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[ 06-30-2004: Message edited by: AcidWarp ]

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

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Originally posted by AcidWarp:
Xan, you are looking a little bit tired and irritated. Maybe you should take some more mescalin.

[ 06-30-2004: Message edited by: AcidWarp ]

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Originally posted by Acid:
Wrong acid.

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There will always be someone here to mock the status quo. I'm glad someone could do it while I went and saw Spider-man 2 (rocks btw, go see it)

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Michael Moore and the Battle for Hearts and Minds

Ted Rall

Related Links
• Ted Rall's Editorial Cartoons

DAYTON, OHIO--I've never met Michael Moore. I know several people, however, who have. They all say the same thing: Michael Moore is an arrogant, hypocritical blowhard.

The same goes for "Fahrenheit 9/11." I haven't seen it, but friends who have say the film is a throw-everything-at-the-wall-in-the-hope-that-something-sticks mess riddled with exaggerations, innuendos and inaccuracies. They also call it powerful and important.

From what I hear, Moore's new hit documentary dwells on the fact that the Bush Administration allowed a planeload of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s Saudi relatives to leave the U.S. a few days after the attacks. Moore's insinuation that the flight was unusual is patently false; in most countries, it's standard diplomatic practice during periods of crisis to evacuate foreign nationals who might become targets of violence. It is true, however, that the Bush and bin Laden families have a long, unholy and possibly treasonous relationship. Here a functionally false factoid points to a bigger truth.

During a sequence explaining how Hamid Karzai came to become the president of Afghanistan (news - web sites), the film references the notorious Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project (TAP) conceived by the Unocal Corp. to carry oil and gas from the landlocked Caspian Sea basin to Indian Ocean ports. Beginning in 1996, the U.S. overlooked human rights abuses and heroin cultivation in hopes of signing a TAP deal with the Taliban. Karzai, then a Talib himself, worked as a Unocal consultant. Bush inherited TAP (and Karzai) from Bill Clinton (news - web sites), but the movie makes no mention of this fact. However, Bush did revive TAP after the Clinton-Taliban talks had collapsed. And he went a lot further than Clinton, invading Afghanistan and installing Karzai as his puppet. True, Moore's decision to exclude the Clintonian origins of the TAP scheme from his script was disingenuous. But, given that Bush's interest in TAP was so much greater than Clinton's, does it matter?

"The Left's only defense against [sic] Moore's mockumentary," writes David Limbaugh, "is to charge that people on the Right, like Rush Limbaugh, also distort the facts to fit their ideology. It is no defense to a specific charge to say that other people do it."

If we lived in an ideal world, I would agree with him.

In an ideal world, Americans of every political stripe would enjoy a forum to discuss the issues of the day. In an ideal world, communists and conservatives and militiamen and socialists and centrists and Christianists and atheists and libertarians and anarchists would all get the chance to express their opinions and propose changes in law and policy in the media as well as the corridors of power. In an ideal world, vigorous debate would never degenerate into name-calling or threats. In an ideal world, a losing political party would play the role of the loyal opposition as it plotted its return to power. In an ideal world, an imaginative, freewheeling, independent media would cast a wide net, broadening our national dialogue to include the previously disenfranchised.

In the real world, however, a narrow subset of right-wing conservatives controls the Supreme Court, White House, Congress and most state legislatures. In the real world, no American to the left of John McCain--including John McCain--has a chance to propose a law and see it signed into law. In the real world, newspapers, magazines, radio and television outlets are owned by a shrinking pool of conservative corporations motivated by short-term profits and cozy ties to the right-wingers who run the government. In the real world, the Democratic Party has given up hope of recapturing either the House or the Senate, and Democratic politicians vote along with the Republicans. In the real world, anyone who questions the president's justifications for starting wars, or questions whether he even has the right to call himself "president," should expect to be insulted and ridiculed, blackballed, smeared as a traitor and threatened with death by conservative commentators.

We are at war, but the terrorists aren't foreigners. We are fighting for our nation's soul. The right-wing Republicans who control the government and the media have no intention of sharing their power. Thus they present themselves and their ideas--that we should spend our national treasury on invading oil-producing nations but not on national healthcare, that it's acceptable to throw people into concentration camps--as the living embodiment of what it means to be American. Meanwhile the neofascist bullies slime everybody else--the majority--as "anti-American."

The United States is living under ideological apartheid. There are a many more of us than there are corporatist neofascists, but as any prison inmate can attest, numerical superiority does not assure victory. Excluded from access to mainstream politics and media, measured and even-toned opponents are ignored and marginalized.

The current situation calls for radical, loud, even ugly, tactics. Nelson Mandela, fighting the racist white minority government of South Africa, resorted to building bombs to loosen the grip of apartheid. Here in America, one unfair, dissembling movie by a liberal loudmouth like Michael Moore, no matter how successful, could never be powerful enough to counter the millions of conservative lies disseminated by thousands of talk radio stations and newspapers every minute of every day of every year. But it's a beginning.

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Originally posted by J0SH:
It seems our rights are being stripped away from us as Americans one by one. We can now be held without trial, searched without a warrant, etc. What do you guys think, is feeling safe worth more than feeling free?

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That always happens during war. What else is new?

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He stated on tv he hoped Reagan burned in hell on the day of his death announcement

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Originally posted by J0SH:
I don't think Ted Rall killed 8,000,000 jews.

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And that is irrelevent if regardless of past history, you'll still quote as you see fit.

For example:

''Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

~A

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The United States is living under ideological apartheid.

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It's statements like this that completely destroy any momentum a columnist might have had.

The fact that universities (typically state funded) are filled with communists and socialists and that there is a movement to secede currently trying to draw people to to South Carolina to rebuild the US as a Christian pseudotheocracy show it to be not only patently false, but rediculously hyberbolated and frankly, hackneyed. It is every bit as ridiculous as when the left refers to the right as 'nazis' or when the right refers to the left commies (though I mentioned communists in universities, I am not saying all leftists are communists, just to clarify what might look like a contradiction)

And that is the problem with both sides in politics. The pundits don't mete out the details and their followers simply follow. It's so orwellian that it's just plain sickening.

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