- How long before the whole mountain we call the United
States of America comes down? As a nation, we've been sliding down that
"slippery slope" for decades, grasping at a twig here, a rock
there to slow our journey to oblivion.
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- All the rights and ideals embodied in our constitutionóthe
glue that has held us together as Americansóare being rapidly stripped
away by a criminal gang that has finally succeeded in seizing power and
is bent on holding on to it at all costs.
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- To our criminal rulers not only are our constitutional
rights legal fictions, but they have stood the constitution on its head
to grant themselves powers denied them by the framers. So much for their
nonsensical palaver about being strict constructionists.
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- Whether the presidential election of 2000 was the first
to be stolen we'll never know, but we do know it was the first stolen election
to receive the blessing of the US Supreme Court. In any other countryóthose
lesser nations all that must be brought under the heel of the American
Empire, one way or anotherówhat happened in 2000 would be called
a bloodless coup d'tat.
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- Of course, it took 30 - 40 years of mucking with the
educational system to dumb Americans downóthen decrying the state
of public education while touting private and parochial schools where much
of so-called learning is by roteóso the clucks wouldn't notice that
fascism was about to replace freedom. Shoot, one F-word is as good as another,
right?
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- For how many years were we force-fed the notion that
government was bad, inefficient and wasteful, and corporations were good,
efficient and thrifty? And we bought it, allowing government to outsource,
deregulate and privatize everything it desired to benefit those inanimate
persons called corporations. In case you haven't notice, those corporations
are run by dummies subjected to the same dumbed-down public, private or
parochial "educations." Worse, the people's watchdogsóa.k.a.
"the news media"óare now under the thumbs of a handful
of corporations whose vested (invested, actually) interests are intertwined
with the rest of Corporate America.
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- Once George W. Bush was installed in the White House,
the masks started coming off and Pax Americana was on. To blindside the
public, a double-pronged approach was needed. Hence, the Project for the
New American Century's call for a "new Pearl Harbor" came in
handy. We felt the first prong on Sept. 11, 2001. The second prong was
declaring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda operatives the perpetrators,
thereby legitimizing a military attack on Afghanistan.
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- You didn't expect Bush II, who denounced nation-building
during his presidential campaign, and his minions to tell you that empire-buildingóespecially
for oil, oil pipelines and anything else of value they could get their
hands onówas what they had in mind, did you?
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- And you have to admit that Sept. 11 and Afghanistan,
especially laced with words like "terrorists," "terrorism,"
"axis of evil" and "homeland security," diverted attention
from the mess caused by energy deregulation in California that allowed
Bush II's friend, Kenny-Boy Lay, and his buddies take the state for billions,
followed by the collapse of Enron and all the other corporate scandals
that cost their employees and investors billions. It also diverted attention
from the tax cuts for the rich that sucked up a healthy budget surplus
and plunged the nation into debt. Most of all, it diverted attention from
the rights being stripped from the people in the name of "security."
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- Also going unnoticed while Americans were being kept
in a perpetual state of fear was that Bush's evil twin, Ariel Sharon, and
his fascist loonies were turning the Occupied Territories into rubbleómini-Afghanistansóas
the US corporate media hammered away at the "evil" Palestinian
suicide-bombers who were blowing up "innocent" Israelis.
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- At the behest of a cabal War Secretary Donald "Strangelove"
Rumsfeld had secreted in the Pentagon, George, with the help of British
Prime Minister Tony "The Poodle" Blair, embarked upon using cooked
intelligence supplied by Rumsfeld's cabal and No. 10 Downing Street to
convince Americans they were in imminent danger of being attacked, if not
nuked, by former ally turned nemesis Saddam Hussein, who was harboring
all these weapons of mass destruction. To compound those lies, Bush II
told an even bigger one by accusing Saddam of being in bed with al Qaeda
and, thereby, being responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. Bottom line: we had to liberate Iraq from the
evil Saddam, and the Iraqi people would greet us with kisses and flowers
for doing so. Oh yes, the Bushies were going to bestow "democracy"
on Iraq after trashing democracy in the US.
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- So at the expense of the lives of 270-plus American and
some 51 UK troops (at last count), and countless Iraqis, the US military
undertook an illegal invasion that destroyed Iraq, sent Saddam scurrying
and then murdered his sons. There were damn few kisses and flowers, though,
from "grateful" Iraqis, who now endure life in the rubble and
try to survive the brutal heat without electricity, water or adequate medical
care.
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- The US corporate media, though, aren't telling the American
people how bad things are in Iraq or that the US is losing in Afghanistan,
which has again become a battleground for the warlords and the Taliban,
and the Taliban are winning. After the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad,
the corporate media have finally had to own up to the guerilla warfare
now taking place in Iraq, because Iraqis of just about every stripe want
their occupiers to leave.
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- Meanwhile, here at home, Texas Democratic state senators
have had to twice flee their state because US House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay, a Texas Republican, is demanding that the Lone Star State do a another
congressional district reapportionment that will benefit the GOP. If you
can't get your way at the ballot box or by stealing the votes, use any
method you can come up with to get the desired result.
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- And in California, the Bushies have engineered the recall
of a twice duly-elected governor with an eye toward installing Republican
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a B-actor who, according to published reports, likes
to grope buxom women who aren't his wife and whose father was a Nazi Party
member and a Brownshirt in Austria.
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- In both cases, the US corporate media are missing the
big picture. If either effort succeeds, the floodgates will be opened and
mob rule will prevailócorrection, rule by the rich mob. Any elected
official who crosses the big-buck boys will be subjected to being removed
from office by either a recall or by a gerrymander.
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- As we slide further down the slope, we are now in danger
of having nothing more to grab to stop our fall. If the Bushies don't pull
some more stuntsóanyone for invading Syria?óor start lobbing
nukes, the Christian crazies are cranking up for Armageddon, with the help
of the Zionist crazies in Israel (would you believe?).
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- Calling themselves Christian Zionists, they not only
are influential in Washingtonóalong with the FarRight Zionist lobbyóbut
they practice something called "dispensationalism" that emphasizes
a literal reading of the apocalyptic passages in the Bible. They believe
that the "end times" will occur when all the world's Jews are
gathered in what they believe is historic Israel. This, they are sure,
will herald the second coming of their savior, then the final battle and
the Raptureóbut Rapture for only a handful of Christians. They are
opposed to Bush's farcical Road Map for Peace and they continue to contribute
vast sums of money for the building of more Israeli settlements on Palestinian
lands.
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- Aligned with the Christian Zionists are people like Israeli
Tourism Minister Benny Elon, the leader of the far right Moledet Party.
The Moledet Party favors the forcible removal, euphemistically called "transfer,"
of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Elon goes a step further,
according to Atlanta Palestinian Solidarity, "He has openly discussed
the idea of fomenting a campaign of extermination to wipe out Islam (a
genocide that would be far vaster than the Holocaust):
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- "'It's clear that Islam is on the way to disappearing,'
Elon asserts with certainty. 'What we are now seeing across the Muslim
world is not a powerful surge of faith but the dying embers of Islam. How
will it disappear? Very simply. Within a few years a Christian crusade
against Islam will be launched, which will be the major event of this millennium.
Obviously, we will be up against quite a large problem when only the two
great religions of Judaism and Christianity remain, but that's still a
long way off.'"
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- With stolen elections, phony wars on "terrorism,"
stripping people of their freedoms to make them "secure," illegal
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, an economy in the toilet, corporate
crooks stealing people's pensions and investments, shredding the social
safety net, shrugging off the destruction of the environment, placing corporate
profits ahead of people and religious crazies on the loose, America has
gone over the edge. Then Bush II has the gall to say they hate us for our
freedoms and lifestyle.
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- Will enough rational people stand up in time to stop
the slide and help us regain all that we have lost?
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- The way out of this mess is not by building more heinous
weapons or waging more wars. Violence only begets violence. The way out
is by changing our attitude toward other people, stopping the theft of
their resources and labor, and treating them with dignity and respect.
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- Copyright © 1998-2003 Online Journal. All rights
reserved.
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- http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/082603Conover/082603conover.html
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