so last saturday was the anti-war rally here in l.a. there were 100K+ in d.c., thousands in ny and sf, and here in l.a., the second largest city in america, we had maybe 3,500, if that. seriosuly people, we need to be active and in the streets to have more of an impact. when the man who is still not my president remains disconnected and in denial and says straightfaced that sacrifice is simply being upset by images of war on tv, we need to put our boots on the ground to counter his need for boots on the ground in Iraq. we spoke on election day, 2006, at the ballot box. we need to speak louder than words with our presence at the next marches, rallies, and demonstrations. the future, any future, demands our attention.
we have attorney general who willfully misunderstands habeaus corpus. We have a vice-president willfully lying about "success" and refusing to discuss his own daughter's with-child status when the villification of that status was a major part of his political success. we had a secretary of defense who profited from bird-flu scares. we have malfeasance and corruption and incompetence at every level of government since the stolen election of 2000. the plan of this administration was always to do as much harm as possible and therefore keep the focus off any one thing. and in a country where american idol is more talked about than the possibility of voting machine fraud in ohio which led directly to the first four years of bush, we are in deep trouble. so cheney played the press expertly as shown by libby trial testimony? watergate was the last hurrah of the mainstream press. but then a few things happened. the right went on the offensive, and carter, the first post-watergate democratic president, was vilified as an outsider. even the washington press corps, which had been feasting on the corpse of nixon, went after carter. they just didn't like that he wasn't one of them. he might have been a democrat, he might have been liberal in some ways, he might have even had a new and unique way to look at foreign policy (through the prism of human rights)but he was from Georgia, for God's sakes. And then came the Reagan 80s. The press seemingly wanted to forget that they had done their duty by revealing the crimes of Watergate so they gave the Gipper a free pass for 8 years. Because they were making money. And money transcends politics and beliefs and democracy. So we had arms for hostges, and Iran-Contra, and gang warfare in the cities, and no mention of the Aids crisis for years, and instead we got a steady diet of feel-good Gipperdom. He even got credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall and overseeing the end of the Soviet Empire. The fact that for 70+ years the Russians had spent 70% plus of their GNP on defense had nothing to do with that. It was their response to Star Wars that made that wall come down. And the reporters wrote it and made Reagan a hero. A monstrous man, small in his thinking, going back to the McCarthy days in Hollywood, the free press, our best defense against creeping fascism, was bought and sold and left him alone. And our problems continued. So when did the press get their balls back? When Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and yet another Southern outsider, came on the scene. Whitewater, white stain on blue dress, it didn't matter. She went down on the President and they said "He's going down too." And for 8 years they went after him, and the 90s saw the metastisized growth of cancerous right-wing talk-radio. And the money kept rolling in. Clinton was a Southerner, but he wasn't their kind of Southerner; not a Nixon Southern strategy Southerner who hated Blacks and unions and anything that smacked of intelligence or learning or Eastern (read: Jewish and urban) influence. And then, with another Repugnant Republican in office, the press once again went all capon on us. They had money, they wanted to keep it. So they simply shut up. When Peter Jennings died (the longtime anchor at ABC news) I knew the press (print and broadcast) was dead as a constitutional safeguard. He left an estate of some 40-50 million. That's why reporters don't go after Republicans. They might lose their cushy jobs. Republicans will go after them. Hound them on talk-radio. Make them toxic to their employers who don't have the stomach for the constant fight. It's as simple as that. And that brings us to King George the Worst.
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You left out the introduction of crack into the ghettos of America under the Regan supervised C.I.A. It's purpose to further divide the haves from the have not's and give yet another reason to be afraid of poor minorities. I wonder if they will find the rampant spread of Meth to be very similar in getting rid of poor white people. Or simply creating a permanent underclass.
establishment and perpetuation of a permanent underclass has always been the republican way - this way they can always have newsworthy scare stories and bad-guys on the local news, thus keeping public money flowing for police and protection and away from any meaningful social programs or legislation. it's always about fear with those people. never about what's right. there's a line in the matt damon film about the history of the c.i.a., the good sheperd, when the weird mob character played by joe pesci lists what various ethnic groups have - the jews have tradition, the italians have family and the church, the irish, the blacks, et al - and he asks damon what they (w.a.s.p.s) have and damon answers cold and straightfaced - we have the united states of america. the rest of you are just visiting. it's the patronizing, entitlement attitude of superiority that is t the core of all republican policies. they are not americans. they are republicans. huge difference. the bottom line ha always been the accumulation of wealth and property. this war provides them with both.
Preaching to the choir.
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