Shrimp Puffs
by digby
Just in case anyone’s wondering…
100 Most Invited: Find Out Who’s Hot and Who’s Not
My personal favorite:
3 GEORGE and SUSAN ALLEN SENATOR & WIFE The former Virginia governor and son of a legendary Redskins coach wears cowboy boots and is all over the news of late – could it be his attempt to win the 2008 Presidential Superbowl of Politics, or is that just a bunch of “macaca?” She’s lovely, bright and known to loosen him up.
How droll.
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Keeping It Real
by digby
What with all the soul searching lately and discussion of where we draw the line as we attempt to traverse the minefield of current electoral politics, I think this is a good time to link up to this very interesting meta-blog piece by political scientist and blogger Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber in this month’s Boston Review.
Farrell does a thorough analysis of the netroots and then homes in on our common self-description as non-ideological partisans out to change a corrupt and inept party structure:
Their experiences have deepened the netroots’ conviction that there’s something rotten in the Democratic Party. Quasi-corrupt relationships hamper the ability of Democrats to win elections; candidates for office are expected to hire certain well-connected consultants if they want to receive party funding. Party leaders try to eke out narrow wins, focusing their attention only on the most competitive races instead of campaigning aggressively across the country. Elected officials prefer stroking the egos of major donors to grass-roots organizing. Senators mug to pundits’ and newspaper editors’ penchant for bipartisanship by denouncing fellow Democrats as extremists, giving cover to Republicans, and dragging the political center ever further toward the right. These problems cripple the party’s ability to compete successfully, guaranteeing continued Republican hegemony. In response, netroots bloggers want to reform the party’s organizational structures and punish elected officials who weaken the party in pursuit of their personal agendas.
Absolutely. As I watched the torture debate unfold this week, I was acutely aware of exactly those deficiencies in the party and saw the whole ugly mess as a result of terrible partisan tactics and non-existent strategy. But something else niggled at the back of my mind. There was something tremendously meaningful happening about which Democrats of good faith were deeply concerned and it had nothing to do with partisanship and everything to do with citizenship.
I was reminded one of one the previous times such an outrageous, hurried, ill conceived machination was presented as a fait accomplis by the Bush administration and it brought millions of people into the streets — the Iraq war. I recall pragmatic voices saying at the time that protesting was a bad move, that it hurt our image, that we should concentrate on gaining institutional power. And I wrote at the time that I understood why people said that, but you have to give people something more than dry tactics and strategy in politics:
People need to feel part of something in order to get involved in politics. And as someone who has volunteered in many a campaign I can tell you that for the last decade it has had all the uplifting inspiration of the Bataan death march. It is work with no satisfaction in the soul or spirit and without that politics becomes nothing more than a duty.
The Republicans have a base of committed true believers and we desperately need some of that too. Telling these newly galvanized Democrats that the only way they can legitimately express themselves is through the ballot box — particularly in this day of manufactured, pre-fab campaigning — is a very self-defeating idea.
I thought about that this week. Most people don’t commit themselves to politics simply because they want to win or even because they want to stop someone else from winning (although when dealing with these modern Republicans that is a huge factor.) Most of us are interested and involved because we believe in certain things and we care about our country and our government. We band together with others who share our ideology and our values.
Farrell writes:
Netroots activists often compare themselves to the Goldwater supporters who took over the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s. But a close reading of Rick Perlstein’s book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (which enjoys near-canonical status among netroots bloggers), suggests that the differences between Goldwaterites and the netroots are as important as the similarities. Goldwater’s followers succeeded not only because of their organizational skills but because of their commitment to a set of long-term ideological goals. Over two decades, they relentlessly sought to undermine the ideological foundations of the existing American political consensus, rebuilding it over time so that it came to favor conservative and Republican political positions rather than liberal or Democratic ones. The result is a skewed political system in which Republicans enjoy a persistent political advantage. The issue space that American politics plays out on has been reconstructed so that its center of gravity quietly but insistently pulls politicians to the right. So it isn’t any accident that bipartisanship in the modern era mostly consists of hewing to the Republican agenda.
As Perlstein argued in these pages two years ago, it isn’t impossible to remould this conventional wisdom, although it is difficult and risky. And the netroots can surely play an important role. Their comparative advantage is exactly in framing political issues and controversies so that they resonate widely. Prominent netroots bloggers recognize in principle the importance of the battle over ideas. Kos and Armstrong devote a substantial portion of Crashing the Gate, to discussing the need for a Democratic apparatus of think tanks and foundations that parallels the conservative intellectual machine. Kos writes regularly about how the Democrats need “big ideas� if they are to win. However, because the netroots conceive of themselves as a non-ideological movement, they aren’t delivering on their potential to help provide and refine these big ideas themselves and thus reshape the ideological underpinnings of the political consensus. If the netroots truly want to tilt the playing ground of American politics back again so that it favors the Democrats, they will need to embrace a more vigorous and coherent ideological program.
I want to win, don’t get me wrong. And I’m a pragmatist by nature so I have little patience with purity pledges or tilting at windmills. But I am explicitly liberal in orientation and I want to see this country tilt back to a more liberal politics. If I was afraid to make a point of that before this week I no longer am. I learned that even upholding the constitution is now a matter of liberal political ideology instead of simple mainstream patriotism.
Farrell makes many interesting observations about our nascent movement and comes to some conclusions that I think we all need to at least begin to think about. We care about changing the party and we’re practical people who aren’t operating on a rigid agenda. But is that really enough? Farrell makes a compelling case that it isn’t.
Update: For more bloggy goodness, if you haven’t seen this video interview with our man Atrios, you’re missing out. My only complaint is that he rudely failed to introduce the famous Eschacats. What was he thinking?
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That Was The Week That Was
by digby
It’s been a tough week for all of us. But it’s been a tough week for the Republicans too. From John Hulse in the comments:
We have Mark Foley a republican congressman from Florida’s 16th Congressional District, a 52 year old man, sexually harassing a 16 year old (boy) congressional page, resigning from congress immediately. The congressman was even asking the young boy for photos of himself. Sexually explicit computer messages. Something like “Would you please slip your tighty-whities off for me.” and “Are you turned on?” Creepy times 10.
We have snippets of Bob Woodward’s new book, where Laura Bush is walking around the White House hallways calling for Don Rumsfeld’s resignation.
Then a CIA report that says that the invasion and occupation has made the United States LESS SAFE and recruited 1 million new crazed terrorists who are willing to kill themselves and all of us.
Reports are now saying that American troops are coming under attack 100 times EVERY SINGLE DAY. That�s an attack about every 13 minutes. Give or take a roadside bomb.
Crooked republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff now is being reported to have had hundreds of meetings inside the White House. Offering gifts to the richest men in the White House. Free concert tickets, free dinners to nice restaurants, free trips, free travel. FREE FREE FREE.
Quite ironic how the poor of Katrina were left to starve and die, but Bush’s friends get concert tickets and a free meal. The average American can’t afford to take a vacation and these corrupt pieces of human garbage get free trips to Scotland to play golf. All they had to do was agree to screw over the Indians. It seems from the evidence that it was an easy call for them to make.
The question one wonders is how much more harm to America could George Bush and the republicans do to America if they were with the other side?
And finally Bill Clinton’s slam dunking of poor Chris Wallace. Mr. Wallace ended up peeing all over himself and lying about all the tough questions he asked the Bushies.
All this and we left out, TORTURE. George W. Bush will be known forever to history as the torture president. Both al Qaeda and the United States, I’m afraid.
Oh yeah�.I almost forgot. MA-KA-KA!
Let’s just say this is going to be a helluva campaign. Fasten your seatbelts.
Update: This Republican Boytoy scandal must really have the leadership freaked out:
House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post last night that he had learned this spring of some “contact” between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Boehner said he told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and that Hastert assured him “we’re taking care of it.”
ooops
Boehner later contacted The Post and said he could not remember whether he talked to Hastert.
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Know Your Place
by digby
Just in case they failed to get the memo:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.
He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.
Right. The Empty Codpiece and his federalist society drones are the ones the constitution anticipated should be interpreting the constitution when the US engaged in an unending, undeclared “war” on a tactic.
If these Republicans manage to hold on to the presidency, which they very well may since we’ve anointed St McCain of Guantanamo, I guess we’d better get used to the idea that we are living in an All American form of military dictatorship. There really is no other way to interpret Gonzales’ statement.
Funny how we managed to get through the cold war and WWII without stripping the courts of authority, but then the Commies and the Nazis were nothing (nothing, I tell you!) to the existential threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. It’ll be a miracle if the country survives.
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“They All Look The Same To Me”
by digby
I read today that one of the biggest corporations in the world has taken sides in the election and has chosen to explicitly identify themselves with a right wing shill. General Motors has actually hired Sean Hannity for a “patriotic” campaign to sell their cars. (This is a man who asks his guests “Is it that you hate this president or that you hate America?” )
Hannity is an unusual choice, to say the least. Apparently GM no longer cares if Democrats buy their cars. Good to know.
As I was casting about today for various Hannity quotes, I came across this beauty from his book “Deliver Us From Evil.” The events of this week made it particularly striking, I thought:
Uncomfortable with the idea of God-given natural rights, [liberals] seek to substitute their own concepts of liberty and justice — whatever they may be at the moment. The prefer the idea of a “living and breathing” constitution, one that can change with the times. Yet what they fail to see is exactly what Madison warned against: that a government with unchecked power — whose authority is not grounded in a more fundamental source of morality — leaves its people unprotected from evil.
This blind spot has left liberals far less suspicious of totalitarian regimes than they should be. Monarchism, national socialism, fascism, communism — all these forms of authoritarianism are illegitimate and inherently unjust. They enable a relative handful of people to hold the state’s levers of power, and use them to impose their will on an entire population. And inevitably they lead to abuse, oppression, even mass murder.
…We believe that American is a superior society not because Americans are superior human beings, but because our culture was founded on a recognition of our God-given natural rights — the “unalienable rights'” referred to in the Declaration of Independence. From that awareness flows a basic, shared respect for humanity, individual liberty, limited government and the rule of law.
Well, there’s unalienable and then there’s unalienable.
They (the detainees) do not deserve the full panoply of rights reserved for Americans. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) 9/28/06
Let’s let Trent Lott explain it as only he can:
“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”
Do they all look like macacas Trent? because animals don’t qualify for those unalienable rights that are reserved for Americans. Well, some the Americans. The good ones. You know which ones.
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Who Cares What The Supreme Court Says?
by tristero
Oh, yes, it’s disturbing. But let’s not not over-react. In reality, it’s just election-season politicking, the torture bill, I’m talking about, the limitations on habeas corpus. They really don’t mean it to stick ’cause they know full well it’s unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will overrule it. And that will be that.
Supreme Court decisions that are “so clearly at variance with the national will” should be overridden by the other branches of government, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says.
“What I reject, out of hand, is the idea that by five to four, judges can rewrite the Constitution, but it takes two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the states to equal five judges,” Gingrich said during a Georgetown University Law Center conference on the judiciary.
It takes approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the 50 states to adopt an amendment to the Constitution, the government’s bedrock document.
Gingrich, a Republican who represented a district in Georgia, noted that overwhelming majorities in Congress had reaffirmed the Pledge of Allegiance, and most of the public believes in its right to recite it.
As such, he said, “It would be a violation of the social compact of this country for the Supreme Court to decide otherwise and would lead, I hope, the two other branches to correct the court.”
In 2002, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that the pledge was unconstitutional when recited in public schools because of the reference to God. The Supreme Court in 2004 reversed that decision on a technicality, but the case has been revived.
Gingrich said “the other two branches have an absolute obligation to render independent judgment” in cases that are “at variance with the national will.”
He spoke at Thursday’s panel discussion on relations between the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government.
And I can just hear the rationalizations. Look, it’s well known Newt isn’t in the Bush inner circle, even other Republicans think Newt is crazy.
Keep going…
Besides the country wouldn’t stand for it. If George W. Bush chooses to ignore Supreme Court decisions he doesn’t like, why, there would be…well, no there wouldn’t be riots in the streets, but a lot of very irate people would write letters to the editor!
Riiiiiight.
And don’t you just love Daschle’s charmingly naive riposte? What if Gore ignored the Supremes? The Republicans wouldn’t have liked that one bit! ROTFLMAO!
My dear Daschle, you really don’t get it. This isn’t a game where the rules are “I play fair so you play fair.” This is about the reality of asymmetrical power and that’s no game. For a Republican in 2006 to worry that a Democrat would ever be in a position, let alone dare, to override a Supreme Court decision is like worrying that Noam Chomsky might have his own talk show on Fox News.
Now, for those of you clinging on to the delusion that what is happening isn’t what actually is happening, let me spell it out. Gingrich is floating out there the very real possibility that Bush will not abide by any Supreme Court judgment he doesn’t like. Suddenly the idea that the Supremes aren’t the final arbiter on constitutionality is something that “merits discussion” and if you don’t think this notion is going to dominate the discourse if the Supremes strike down the torture bill, well, I hate to be so blunt about it, but you are completely, totally wrong.
Rogue presidency. Fascism.
I’m not joking, I’m not being shrill, and I’m not being alarmist.
Saints Preserve Us
by digby
Susie informs me that today was Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, the protector of light against the forces of darkness. Apparently St. Mike is honored by all the people of the book, which is news to her — and me too.
Susie nominates him for our patron saint and I’ll second that nomination. We need all the help we can get.
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It’s Getting Hot In Here
by digby
Many thanks to tristero for voicing the frustration and outrage so many of us are feeling about events of this week. I remember writing a piece sometime back about the danger presented by the constant drumbeat of cruel and violent rhetoric that bubbles up from the right wing into the national conversation and becomes more and more acceptable. (David Neiwert, as you know, has written about this extensively.) Civilized taboos are being broken everywhere, especially the most important taboos, the big ones, the ones that put untrammelled power in the hands of unaccountable authority. I wrote in that post called “Flame On High”
Seeing Ann Coulter feted on the cover of Time magazine as a mainstream political figure instead of the deranged, murderous extremist she actually is was quite a shock. And then a friend sent me the links to the Free Republic thread discussing the death of Marla Ruzicka, which made me so nauseous that I had to shut down for a while.
It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. And the media are enjoying the hot tub party so much that they are helping to turn up the heat.
Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn’t. For instance, he doesn’t say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn’t say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn’t say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn’t put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn’t, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.
Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it’s a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.
I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.
The idea was that the rise in heated, violent rhetoric in our culture was leading to serious concerns about the eliminationist impulse on the right. Just this week we see a disgusting anthrax “joke” played on Keith Olbermann because he has had the temerity to speak out against the president — and a right wing newspaper laughs about it.
But why should that surprise us? We also saw more than half of our elected representatives explictly endorse torture and the repeal of habeas corpus (although they lied right to our faces and said they didn’t.)
That shouldn’t have surprised us either. CJR has an interesting article this month on how the press covered torture called A Failure of Imagination. It’s not pretty:
There is a final factor that has shaped torture coverage, one that is hard to capture. In most big scandals, such as Watergate, the core question is whether the allegations of illegal behavior are true. Here, the ultimate issue isn’t whether the allegations are true, but whether they’re significant, whether they should really be considered a scandal.
Though the administration has decided not to defend publicly the need for “coercive” interrogations, others have. Their argument is that the policy of abusive interrogations is not only acceptable but necessary to protect the United States. At the same time, polls on torture are notoriously sensitive to phrasing. It’s the mixed results themselves, though, that may be telling. Americans appear to be ambivalent about the occasional need for torture. And with ambivalence, perhaps, comes a preference for not wanting to know.
Within this context, any article, no matter how straightforward or truthful, that treats abuse as a potential scandal — even by simply putting allegations on the front page — is itself making a political statement that “we think this is important,” and, implicitly, wrong. To make such a statement takes chutzpah. Between the invasion of Afghanistan in fall 2001 and the revelations about Abu Ghraib in spring 2004, chutzpah was in particularly short supply.
And it still does, apparently. While there has been ample coverage of Bush’s torture and indefinite detention regime it has never assumed the level of “scandal.” Even Abu Ghraib, where there were pictures of abuses, never really touched the administration. And what happened to the culture?
You’ll recall what the most popular radio host in the world had to say about it:
LIMBAUGH: …this is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
And you’ll recall what leading Republicans said about the criticism he received for that:
Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.
In the days after 9/11 the panic and hysteria were so thick in the air that people were saying a lot of crazy things. I remember writing a blistering post some time back about Jonathan Alter, who is a good guy, but who lost his mind for a bit after 9/11 and entertained this torture concept in his column. We all remember Alan Dershowitz going on the record early with an argument to make torture legal. I was quite stunned at the time, but I assumed that once the smoke cleared the nation would realize, with some chagrin, that many of the things they felt and believed while the rubble was still fresh was no longer acceptable.
The opposite happened. Our culture, debased by years of ugly rightwing eliminationist rhetoric has gotten worse. It is so much worse that it has abandoned the taboo against torture. There is no other way to read the results of this week.
Some of our leadership did speak out against the abuse of prisoners. Hillary Clinton, in particular, addressed the humane treatment of the captured enemy in explicit terms of fundamental American values. Others did as well. But overall, I think it’s pretty clear that speaking out against torture is still something that requires chutzpah — which means that approving of torture is now the norm. We need to recognize that and form our strategy based on that recognition. We are no longer the country I grew up in.
I feel I should point out that the old frog in boiling water thing is incorrect. When a frog feels the water heating up he jumps out. His survival instinct is strong. Humans, on the other hand, are much more complex creatures. It’s not that we don’t have a surivial instinct — it’s that we have the ability to rationalize and make ourselves believe that boiling water can’t kill us — it only kills frogs. But primitive lizard brain instincts are important in warning us when something is terribly wrong — and we fail to heed them at our peril.
This country is very swiftly retreating to an uncivilized state. It’s not because of gay people getting married or women aborting blastocysts. It’s because a vicious, violent ugly faction took over the political discourse and normalized the idea of a powerful enemy within and without America that must be stopped by any means possible.
And the government is giving these people tours of the prison at Guantanamo and they come back and report that it is beautiful resort and the residents are fat and lazy. (Literally. It couldn’t be more soviet.)
Of course, the very same person who said that wrote this in 2003:
“In a year’s time, Iraq will be, at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world and, at best, pleasant, civilised and thriving. In short: not a bad three weeks’ work.”
That would be amusing except for the fact that he is no more deluded than the people who run the most powerful country in the world. This water is starting to bubble.
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What Exactly Did Bush Do About The Cole In His First 8 Months?
by tristero
Olbermann examines the recent claims that Bush in his first 8 months was as aggressive in going after bin Laden as Clinton. Guess what? It’s all lies and Olbermann has compiled the facts and footage to prove it, including stuff I suspect is quite new to most of us (such as that the Taliban offered Bush, yes Bush, to hand over bin Laden to the Saudis and he ignored the offer). And guess what? It’s on MSNBC and nobody will see it.
Wotta racket. It’s even better than suppressing the truth. Make it available so no one can claim censorship. But keep it away from the mainstream mass media so it has absolutely no impact at all. And if by any chance anyone gets suspicious, ignore the substance but dismiss the reporter as “too far left” to be taken seriously.
Wotta racket.
ht, Daou Report
This Ain’t Yer Grandpa’s Democracy
by tristero
Well. Now what?
The first thing to do is apparently quite controversial, why, I have no idea. But it is imperative that we fully recognize how seriously godawful the situation is.
I’ll say it again: Americans are living in a fascist state. Don’t like the word “fascism?” Neither do I. So what? It’s ludicrous to call the gutting of habeas corpus, etc, etc, by near unanimous consent merely “authoritarian.”* We are living in a fascist state. [See update.]
Some commenters in the post below said I am being too discouraging. Hardly. This country’s government has been transformed and is no longer recognizable as a working democracy. That’s simply a fact and we better accept it.
Because when you’re dealing with fascism, “We can beat this, people if we just fight harder!” is naive win-one-for-the-Gipper fantasy-land. It’s gonna get a lot worse than it is now before it gets better. We’re gonna be lucky if more of us don’t end up “persons of interest” to the Bush administration. Remember, if you’re not with Bush, you’re objectively pro-terrorist and I can’t tell you how many times when commenting on rightwing blogs I’ve been accused of “aiding and abetting” the terrorists.
Does that mean not to resist Bush as some people suggested yesterday? I have no idea where that comes from. It never occurred to me.
I fail to see the connection between being realistic – that the situation is absolutely godawful – and giving up. Perhaps it’s my experience as a composer, where confronting literally intractable obstacles – aesthetic, personal, and professional – are often an hourly occurrence. Of course, it’s difficult to stick with it. Of course, it’s discouraging, probably impossible with the odds of failure 10 to 1 or worse. Understanding that – truly understanding that – is the first step towards fighting with competence. You still very well could fail, but at least you’re reality based.
And that makes you a lot more agile and street-smart than most of the folks you have to fight. And that increases the odds in your favor. And your chances of capitalizing on luck. Maybe not enough, but there’s something downright satisfying about giving the bastards the worst possible time you can give them.
But in order to resist Bush, it’s not enough to understand that we are in the early stages of a major catastrophe. We must also recognize exactly how it is bad, awful, dangerous, and the full extent of it before we can craft an appropriate resistance. What is clear is that the strategies used by the Democratic party to resist Bushism are useless.** We need much better ones.
Finally, we must realize that we will be fighting what this unspeakable bastard has done to the country and the world for a very long time.
*Only Republican votes count. And even then, a signing statement can easily finesse where they deign to restrict the god-inspired power of Oedipus Tex to do whatever he wants.
**Of course, you have to vote and of course you must vote for Democrats. Why? Because.
You think that’s no answer? In the amount of time it would take for you to type out all the reasons you and I shouldn’t bother, including gleefully pointing out that in the footnote above, I “admitted” it doesn’t make a difference (which I didn’t, btw), you could have saved yourself all that tedious effort and just voted. So grow up and just do it.
That’s the least you can do. But if you’re serious, you have to find ways to resist Bush in addition to voting that are less futile.
BTW, don’t waste valuable electrons telling us how voting legitimizes a corrupt system, blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it all before and it doesn’t sound any more plausible the more it gets repeated. And yes, I know full well that the machines are rigged and it is not a paranoid fantasy to think that. It doesn’t matter. Get off your lazy ass in November and vote for Democrats.
Don’t wanna vote for Democrats who voted for torture? Agreed. Don’t vote for them. Vote for other Democrats.
[Updated slightly after original post.]
[UPDATE: Some in comments and elsewhere have disputed my use of the F word here. Among the arguments: fascist states don’t have elections. Well, in fact they do. But they’re rigged. Computerized voting machines anyone. Another is that free speech is curtailed in a fascist state. Well, in fact it is. What matters freedom of speech in an era of megachurches if you don’t have access to a significant microphone?
I deliberately chose one the most “extreme” words available because it sets off alarm bells. I am aware that this eruption of American fascism is quite different than classic examples. I am also aware that the extent of fascistic repression is small compared to other countries. American fascism doesn’t resemble European models, or Asian, or Middle Eastern totalitarian states. But that doesn’t make it any less fascistic.
If the cult of a leader inspired by God and Manifest Destiny, deeply beholden to corporate interests, which condones torture, heaps contempt on habeas corpus, plays the race card whenever it can, passes laws based upon the whim of the leader, and severely restricts the free discourse of ideas on the truly mass media isn’t fascism, then please tell me what is.
More active use of the repressive powers Bush has seized? More censorship? That’s simply a quantitative argument. The “quality” of fascism is undeniably here.]