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Politics : HOWARD DEAN -THE NEXT PRESIDENT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (758)	11/29/2003 12:56:47 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3079

Of course! It's both explicit, as in Tom Delay and Jeb Bush's comments, and implicit an inexorable in policies and concentration of power. The Framers knew this to be a gravitational force that can only be fought with balance of powers and free press. So maybe that is why Bush wipes out America's Middle Class. Bush reminds me of Tom Delay who expressed a few years back his admiration for plantation societies abroad where there were only the rich and the workers who toiled 80 or 90 hours a week in the fields for a substandard living. The free press went first, after the 1947 Nat'l Security Act allowing gov't officials to have secret media control. The balance of powers is now gone more completely than even the mid-1800s when the railroads owned Senators outright. Scruples are gone. We now see no institutional representtive of gov't with any scruples, or even the ability to distinguish between scrupulous and unscrupulous statements and acts. The GOP has succeeded in getting us to the point of "whatever you can get away with", power not as a means, but an end. "1984" makes uncanny references - "the revolution will be over when the Newspeak dictionary is complete". Our language has been hijacked by thinktanks feeding the media, paid for by those who gain from looting taxpayers. The terrorist cause is the perfect kind of Orwellian enemy for the Information Age - it is the "Dark Enemy of Oceana", and we see policies exactly duplicating Orwell's vision, "Death to the traitors!", especially by totalitarian command, and in secret. Even the names of the thousands or tens of thousands of captives are kept secret and made unpersons, except for the occasional high-profile general who gets tortured to death, and someone gets the word out, without much effect. The secrecy precisely follows Orwell's description of how to take over a society. We see websites removed, documents destroyed and made unavailable to the public, and history rewritten. "Who controls the Present controls the Past. Who controls the Past controls the Future". The Bush administration acts as if they can completely control the present, regardless of wild acts of hypocrisy, incompetence and criminality, because after all, "it isn't a crime unless you're caught". The only fly in the ointment is the disgruntled citizenry. They can be placated for a while with phony polls, rigged elections, media management, and threats of violence. Eventually this polarization will become even more extreme, and will have to have a breaking point.