49 million Americans held hostage by power-crazed idiot savant

[shereads]

Send help.

 

[razor_nut]

I don't even want to know the ransom.

Someone save me!

 

[Guest]

Well, I can't wait to see her.

 

[Guest]

Send help.

And chocolate.

 

[rgraham666]

I'm afraid this is one of those cases where you're going to have to help yourselves.

I'm here for moral support, but you're going to have to do most of the work.

 

[neonlyte]

Send help.

I understand very serious consideration is being given to sending you left of centre Guru to assist your current plight.

We're having a collection to raise the airfare to send Tony Blair over to you. (Don't send him back)

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Re: Re: 49 million Americans held hostage by power-crazed idiot savant

I understand very serious consideration is being given to sending you left of centre Guru to assist your current plight.

We're having a collection to raise the airfare to send Tony Blair over to you. (Don't send him back)

It might be worth noting that 49 million are being held hostage by an idiot savant AND 53 million of their fellows.

 

[cantdog]

Thanks. Tony will be such a big help. Check the technique the Marines used to get Aristide on the 'plane, and just whisk him on over.

Send help, indeed. Are you gonna just sit an cry? There's a lot of us. We ain't helpless, and we ain't doomed. We are lazy, though, and won't lift a finger to save ourselves as long as the food keeps coming.

Half the pop of the most luxuriously resourced people of the whole planet and they just can't do anything to stand up for themselves.

 

[shereads]

Re: Re: Re: 49 million Americans held hostage by power-crazed idiot savant

It might be worth noting that 49 million are being held hostage by an idiot savant AND 53 million of their fellows.

Oh, I don't think that's escaped anyone's notice.

A majority of Americans are happy as pigs in a corn bin, as they have every right to be after a resounding win. It's what they're happy about that's worrisome.

More than half of Americans are gleefully looking forward to giving the rest of us a Moral Values Make-Over: criminalizing internet porn, putting homosexualtiy back in the closet where it belongs, and cracking down on abortion so that women who fornicate will face the consequences.

This isn't a heartbreaking loss to our football rival, where we're called upon to be gracious and let bygones be bygones. This is a step backward in time; the undoing of decades of progress in social tolerance and civil liberties. It's the death of the American dream for anyone whose dreams were outside the norm.

 

[minsue]

Re: Re: Re: Re: 49 million Americans held hostage by power-crazed idiot savant

It's the death of the American dream for anyone whose dreams were outside the norm.

(with no irony) That's what that feeling in the pit of my stomach is! I've been going insane trying to name it. Sadly, you have just put it into words quite well.

 

[cantdog]

Ah, the fifties were conformist and tight-assed too. We showed 'em! After a few decades, anyway. But there's better communication, now. The whole pendulum could be shorter, and be swingin allegro now. Buck up. At least a lot of us remember the old days fondly and would be happy to have 'em back. That's all those guys had going for them, remember? Then they organized!

The moral of this story isn't oh shit we're doomed. Its Organize!

 

[Wildcard Ky]

Some people seem to have a really difficult time understanding the concept of "majority wins".

 

[cantdog]

Some people seem to have a really difficult time understanding the concept of "majority wins".

The majority can decide to toss you out and they will find you still defend yourself. I don't roll over if it's a serious threat, no matter how many people there are who think I should be dispossessed. You stop defending yourself if there's a majority involved?

 

[Guest]

Some people seem to have a really difficult time understanding the concept of "majority wins".

Well, at the last election I had a really difficult time understanding the concept of "minority wins".

And some people are missing the point.

Yes, the Bush brigade won. (Well, this time, anyway!)

But nearly half the voters in this country (and people occupying other countries on this planet) feel the US is in a serious downward spiral with regards to our economy, the military, the environment -

Just because he won doesn't mean dick. We're in trouble, Bush thinks it's fine, and I don't want to envision where we'll be in four more years.

 

[Xelebes]

Why do I furl my brow at these type of threads?

And why couldn't the Democrats pick a presidential candidate with at least some conviction in his arguments?

 

[cantdog]

In my view he was prevented from criticizing some of Dubya's lapses because his party had done the same shit.

But no one was listening to his conviction. I explained to Q_C that he'd told us all right up front about his Iraq plan, but the media suppressed what he said. Q_C said he watched a lot of news [FOX, tellingly} and all he heard was "i have a plan," a two-second sound bite, with no elaboration. FOX didn't want Kerry's ideas to get out there, and they evidently did a good job of cutting hiom off at the knees.

The key to citizenship in this age is to research issues yourself and not believe the pundits clucking their tongues about "He isn't presidential" and "he lacks conviction." I don't believe the half of what the talking heads say, I go look for myself.

 

[Xelebes]

In my view he was prevented from criticizing some of Dubya's lapses because his party had done the same shit.

But no one was listening to his conviction. I explained to Q_C that he'd told us all right up front about his Iraq plan, but the media suppressed what he said. Q_C said he watched a lot of news [FOX, tellingly} and all he heard was "i have a plan," a two-second sound bite, with no elaboration. FOX didn't want Kerry's ideas to get out there, and they evidently did a good job of cutting hiom off at the knees.

The key to citizenship in this age is to research issues yourself and not believe the pundits clucking their tongues about "He isn't presidential" and "he lacks conviction." I don't believe the half of what the talking heads say, I go look for myself.

I did see the debate and did some independent investigation but Kerry was a weak candidate to have pushed for presidency. Mind you, the weakness was made smaller when compared with Bush, however the people saw the weaknesses and went with the devil they knew.

 

[cantdog]

That they did, no question. Warts and all.

I fought Ashcroft's policies the first four, however, and I'm gonna fight them the next fifty if I have to. I dislike a police state, and I want it rolled back offa me.

People are welcome to their devils, known and unknown, but I'm still going to defend myself. There are limits to what any government gets to do.

I'm sorry for the people who placed more emphasis on where people put their penises. Unless you're sitting on my lap, you don't have to care where my penis is. And neither does any government.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Some people seem to have a really difficult time understanding the concept of "majority wins".

The concept of rule by a majority has a corrolarry, as expoused in Blackstones when it discuses the foundations of democracy.

I paraphrase as I am not fortuneate enough to own a copy of Blackstones.

In a democracy, the job of governemt is two fold. It enforces the will of the majority, but it also protects the rights of the individual.

A stong case can be made that his administration wishes to follow one part of that definition zealously and ignore the other. In the case of their strong support of a ban on gay marriage, it would seem they not only ignore, but directly oppose the second mandate.

If that is the case, then a strong case can be made that this administration is not acting legitimately reguardless of the majority that elected it.

Blackstones is not the only definition of democracy. It can be argued that it dosen't apply as the right to marry is expressly reserved for Hetero couples. Another argument for another place.

On the other hand, you have a solid argument too, whining forver about nearly half of us didn't vote for him belies the fact that over half ot those who voted did.

Americans have chosen this course of action. In every concieveable way, the election of GWB is an expression of the majority opinion. The majority of voters chose him. The majority of states chose him. The defeat of the Democratic party and by extention it's social agenda was complete and total. He will now act with every bit of his power to enforce the will of the majority. If he does not, however, protect the rights of the indicidual while doing it, then IMHO every action he takes is illegitimate.

-Colly

 

[rgraham666]

DEMOCRACY An existential system in which words are more important than actions. Not a judgemental system.

Democracy is not intended to be efficient, linear, logical, cheap, the source of absolute truth, manned by angels, saints or virgins, profitable, the justification for any particular economic system, a simple matter of majority rule or for that matter a simple matter of majorities. Nor is it an administrative procedure, patriotic, a reflection of tribalism, a passive servant of either law or regulation, elegant or particularly charming.

Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.

The Doubter's Companion - John Ralston Saul

At least the participation is higher this time.

And Harold? If Bush had lost, I suspect you would be as angry and fearful as the people who voted for Kerry.

 

[Weird Harold]

And Harold? If Bush had lost, I suspect you would be as angry and fearful as the people who voted for Kerry.

Nope.

I've been voting for 34 years, and this is the first time the candidate I voted for won. Most of those 34 years, presidential elections had a very direct effect on my work because they literally changed my boss.

I've never seen thepredictions of doom and gloom that the losers of every presidential election have predicted come true and I don't expect to see it this time.

The nice thing about the American system is that "this too shall pass." Things might get better and they might get worse, but I deal with what IS and not what "might have been."

The Election is effectively over and GWB won. I'll deal with the results as they happen. I'd do the same if Kerry had won.

I'm not real happy that oneof my senators is a democrat and likely to become the Senate Minority Leader.

I didn't vote for Harry Reid, but if I want to make my voice heard, he's who I have to deal with. Ranting and cursing at him when I try to be heard isn't likely to earn me any browny points with him and make him more likely to listen to me -- so I don't do that. A polite and rational statement of what cocerns me draws a polite response. I imagine ranting and name calling gets ignored, but I wouldn't know, because I try very hard not to indulge in that kind of behavior.

 

[KarenAM]

Here, as I see it, are the problems that Bush now faces:

He was legitimately elected. Even if there were voting irregularities (and there always are some), he won the popular vote by a wide enough margin that questioning his election seems to me to be a moot point. The challenge he and any elected president faces is that he is now the president of the entire United States, not just the red states, and not just the people who voted for him. This means that, like it or not, his constituents now include 48% of the voting public, including me, who did not feel that he should be president. That's a lot of people. By winning this election, Bush is now ethically obligated to serve our needs and pay attention to our desires as to how the government should behave, just as he is obligated to serve the needs and interests of those who voted for him.

The problems are two: First, in Bush's first term, when he did not have a majority of the votes, he governed in a way that excluded those who disagreed with him, so there is no reason for those of us who voted against him this time to expect him to listen to our voices now that he won with a majority. He has a history, in other words, of not governing as the president of the entire population of the United States, but rather just those who obey and support him. As Colly noted, any president who fails to support the rights of the individual (and Bush has failed badly to do so thus far) has failed as the president of a democracy, regardless of how legitimate he may be based on a majority vote. It's part of the harsh reality of the job of president that he has to accomidate those citizens who disagree with him.

Second, and rather more disturbing, is the trend in American politics for voters themselves to forget this. Gone are the days of "live and let live" in politics; now voters in the rural midwest feel that their values should be imposed by the Federal government on people in urban San Francisco, and vise-versa. This desire to homogenize Ameircan culture and society is largely the result, in my opinion, of the radical improvement in communications technology that appeared in the last century, and the desire of ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum to create utopias, whether a Christian theocracy or a Politically Correct police state. What is lost in these attempts at social engineering is the fact that the United States was founded on and thrives through diversity, of political opinion as much as any other thing.

In the current situation I worry about the following: The evangelicals whose support for Bush gave him the office are part of a broader social movement that is publically opposed to secularism, science, and tolerance, not just in their hometowns but everywhere. Teaching evolution must be banned in cities a thousand miles from their homes and gays must be ostracised or worse everywhere. Just as "liberals" in the Democratic party forgot or denigated these folks and their values, so too do all too many of these folks denigrate the values and beliefs of those who order their lives and society around secular, humanistic ideas. As our thread title suggests, it is ethically wrong for president and government of the United States to push the ideology of 51% of the population on 48% of it, but this is precisely the public agenda of many conservative groups who Bush now owes favors to, and to whom he has been favorably disposed even before he had majority support.

So, yes, for the first time in four years Bush is the legal and legitimate president of the United States. But if he chooses to rule, rather than govern, if he imposes his or anyone else's ideological belief system on even a single individual through the power he has been entrusted with for the next four years, the legal and technical legitimacy he now has will mean nothing. He and those who support him will be nothing more than tyrants, majority or not.

 

[Xelebes]

We can all hope for something here: procrastination and laziness to get in the way of his policies.

I'm sure there has been policies that Bush has been wanting to pass but hasn't in the last four years that it'll all add up and have him not passing legislation and stuff.

It happens.

 

[Pure]

Here's some food for thought.

Look at the map by _counties_ at such places at www.electoral-vote.com . It's kind of scarey to see all those red ones.

Visit the fun site www.smirkingchimp.com .

Have a look at this little piece by a favorite conservative columnist:

November 5, 2004
Buck Up, You Lefties!
There's reason for hope

by Justin Raimondo

The presidential campaign had hardly ended before the sounds of shocked outrage and the gnashing of teeth was heard across the globe:

"How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" wailed the Daily Mirror.

"This is not going to make the relationship on the two sides of the Atlantic any easier," averred Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States.


"We didn't want Bush," said Amar Hassan Fayad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "Kerry could have made a fresh start. His mission wouldn't have been as complicated as Bush's."


"Never in the course of human history has such an inspiring election produced such a depressing result," moaned Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian.

On the home front, the mood was even darker. The knowing smirk on Jon Stewart's face was nowhere to be seen on election night, although it will doubtless make a return appearance all too soon. (Hey, it's a living). New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's lamentation typified the mindset of the post-Kerry Latte Liberal:

"What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

Maureen Dowd cites a "Bush insider" who says:

"'He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now. He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war.' Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create."

This last possibility – nay, near certainty – is cause for grave concern. While the Latte Liberals are sitting around the café lamenting their beleaguered status as internal exiles, the "liberated" peoples of Iraq will bear the full brunt of the election results. We will "feel their pain," so to speak, from a safe distance.

Not that John Kerry would have given them a moment's respite from American state terrorism. How long, one wonders, before the Latte Liberals stop blaming the American people for being too dim to embrace Kerry as their savior and start reexamining what was possibly, if not the worst, then certainly the most passive political campaign in American history?

Remember the Democratic convention – where antiwar signage and sentiment was verboten? – that cravenly sought to mimic Republican militarism? Boston signaled the death wish of the Democrats: after all, why vote for Bush Lite, when the real deal is already in office?

When Bush's minions defamed Kerry's military record, smeared his supporters, and implied that a Kerry victory would be followed shortly afterward by the nuking of major American cities, the Democratic candidate … did nothing. Better to lose the election than that the word "chickenhawk" should ever pass the lips of a Boston Brahmin.

As Kerry sunk in the polls, and the possibility that he was deliberately throwing the election to the Republicans began to be bruited about, somebody must have woken up over at Democratic party headquarters, because – in a complete reversal – Kerry began pounding away at the president's conduct of the Iraq war. Not that he came out in opposition, yet, as I have pointed out before, he appropriated antiwar arguments in the final weeks of the campaign – and immediately began surging in the polls.

But it was too late, and, aside from that, the Republicans had a superior organization, fueled by the zeal of Christian fundamentalists who believe the president's policies are a divine writ from God. What sort of emotional-ideological fuel fired the Democratic machine – hatred of Bush? Whatever it was, it wasn't a love of Kerry's fabled nuances, and – more importantly – it wasn't enough.

Aside from Kerry's known limitations, however, I would urge the dejected to put their present travails in historical perspective. On November 11, 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected in what was truly a mandate for his monstrous foreign policy: it was one of the largest landslides in the history of American politics. Nixon crushed the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, taking more than 60 percent of the vote.

A few months later, Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. By April, the Nixon White House was in disarray, as the Watergate conspirators scrambled in a vain attempt to cover up the cover-up. Senate hearings on the matter were convened in May. That summer, John Dean spilled his guts to Watergate investigators, who uncovered more incriminating evidence of illegal White House activities. October's Saturday Night Massacre sounded the death knell of Nixon's presidency, ensuring that, no matter what the ultimate outcome – impeachment or resignation – the 36th President of the United States would go down in the history books as a discredited and pathetic failure. A year after pulverizing the McGovernites – who, unlike the Kerry-ites, really were opponents of global interventionism – Nixon was whining "I am not a crook!"

While history never repeats itself in quite the same way, the possibility that Bush could wind up disgraced looms larger today than it did for Nixon in the winter of 1972. Back then, the Watergate burglars were still being depicted as a "rogue" operation, and no one believed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who doggedly uncovered the crimes that eventually brought down a president. Similar scandals are simmering on the back burner at the Bush White House: at least three, at last count. Any one of them could lead to big trouble for this administration, which had better start battening down the hatches just as soon as the last of the champagne is poured.

While the issue has largely been lost sight of on account of special prosecutor Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald's bulldoggish tactics – threatening to jail reporters for refusing to divulge their sources – his probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Washington neocons eager to discredit her husband, diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, is likely to reach into the vice president's office – and, from there, insinuate its way into the White House. It's the cover-up, not the crime, that gets them every time…

A related investigation into the basis of the infamous "16 words" of the president's 2002 State of the Union address is also percolating, and this should be even more interesting – and potentially damaging to the administration. Because this probes into the question of how so much blatantly false information made its way into the White House and onto the president's desk – including an outright forgery that was so crude it took the IAEA's scientists a matter of minutes with Google to debunk it.

Yet another looming legal case is the upcoming trial of neocon ideologue Larry Franklin, a specialist on Iran working in Douglas Feith's Pentagon policy shop, who was caught red-handed turning over highly sensitive top secret documents to two Israeli government officials and two top employees of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. In a fascinating piece on the sociology of the neoconservative movement, social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel characterizes them as an "informal" faction:

"I call these exclusive, informal factions 'flex groups,' for their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change."

In light of the Franklin case, however, the covert activities of the neoconservative "flex group" in the Pentagon appear to serve a purpose greater than mere mutual self-promotion. Rather than just furthering the interests of the individuals involved, clearly the idea is to promote the goals of a foreign power, namely Israel – the chief beneficiary, aside from Iran, of our post-9/11 foreign policy, and which clearly had an interest in rushing us to war. Now that Tehran is in Israel's sights – along with Syria and Lebanon – the same "flex group" is flexing its muscles and getting ready for action in Bush's second term. But there's nothing like a charge of espionage to put a crimp in the activities of even the most dedicated and energetic fifth column.

So, cheer up, all you disillusioned and depressed lefties and assorted liberals, who were (naively, in my view) counting on the deus ex machina of a Kerry victory to pull us out of the Iraqi quagmire. As an unreconstructed reactionary of the "isolationist" (i.e., anti-imperialist) Old Right, I can rightly claim to have never been taken in by this dubious panacea. In the interest of good taste, however, I'll refrain from any further displays of unseemly gloating, and merely remind my readers that they were warned: "It's Bush by a relatively substantial margin in the popular vote," I wrote in the "Notes in the Margin" section of this column the day before the election, and so it was.

Aside from confirming my predictive prowess – I meant relatively substantial compared to the 2000 contest – the Bush victory signifies much less than is readily apparent. Yes, it's one giant step backward, but the antiwar forces can confidently look forward to taking two or even three quite substantial steps forward in the months to come. While the public now knows that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," no lraqi links to 9/11, and no real threat to the U.S. posed by Saddam, the whole story of this administration's unparalleled mendacity has yet to be fully revealed. Bush's Watergate is bubbling up to the surface. The built-up pressure of months of investigations – years, in the case of the Israeli spy ring – is threatening to explode the deepest darkest secrets of the Bush White House onto the front pages. Now that Franklin has engaged Plato Cacheris, who first rocketed to fame as Attorney General John Mitchell's co-counsel in the Watergate case, the stage is set for a series of courtroom dramas – and possibly congressional hearings – that will not only tear the mask off the War Party but could discredit it for a good many years to come.

Screw John Kerry. We have just begun to fight.

– Justin Raimondo

 

[shereads]

Some people seem to have a really difficult time understanding the concept of "majority wins".

So this time it's the majority that carries the election? This is getting to be confusing.

No, seriously, Wildcard. We know you won. It's crystal clear that your side won. It's a simple concept. He's a simple president. The outcome was never really in doubt.