agita and resultant sour taste from the incessantly shrill vitriol of yesterday's sanctimonious partisanship. This feeling has been particularly pronounced during even-numbered years as election season spins into high gear. To me, yesterday represents my yearly pungent reminder of the pronounced failures of King George the W, yet the MSM keeps enlightening us simple-minded folk about how it actually belongs to our Dear Leader. And post-hoc fallacy be damned, the smug little prince always seems to get a bump in the polls.
Could this year be different? A question I've asked for the last five years straight, always to the bitter disappointment of unrealized expectations. Somehow, and I'm not speculating on specifics, Team Red always seems to come out from under the negative press, pulls through the lopsided polling, and nets an October surprise catapulting them into unfathomable victory.
This morning, it's Disney that's really cheesing me off. ABC/Disney, despite opposition and sheer human decency, has pushed forward with their disgraceful distortion of 9-11, a vicious, epic-sized, mud-slinging campaign ad donated commercial-free to the American populace at a total cost of $30 million. Recall, if you will, that this is the same company who refused to air Fahrenheit 9-11 because of its 'lopsided' political content with one senior executive claiming it was "...not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle."
Unless that film has the right partisan agenda, of course. So here we are, forced to sit through a mound of lies and distortions so egregious as to raise the ire of key members of the 9-11 commission and other experts, spark threats from entire democratic leadership, a lawsuit from American Airlines, and general disgust from any rational observer who actually possessed higher brain functions and a pulse over the last five years.
Yet I have come to terms with the fact that many - perhaps most - Americans do not exhibit the capacity for critical reasoning. That what we see on television, especially in documentary format, must constitute the truth. And the truth, as Disney tells us, is that 9-11 was Clinton's fault, Bush is our savior, and if you don't want to be consumed by a swarm of locusts, you'll damn well vote Republican in November.
This $30 million gift could not come at a better time. The American public has become tired. Tired of the war, yes, but tired of the lies most of all. We're tired of waiting for results and having to admit to ourselves, time and again, that those entrusted to operate in our national interest are incompetent and self-serving. More than half of the country can't think of a single thing they like about the President. Nearly one-third of the country now believes that Bush should be impeached (at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, only 19% believed the same about Clinton).
And Iraq. Oh, Iraq. More than two-thirds believe Iraq is a failed elective war. The hunt for bin Laden has become "stone cold" - truly tragic considering how the admin botched whatever intel they actually had on the guy. The use of torture by the "civilized" United States is now freely and abundantly admitted, and Bush is even secretly attempting to kill the War Crimes Act. Bush dutifully trotted out his pro-Iraq propaganda for us non-believers yesterday, but failed to mention that the precipitous drop in body count last month was because the Pentagon decided to no longer include those killed by car and suicide bombs in the death tally! And this is the man who is going to make us all safer?
Yesterday, I threw together a hasty post on the last five years. But Olbermann treated us to one of the most lucid accounts of Bush's impeachable offenses to date while adding the following to my list:
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country's wound is still open.
Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.
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