george bush made me a radical

[datasuspect]

especially in this political climate where to differ with the regime is tantamount to treason, where expecting a free press and open discourse makes you a terrorist. where progressivism is pretty much sedition.

i am continually sickened every time i get that sinking feeling in my stomach: when some bloviating cable news talking head sets the tone for discourse by resorting to sophistry and logical fallacy; when i encounter the abject denial and the resulting rationalization that i watch people going through when they justify their defenses of a murdering, fundamentalist christian, lying president; and when i see the body politic riddled through with cancerous, malignant religiosity.

we live in an age of genocide. the same apparatus that brings you elegant car commercials and snarky old navy commercials is the same apparatus that sanitizes and sweeps under the carpet the wholesale slaughter of a people that posed absolutely no threat to us.

they even infect du.

so this is what black ops, psy ops, and disinformation campaigns look like. the corporate government and its news organizations play by pages torn out of CIA playbooks that were intended for third world regimes. now it is happening here. the us as banana republic.

i know not much of this very new, but it so much in my face every day, that i wonder, is there anything definitive i can do to get my point across?

[Ladyhawk]

1. Nice post. And I've been radicalized, too.

I'm not sure what to think about this crazy, radicalized Ladyhawk who so passionately hates Republicans and right-wing fundies. I don't know if I'm just really, really cheesed and will eventually get over it or if this is my new state of being until some semblance of sanity swells to the shores of America.

Part of me is suspicious of my own anger, questions it. Then I think that in an insane world the sane person must appear insane. Maybe we need to be radicalized in order to save ourselves.

[gmoney]

2. Sounds like my new favorite cartoon

The last panel especially...

[masaka___]

6. Ha!

That's a great site. I liked this link:

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/chin_up.html

Funniest Line: "Hell, our atheists are more Christian than their Bible-thumpin' motherfuckers."

[Warpy]

3. The right always destroys itself in the search for ideological purity.

They've gone beyond all ability to be contained or countered. The best thing we can do now is sit back and refuse to give them an enemy outside their party they can focus on. Deprived of an enemy, they'll look for traitors (i.e. moderates) within their own party as being to blame for diluting their programs (with reality) and causing them to fail. The purges have already started within the bureaucracies. Soon they'll start on the party, itself.

All we can do for now is smile sweetly and say they all got what they wanted as we document how they got there.

[gumby]

4. Congratulations !!

Welcome to the Matrix.

Scary, ain't it?

[Thoth]

5. Well said...

the same goes here. And once you learn that the official story of 9-11 is BS, there's no going back to "normal".

[Minstrel Boy]

7. Slapped awake, given a cold shower and a pot of espresso.

That's what I feel George Bush has done for me.

It's some powerful stuff, what the heightening of contradictions can do.

[Kansas Wyatt]

8. Welcome to the Banana Republic of America

Formerly known as the United States of America. I suspected before the 2000 election that it was no longer 'We The People', and it was confirmed on November 3, 2004. We are just peasants and servants for other's imperial powers.

[gumby]

9. here's one of my favorite definitions

from Michael Parenti. If you're not familiar with him, http://www.michaelparenti.org/

His analysis explains a lot....

"Conservative Celebration: How wonderful our free market society is and how much more wonderful it would be if it were not for meddlesome government regulations and the demands of undeserving low-income groups that feed out of the public trough.

Liberal Complaint: About how some of our priorities are all wrong. How there are serious problems that represent aberrant departures from what is otherwise a basically good system.

Radical Analysis: That sees ecological crisis and military interventions and the National Security State and homelessness and poverty and an inequitable tax system and undemocratic social institutions such as the corporate owned media; it sees these things not as aberrant outcomes of a basically rational system, but as rational outcomes of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for a privileged class.

If you move from a conservative celebration or a liberal complaint to a radical analysis, you cross an invisible line, and you will be labeled in mainstream circles as conspiracy theorist, or a Marxist, or even a paranoiac. Terms which some people treat as coterminous.

Parenti quotes Walter Carp: The essence of political analysis is to try to define and devine intent. That’s what you have to be looking at. When you do that, you have to start talking about something else."

When you start talking about that "something else" you are automatically shut out of polite political discussion. The end. Howard Dean got his toe wet and look what happened to him. Stolen election? Don't mention it. Not polite.

[jzodda]

10. Yeah Bush has pushed me to become

more to the left but thats not even the big thing

Bush has pushed me toward the angry left, very very angry.

I may anger some people saying this but if bush were to disappear in some way I wouldnt be one of the people crying over it.

[Ladyhawk]

11. Smile at Agent Mike when you say things like that. :) n/t

[distantearlywarning]

12. I feel the same way.

In fact, I would have described myself as a moderate until Nov 3. I was fairly ambivalent about Kerry and the only reason I didn't support Bush is because I didn't like his public reaction to the events at Abu Ghraib. I almost voted Libertarian, but decided at the last minute to try to make my vote count.

After hearing from MSM about Bush's "man-date", how moral values like homophobia and contempt for everyone who doesn't believe the same things you do (the "hate-thy-neighbor" stance) prompted the vote that led to said mandate, and after all the information I found about 2004 voting irregularities, suppression of actual news by Republican MSM, and various other tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, I have to say at this point I'm fairly well radicalized.

This government sucks ass. We are all on a fast road to hell in a Bush administration handbasket. And I am ashamed that I didn't see it earlier.