I already knew about the radioactive cereal fed to retarded children in one of those strange little ivy-covered buildings that dot the North Shore of Massachusetts.
I already knew about the syphilis experiments performed on black prisoners.
This image will always be with me when I try and distinguish the difference between chemical weapons and napalm, and I will always wonder if we wanted Saddam to use the chemical weapons we helped him acquire. If not... then why did we help him?
I already knew about Kent State.
And I just found out about Indiana sterilizing "misfits" (my word).
So, the worn-down part of me says, with great cynicism, "we ain't perfect".
More follows...
The worst part of it all is that some of these things involved a great many people who truly believed from the bottom of their black little hearts that they were doing something perfectly acceptable. Or if not, then to do it anyway.
Our civil war was in part due to slavery. Can you imagine that a sizable percentage of the population found it perfectly reasonable to own other people? Why didn't the Supreme Court take up the issue sooner? And then, what changed it? Was it "activist" judges?
Activist judges are bad, right?
Was it an activist judge who granted corporations the same rights as a person? This was an interpretation of the 14th amendment. We are paying dearly for that one, witness the stranglehold K street has on legislation.
Double standards are fine as long as the connection is made to only one of the standards and the other one is left in the dark. When light is thrown on the other, and the true nature of the double standard is know, there is a shift in reality for the observer. That is the reason that some things such as religion spend so much effort trying to denounce/subvert/decree/lie about whatever is causing the apparent contradiction.
The Bush administration has, unbelievably, embraced the double standard. It is not only used as a tool of confusion it provides a lame sort of cover for later on.
I want to share something with you. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion I went through a long period where I felt disembodied and secretly questioned my own world view and whether I was going crazy. My heart knew that what we were threatening to do was deeply wrong. My brain kept telling me that what I was witnessing was known historically as fascism and that, yes, it was happening in America. I was figuratively looking for the "pods" or any evidence that something unnatural changed everybody.
My reality, and I suspect many others, shifted dramatically over the past few years. 9/11 was an outrage but in retrospect my adjustment to that reality was much shorter and simpler than the Iraq reality.
9/11 was a tragedy, but what has followed has been a disaster.
The hyperbole that this administration was throwing about was worrying and should have been the first clue. Why didn't the press point out that if the terrorists wanted to take over, then they would have landed the planes instead of crashing them? Didn't anybody else see it? I actually began emailing the news organizations, politely pointing out this discrepancy and many others because it never dawned on me that people like Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel would lie to me or not report all the facts they knew. That's how I associated them, as Walter Cronkites - someone you can trust to get the news.
So, at about day 2 into the war, I already hated congress, was convinced that the president was the anti-Christ and brought many of his minions with him, and having just wrapped my mind around the "new" media, I began sending not so much helpful emails but rather emails pointing out what a bunch of enthusiastic cock-suckers they all were.
I can almost understand how the Patriot Act came to be because politicians are political creatures and given the patriotic fervor gripping the people it would have been suicide to vote against it. Some of it even made sense given that our past deeds seemed to be generating some blow-back. Maybe a bullet-proof vest was in order for the country. Some of the other things in it seemed unnecessary. How quaint.
One of the reasons I think Cheney so strongly pitched the lie about Iraq having something to do with 9/11 is that he helped supply both Iran and Iraq with weapons during their war. It was a strong message to the region that it was US policy to want them all dead. There is no other interpretation if you are from that region. Those kind of statements can have consequences and maybe Cheney was having a Freudian moment.
So we were told to believe his lies. We were told over and over that we were unpatriotic if we didn't. This was said to us with a straight face even as he announced the most American of things - the no-bid contracts. I don't even know where to begin to tell you how I felt about that and the fact that it was basically OK with the media. I was thinking that this man, Cheney, was the purest definition of what I like to call an 'Ankle'. An Ankle is about 3 feet lower that a c*nt. Pardon the nastiness, I shouldn't say Cheney.
Man, I wish I knew about blogging back then. I came close but missed the exit a few times. I would actually hop on the Yahoo message boards where they would be filled with threads entitled "HA HA STOOPID LIBS! WE R GUNNA KILL ALL IRAQ KIDS AND YOU NEXT!"
But they didn't kill us all. They certainly kept insulting us, but all the armchair generals and Bush cheerleaders seemed to have gotten bogged down somewhere. We were going past Rumsfeld's suggestion of a month for the war and we were quickly eating up the $150 dollars Wolfowitz loaned us to get hugs and flowers in Iraq.
It was funny though, here and there on the Yahoo boards a small voice of sanity would sneak out something that connected two dots. "Where is Bin Laden? Didn't he tell the US to get out of Saudi Arabia? Well we just got out of Saudi Arabia." Things like that.
"PUSSY LIBS JUST WANT TO BONE BIN LADEN!"
Speaking of Bin Laden... we know Bush was not preoccupied in finding him but is it possible that he was preoccupied with not finding him? Look, I'm not going to get conspiratorial on you, but we did get out of Saudi Arabia pretty fast as Bin Laden demanded and supposedly we could have had him at Tora Bora but we were in a hurry to do other things.
What about that anthrax problem shortly after 9/11? People rallied around the president and he was taking full advantage of it. Then suddenly, out of the blue, anthrax! A thing like that could make a government look pretty ineffective if they couldn't stop it. A person could loose hero status pretty damn quick if the letters continued to arrive. Hell, people up and down the east coast wouldn't buy gas because they were certain that they were the next target for Lee Boyd Malvo. It was a "weaponized" grade of anthrax and we were told how difficult it was to make with that quality.
Do you know what I think? I think there was an additional letter sent, one without anthrax. It may have said something to the effect of "call off the dogs or the other four tons get disbursed. More order will follow." Yes, that could be a problem. It just strikes me odd that someone would go through all that trouble to make a couple of letters worth of the stuff, one going to the national enquirer. It seems like a warning shot to me.
Alas, Mission Accomplished. Time to send Viceroy Bremer over with some spending money and see if he can convince the remaining 4 dead-enders to turn in their electric garage door openers and get in line for reprogramming.
I was a bit embarrassed that part of the cultural exchange involved such a strong emphasis on gay sex. It's not that I have anything against it per se, it's just that I didn't feel it was the kind of thing that would appeal to Islam's conservative nature and that was obvious in how poor their naked pyramids were.
I want to tell you something I never told anyone before. When I saw those photos my first thought was "kill all fucking soldiers." It was quickly followed by "my God, they probably are going to kill our soldiers after this."
Admit it, didn't you think that heads would roll for this one? Didn't you expect the military to throw daylight on this right away to dispel any doubt? Did you expect this?
"Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, who is in charge of setting policy on prisoners and detainees in occupied Iraq, has banned any discussion of the still-classified report on Abu Ghraib written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, which has circulated around the world. Shortly after the Taguba report leaked in early May, Feith subordinates sent an "urgent" e-mail around the Pentagon warning officials not to read the report, even though it was on Fox News. In the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, officials in Feith's office warn that the leak is being investigated for "criminal prosecution" and that no one should mention the Taguba report to anybody, even to family members. Feith has turned his office into a "ministry of fear," says one military lawyer."
"FAG LIBS PROBABLY HAPPY ABOUT ABU GRAB!, FAG LIBS HAPPY ABOUT DEAD SOLDIERS!"
Yeah. just like that. Guess who just lost the moral high-ground, not that we ever came close to having it. Let's try this one: guess who the terrorists in Iraq are? Hint: they are not Sunni or Shiite.
There was no time to dwell on such things because there was an election to win. Time to trash Kerry but just in case, have Bin Laden make a tape that pretty much endorses Kerry over Bush and release it 4 days before voting. That pretty much cemented the vote from the lower-IQ half of the country.
"HA HA STUPID LIBS! YOUR HORE MOTHERS SHUD JUST BE KILLED FOR HAVING YOU PATHETIC LOOSERS!"
"You know what, motherfucker? Maybe you're right. I'd rather die than live in your world. I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!"
"You go to war with the lying idiot bastard leaders you have, not the lying idiot bastard leaders who should be strung up by their nuts." Even before Tom Ricks' Fiasco, there were many indications that abject morons were running the show but woe be the man who questions the decisions of Fearful Leader.
Here's the press: "Mr. Cheney, there are signs the war isn't...",
"Let me just stop you right there, Bob. I have it for a fact that every democrat is secretly harboring a terrorist in their house and they are plotting attacks against their neighbors even as we speak."
I wanted to puke blood anytime the liars were on TV. The funny thing is, their divisive words galvanized me to start lashing back at everyone and all... with the exception of certain family members for the sake of peace(by the way, Mom never really liked you. She just felt bad because you were so ugly).
At work, I had stopped debating the war and politics in general because I ran into the same problem you all did: fucking idiots. It got to the point where I would preemptively ask "So, if you're so supportive of this war, how come you are still here? Is it a trait with all republicans to dodge danger or are you just taking a cue from president Shit-For-Brains? President Shit-For-Brains is something I heard on Politically Incorrect recently and have adopted it as my official name for... Mr. Shit-For-Brains.
So down the rabbit hole we went. The worse things got in Iraq the more the administration told us how great things were. Abu Ghraib was so horrible and so roundly denounced that Gonzo decided it should become a standard feature of justice.
But why stop there? With the new powers of the patriot act, Gonzo was having a tougher time committing a crime. He enlisted the help of the NSA and the FBI to do this and it was a hit with the American people. Having completely adjusted to the new America I would have been surprised if the people or the media expressed anything other than platitudes for president Shit-For-Brains. In fact, they couldn't believe the fucking gall certain newspapers had for informing them that they were being spied upon.
No one at work would let me put a microphone in their kitchen. In fact, they were offended.
Things went so smooth that when that activist judge up in Liberalland told Gonzo that he shouldn't torture people, Gonzo just re-programmed congress to "hammer" out a new law that made torture ok. As a bonus, McCain also threw in Habeas Corpus as something to loose.
Oh, yeah, to the 14 democrats who voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006? Fuck YOU! I hate the fact that we breath the same air.
Of course, that was the old congress. It was like the fist of God came down and made the republicans suck on the barrel of a gun and with surprised eyes, they all collectively pulled the trigger.
Foley, trying to smoke young boys two at a time. Shit-For-Brains desperately telling us that democrats hate America and love terrorists.
Oh, yeah. Fuck YOU! I owe you a slap in the face for that insult. Terrorism has never had a friend as good as Mr. Shit-For-Brains.
So now we are beginning to shine light into the dark corners of this perverted government. I can only wonder how the depth of incompetence reached so far is possible. 150 graduates of Regents? Why? Is it because they have pliable minds already conditioned not to ask but only to follow? Thanks a lot, cocksucker. And you still want us to just give you a blank check.
The 2008 elections will probably be the ugliest politics ever recorded. All I can say is the democrats have to be willing to hit back hard. This means you and me, to the republican on the street. It is they who are at fault. Either they are showing allegiance to the man and not the country or they are just plain fucking stupid. Either way, It must be pointed out over and over.
Don't even argue with me, republican, all I hear is farts coming from your mouth.