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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (20766)	4/10/2003 9:26:33 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

The Junior Bush League can't even get fascism right. LOL!!!!!!! But I wonder if we the sheeple will even notice. I work with some pretty bright (otherwise) guys who get all their news from Rush and FOX. They think Bush's Amerikka is nifty keen.

To: MSI who wrote (20766)	4/10/2003 10:24:03 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

The Death of the American Soul bestoftheblogs.com There is something ugly gnawing at the American soul. You sense it in the angry voices on talk radio, read it on the defiant bumper stickers of the nation's highways, hear it in the contempt for foreign countries that disagree with American policy, and see it in the unquestioning knee jerk nationalism that equates legitimate dissent with disloyalty. This unsettling force bombards you daily through the thousands of e-mails, virtually all them patently false or doctored to support a radical conservative view, that are passed on endlessly, and unquestioningly, by users to their personal mail lists. This mean undercurrent of the American dream is not, I suspect, simply a product of 9/11, although that amplified an already simmering ennui, as reflected by Waco, the Unibomber and Timothy McVeigh. Nor was it the result of the 2000 election, which left half of the American public feeling robbed. What 9/11 did was allow a large segment of an already vaguely unhappy, white, middle and lower middle class to focus their sense of victimization away from government or liberals to outside forces. It gave the Bush administration the levers it need to mobilize and manipulate their fears and anger in support of its pre-existing agenda. Many of our fellow citizens are feeling threatened in non-specific ways by fears of anything that feels "not American," which today means Muslim and Arab "terrorists" but tomorrow could just as easily mean African-Americans or Jews or Asians. They seem to live on the edge of some sort of permanent, slow-burning rage that blinds them to traditional American concepts like "fairness" and "probable cause" and "reasonable doubt." They cannot, or do not, want to separate fact from propaganda. Say something often enough--Saddam is an evil man, for example, and Saddam becomes the personification of all the evil of the world. If an authority figure says over and over again that Jews should be rounded up and deported to labor camps, soon the trains will be headed to Aushwitz. Truth is relative and getting more so by the day. How else to explain a Washington Post-ABC News poll finding that more than two-thirds of those interviewed--69 percent--said that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do even if the United States fails to find biological or chemical weapons. This is an extraordinary perception. President Bush has repeatedly said over the past year that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that it might share with terrorists who would harm us directly. It is a claim that was the entire key to the administration's rationale for going to war. If it turns out that there are no WMDs, it means that either the President has been deliberately lying to us or has access to extremely bad intelligence. It means that the "liberation" of Iraq was a huge and unnecessary mistake that resulted in the deaths of many innocent people. The real tragedy is that more than half of all Americans really don't care whether we had a legitimate reason for invading Iraq or not. They don't care if a lot of civilians died. They wanted blood and the Bush administration delivered. Something tells me this will not be remembered as our finest hour as a nation. More on these thoughts to come soon.