Americans make me laugh

[NRKofOver]

and I say that as an American, hahahaha.



Anyways, I just read a poll (and I really don't put much stock into polls but their fun) that said 73% of the US population still believes that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the security of the country. And yet, most polls show that most Americans still support our actions in Iraq.



We didn't eliminate the threat of Saddam towards the US. We didn't find any WMD's, we really haven't made life better for the Iraqi people (unless of course, no water, electricity and random chaos in the streets is 'better'). And everyone seems to see this, but continues to say that this war was a good idea.



Hopefully the whole situation improves significantly, because otherwise I think the US population has gone goofy.

Read all about ME!

[memphis mike]

It's only been ten weeks since the war ended---I don't know where you get your info, but it is wrong. The Iraqi people are well on their way to building democracy. The scene in Iraq is no longer chaos....

[Rev9Volts]

yes i agree wiith memphis mike. however americans do make me laugh. actually people of all countries. the bull run in spain is pretty whacky. however, here is a story of 2 americans that is fuunny...



Flaming Gerbil



Flaming projectile gerbil--Actual article from the LA Times



"In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only

trying to retrieve the Gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors

in

the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital. Tomaszewski and his

homosexual partner Andrew (Kiki) Farnom, had been admitted for

emergency

treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong. "I pushed

a

cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in." he

explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out 'Armageddon,' my cue that he'd

had

enough. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn't come out again, so I

peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking that the light might

attract him."



At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what

happened

next. "The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot

out

of the tubing, igniting Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his

face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers which in turn

ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the

rodent out like a cannonball." Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns

and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnom suffered

first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.



TOP 11 SCARIEST THINGS ABOUT THIS STORY



11. "I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum." - Good start.



10. "As usual,Kiki shouted out "Armageddon" - They do this frequently?

(Or, at least they have done this more than once).



9. "So I peered into the tube." - I'm sorry, but that's like looking

through a telescope into hell. I'd rather use binoculars to stare

at the

sun.



8. The poor gerbil (who obviously suffers from low self esteem) being

shot

out of the gay guy's ass like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.



7. Suffering a broken nose from a gerbil being launched out of

someone's

anus. I'm just guessing, but I seriously doubt the said gerbil was

springtime fresh after his little journey into Kiki's tunnel of

love.



6. People walking around with these volcanic-like pockets of gas in

their

rectums.



5. This happened in Salt Lake City. What kind of people are those

Mormons?

I'm starting to get a whole new image of the Osmond family.



4. "First and second degree burns to the anus." Wouldn't this make the

burning itch and discomfort of hemorrhoids a welcome relief? How

does

one ever take a healthy dump after something like this? And the

smell of

a burning anus must be in the top five most horrible scents on the

face

of God's green earth.



3. People named "Kiki" which is obviously a Polynesian word for:

"Idiotic

men who shove rodents up their butts."



2. What kind of hospital would hold a press conference on this?



1. People who do this kind of thing and then admit what they were doing

when taken to the emergency room. Sorry, but I think I would have

made

up a story about a gang of roving, pyromaniac, anal sex fiends

breaking

into my house and sodomizing me with a charcoal lighter before I

admitted the truth. Call me old fashioned, but I just can't imagine

looking at a doctor and saying "Well Doc, it's like this. You see

we

have this gerbil named Raggot and we took this cardboard tube...

[NRKofOver]

Quote:

---

The scene in Iraq is no longer chaos....

---

I guess that's subjective. I know under Saddam it's not what anyone in the US would say is 'good'. But people being killed daily in random craziness seems kind of chaotic to me. Personally, if I was in Iraqi and it was possible, I would leave the country right now. It's not a 'good' life now either. Maybe it's on it's way to being better (and I wonder about that as well), but it's not 'good'.

Read all about ME!

[debbie mannas]

NRK, the sad fact is most of these people think they're well informed, when the only news they watch is fanatical right wing hype.



The rest of us outside the US and of course a GREAT deal of inquiring minds IN the US who actually watch more objective news (such as the BBC) just shake our heads in shock and awe at a nation so misled.



I read a post from a bushie that actually said that saddam had instigated the niger forgeries to confuse US intelligence...



Someone else said to me, thank God we have a leader who goes down on his knees before God everyday...



I think the Iraqis suffering goes on - violent crime and rape is higher now, and women are scared to leave their homes for fear of being abducted and raped.



And we are going likely going to see a rash of birth defects and deaths because of DU contamination and other pollutants.



And how about a village being contaminated as a result of the nuclear facility being looted because people needed the barrels just to hold water!



I do not think the Iraqis are feeling "good", no matter how much they are told they MUST.

[memphis mike]

the BBC, now I've heard it all...what a joke....

[debbie mannas]

so FOX is better?



story.news.yahoo.com/news...&ncid=1480



Cheney Task Force Had Eyes on Iraq Oil

27 minutes ago Add White House - AP to My Yahoo!





By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer



WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites)'s energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq (news - web sites)'s oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.



Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department (news - web sites) papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."



The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.



The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration's energy needs and future energy agenda.



Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club (news - web sites) to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush (news - web sites)'s energy plan.



Tom Fitton, the group's president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information, but "it shows why it is important that we learn what was going on in the task force."



"Opponents of the war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq," said Fitton. "Supporters will say they were only evaluating oil reserves in the Mideast, and the likelihood of future oil production."



The task force report was released in May 2001. In it, a chapter titled "Strengthening Global Alliances" calls the Middle East "central to world oil security" and urges support for initiatives by the region's oil producers to open their energy sectors to foreign investment. The chapter does not mention Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.



Commerce Department spokesman Trevor Francis said: "It is the responsibility of the Commerce Department to serve as a commercial liaison for U.S. companies doing business around the world, including those that develop and utilize energy resources. The Energy Task Force evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply. The final report, released in May of 2001, contains maps of key energy-producing regions in the world, including Russia, North America, the Middle East and the Caspian region."



A spokeswoman for the vice president did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Friday.



A two-page document obtained with the map and released by Judicial Watch lists, as of March 2001, companies in 30 countries that had an interest in contracts to help then-President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) develop Iraq's oil wealth.



The involvement of Russia and France has been documented. Also on the list were companies from Canada, Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, India and Mexico. Even Vietnam had interest in a service contract and, according to the paper, was close to signing an agreement in October 1999.



So far nearly 40,000 pages of internal documents from various departments and agencies have been made public related to the Cheney task force's work under the Judicial Watch-Sierra Club lawsuit. The task force itself has refused to turn over any of its own papers.

[debbie mannas]

www.boston.com/dailyglobe...ies+.shtml



GOP's double standard on presidential lies





By Derrick Z. Jackson, 7/18/2003



MERICAN SOLDIERS continue to die in Iraq, and the Republicans do not want us to know why. In a 51-45 vote, the Republican-led Senate this week rejected a proposal for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the claims Bush used to justify his invasion of Iraq. The senator who made the proposal, Democrat Jon Corzine of New Jersey, said, ''Each day, we have failed to have an accounting ... of what really happened.''





In the latest Pentagon count, 224 US soldiers have died in combat or accidents in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Soldiers are dying at a rate of one a day 77 days after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. The number of soldiers who died in noncombat accidents after the invasion has surpassed the number prior to it.



As the dying goes on, Bush has yet to prove the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He now admits to using bad intelligence in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.



Yet Ted Stevens of Alaska, the Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: ''I'm tired of making a mountain out of a molehill. This is not Watergate. It's not even truthgate.... This is an attempt to smear the president of the United States.''



His complaint was but another in a round of Republican efforts to resist a full inquiry and keep the stench rising from Bush's empty claims behind the closed doors of congressional intelligence and armed services committees. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in June, ''I found, at least in the information that I have as chairman, no evidence of manipulation.'' He blasted a formal investigation as being ''a pejorative that there's something dreadfully wrong.''



Five years ago the Republicans found President Clinton's lying about sex to be so dreadfully wrong that they voted to impeach him in the House. Clinton survived, but not before the Republicans hurled all kinds of pejoratives at Clinton's perjuries.



Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida said: ''Lying under oath is an ancient crime of great weight because it shields other offenses, because it blocks the light of truth in human affairs. It is a dagger in the heart of our legal system and indeed in our democracy. It cannot, it should not, it must not be tolerated.... All that stands between any of us and tyranny is law.''



Representative Sam Johnson of Texas said Clinton's actions ''have made a mockery of the people who fought for this country and are fighting for this nation today.'' Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said: ''If the president calculatedly and repeatedly violates his oath, if the president breaks the covenant of trust he has made with the American people, he can no longer be trusted. And because the executive plays so large a role in representing the country to the world, America can no longer be trusted.''



Now it is a Republican president who increasingly appears to have lied to the American people to justify a war. There is hardly a peep out of Republicans over whether Bush has broken the covenant of trust he made with Americans and made a mockery out of the men and women who are dying in Iraq. Troops and even some officers in the field are openly grumbling that they no longer know why they are there.



Meanwhile Bush's claims continue to crumble. A Washington Post story this week reported that United Nations weapons inspectors found nothing to back up Bush's claims last October that Saddam Hussein had a revamped nuclear arms program. Yet on March 16, just three days before the war, Vice President Dick Cheney declared about Saddam, ''We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.''



To be clear, Clinton indeed did a lot of bad things in his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. I wrote before the impeachment that he should resign. The Democrats were wrong to downplay Clinton's sins in the Lewinsky scandal. Any other CEO in the country would have been canned had he or she been found to have used their office to have sex with a decisively powerless intern.



But it is a far more grave matter if we discover that a president's claims in effect claimed the lives of 224 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians. Five years ago Henry Hyde said, ''The president is the trustee of the nation's conscience.'' It is time to lay bare the conscience of the White House with full public hearings. The way his claims are crumbling, hearings may be the only thing that will stop Bush from plunging his dagger of deceit right through the heart of our democracy and the hearts of our soldiers.



Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

[memphis mike]

over and over and over and over....like a bad record....

[debbie mannas]

Quote:

---

The written press is so liberal it is sickening

---

They dont agree with you then???

[memphis mike]

It's not that bad...the random acts of violence are now pretty much limited to Baath party members who are being left out of the new Iraq.....people are not afraid to go to work or get out.....also the acts are being carried out more against the US GI and not the citizens.

Edited by: memphis mike at: 7/19/03 2:43 am

[memphis mike]

We get the BBC new here in the US every night; I don't know how you make us out to be like the old Soviet Union where all media is contolled by the government...media in the US is a free for all and nothing is left unsaid....and for the most part (huge majority) the American press leans to the left like you.

The American press is quite adept at looking under the rocks for anything to bash Bush.....On this point, you are so far off base. We have a conservative president and a liberal press, we get the whole picture. Fox is not our only news station.

The written press is so liberal it is sickening......We hear everything in the US, nothing is sugarcoated...our press lives to beat down Bush and the Republican party.........you do believe everthing you hear and read.....believe none of what you hear and read and only half of what you see....



I swear if it wasn't for cut and paste most of you would have nothing to do....

Edited by: memphis mike at: 7/19/03 3:05 am

[Rev9Volts]

the bbc? and you al think americans are funny. dam debbie you should give up your music career and do stand up comedy.

[debbie mannas]

or do you prefer FAUX news and types like hannity?



charlotte.creativeloafing...cover.html



Weapons Of Mass Stupidity

Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator

BY HAL CROWTHER It's the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people -- an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask "the people" to swallow something exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his fellow citizens a candid and disparaging assessment of their intelligence.In the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the bewildering possibility of a United States of Asia, the patriotic pageantry and premature gloating call to mind an obsession that once gripped the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. (In my recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things French.) Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his own work and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of stupidity, a relentless tide of gullibility and muddled thinking which made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.



At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything he had written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string of the most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch for months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar of moronic utterances, painstakingly collecting hundreds of what he called betises -- stupidities -- and arranging them in his "Dictionary of Received Opinions."



The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.



Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.



With its <span style="text-decoration nderline">red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries[/u] and <span style="text-decoration nderline">slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils[/u] who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.



Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- <span style="text-decoration nderline">they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis[/u].



But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.



Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)



Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war.



It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous words, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- by which, of course, Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical weapon, not as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism to achieve political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can travel, the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to hammer its critics.



Liars With Secret Agendas





Years ago in Moscow, at the dawn of perestroika, a pair of Russian journalists showed me headlines from the New York Post that made Kruschchev's "We will bury you" sound like "Have a nice day." How can there ever be peace, they asked me, if America hates us so much? Handicapped by the yawning gap between our respective press traditions, I tried to explain that the Post had nothing to do with our government or even the American media machine, that it was owned by an Australian whose Red-baiting and saber-rattling was an act designed to sell newspapers to morons. That he was unconnected to our government was something I believed about Murdoch in 1984, though no doubt Ronald Reagan was eager to naturalize a lonely immigrant with billions to invest in right-wing media.



But now? Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox News?



If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.



How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.



"I almost choked," said my mother's friend Doris, who's 90. "I had to lie down." It's possible that even old George Bush, who served with distinction in World War II, had to stifle a groan over that one.



The invasion of Iraq was in no way what it seemed to be, either. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His "weapons of mass destruction" remain invisible, his terrorist connections remain unproven, and he had absolutely nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center. Most cynical of all was the "liberation" lie, the administration's sudden concern for the helpless citizens of Iraq. Saddam, as grotesque as he was, wasn't getting any meaner, and "liberators" like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing brisk business with him when he was in his murderous, citizen-eating prime (and in Cheney's case, as recently as 1999). It would take half a page to list all the US-sanctioned dictators, killers of their people, who will be sharing hell's hottest corner with Saddam Hussein.



Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like frightened children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript of Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's liberal by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of constructing "a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war on Iraq.



According to polls, at least half of us were so eager to be deceived, we believed the one lie Bush never dared to tell us, except by implication: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.



According to a CNN poll, 51 percent believe this -- "The Moron Majority," declares the headline in The Progressive Populist. And at that point, like poor Flaubert, I feel the sand around my ankles. I want to lie down and give up. On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: "The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time" -- Albert Einstein; and "Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies." -- George Santayana.



It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens "idiots." (Unless they're liberals -- "We all agree that liberals are stupid," writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word "retarded." It's "intellectually disabled," and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of "supporting the troops"? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are "locked and cocked" I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me.



According to this woeful logic, whoever controls the armed forces in the country where you live owns your conscience and your soul. It mandates unanimous civilian support for King Herod's soldiers smashing Hebrew babies against doorposts. It holds our soldiers hostage to silence our common sense, independent judgment and moral autonomy -- the foundations of each thinking individual's self-respect, not to mention the foundations of every theory of democratic government.



<span style="text-decoration nderline">"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public," said President Theodore Roosevelt.[/u]





The Madhouse Choir





They don't make Republicans like they used to. The troop-support doctrine, so universally and smugly conceded, is logic for the intellectually disabled, for people who've been hit in the head repeatedly with a heavy shovel. The stupidity of those who buy it is no more astonishing than the hypocrisy of those who sell it -- Republicans who preach our sacred duty to the army's morale and simultaneously cancel $15 billion in veteran's benefits and 60 percent of federal education subsidies for servicemen's children. If you can't believe that, look it up.



When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason. In the meantime, Iraq is a bloody mess and Afghanistan a tragic mess, and most of the earth's one billion Muslims think the US and Israel are trying to conquer their world and destroy their religion. America's economy is suffocating ("A sickly economy with no cure in sight" says this morning's paper), her currency is in free fall and her reputation flies below half mast on every continent. We've been instructed to hate the French, our allies since the days of Lafayette, because they dared to tell us the truth.



What our best friends think of us is epitomized by a new play in Paris titled George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy. Another in London is called The Madness of George Dubya. Our only original enemies, the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, seem to be thriving -- and quite naturally gaining recruits. There's a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: "If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now."



Is that the children I hear singing, or the madhouse choir? (Calling Dr. Strangelove. . .) But polls tell us that through all the wars and lies and logical meltdowns that followed 9-11, 70 percent of adult America declared itself well satisfied and well served.



"I think it is terrifying," said the late Bishop Paul Moore, a Yale aristocrat who, like most mainstream clergymen, did not support the Bush wars. "I believe it will lead us to a terrible crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it."



I believe it has, and I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn't need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he "has doubts" about evolution.



Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency. New research published by the National Academy of Sciences asserts that human beings and chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of their DNA. Would the polls (or the elections) change if subjects had to submit to DNA tests to prove they possess the qualifying .6 percent? American readers have purchased 50 million copies of Tim LaHaye's gonzo Apocalypse novels, still more evidence that what awaits the United States of America is not a physical but an intellectual Armageddon.



Was it dry, desert sand or quicksand that the despairing Flaubert imagined? When we look down, can we still see our knees? Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls -- if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?



When the sand begins to grip us and no lifeline appears, we clutch at straws. Yet there's anecdotal evidence that the polls could be wrong. Brownshirts targeted the Dixie Chicks, and they survived handsomely. At the Merle Watson bluegrass festival in rural Wilkes County, singer Laura Love ridiculed President Bush from the main stage and harvested thousands of cheers to perhaps a hundred catcalls. At a crowded bookstore in Charlottesville last month, I tossed aside the book I hoped to sell and read a white-knuckled antiwar essay I wrote in 1991. One woman walked out, but everyone else applauded and grinned at me. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know hates these wars and these lies as much as I do.



Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign -- like Saddam's missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it's going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.



****************



Note: text wasn't highlighted in the original.

Edited by: debbie mannas at: 7/19/03 6:38 am

[sofus1]

I thought the Gerbil story was funny