http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092506L.shtml



ok, so no one is surprised.  whats interesting is that apparently its not news.

So the USA-ians aren't the good guys anymore (granted that they ever were).
For the keen observer that is nothing new.

So somebody was imprisoned whithout charge, defense or due process? That's common in many a part of the world. It still feels a bit odd when the USA does it, but for the rest, as you said, nothing new.

Sorry (really, I am)

"Sorry"

so am I.  actually Im more kind of astonished.

how the _fuck_ could one bad president do all this damage?  ok, granted that he shouldn't have been elected anyway....you could tell he was incompetent just by looking at his record...but given that he was he has shown the world that all the checks and balances of the USA just dont matter a damn.

The founders _nearly_ got it, but not quite, they legislated the separation of religion and state because religion just happened to be represented by some of the strongest tribes at that time.....but they should have legislated against parties, against tribes, against fuckwit idiots stupid enough to vote for legislation without reading it, to vote for an obvious idiot just because he is in their tribe, to vote for someone whose previous campaign strategies included lying and deceit.



meh. who cares.  another election and all the damage will start being undone.  that is the final strength of the USA, we can always start again.

so long as the neocons dont win again, so long as the tribe of republicans lose this time.  so long as they allow themselves to lose.

so long as no idiot votes for them.

"so long as they allow themselves to lose"

And it's the possible implications of that statement that scares me the most.

So what are we going to do about this, when they fix another election?

"You" (as in the average american from my perspective) aren't gonna do shit about it as long as there is no draft, the gas price stays below $3 / gallon and America's Next TopModel is on.

I'd love to see some serious political riots in DC to prove me wrong but I'm not really expecting much.

As long as we keep believing that working within the system is useful, you won't see large-scale protesting/rioting.  As long as we continue to believe that what we do at the ballot box counts.  If we stop believing that, at least for me, it would take a little time to get over the shock but I think you'd see the rioting that everyone keeps talking about.

I think the reason you don't have large-scale civil disobedience and protests and rioting is that people still believe in the system.

> could one bad president do all this damage

When you own the congress and the supreme court and the major media and major corporations. When the constitution is considered a poor replacement for the 10 commandments, even if you don't know what either says.

I don't think there's evidence that anything will change in the elections because the elections are based on ideology, not results.

That "one bad president" was elected with the help of serious amounts of demagoguery, with which Conservative Christians allowed themselves to be manipulated.

That "one bad president" was elected with some manipulation of the number of voting machines allowed on college campuses in Ohio.

That "one bad president" also came in with some Tom Delay initiated gerry-mandering of the Texas electoral regions.

Personally, I lay it at the feet of the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, and Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News, and the other "conservative pundits".  All of which were able to make Liberal a dirty word, and make reality itself look like it has a Liberal bias, thus justifying every conservative verbal trick as a necessity.

That's how.  The scary question is, what has changed in the last 5 years?  Well it looks like a FEW of the Republican conservatives are starting to question the Faustian bargain they made.  And MANY of the decisions Bush made have lost that cheap gold plating and been revealed to be cheats.  Iraq, Medicare, Terry Schaivo, the Budget Deficit, unauthorized Wire-Taps, the Geneva Convention, CIA Torture -- it just goes on and on.

But will the Christian Conservatives see how they've been used?  Not yet.

>>> another election and all the damage will start being undone.  that is the final strength of the USA, we can always start again.

You're the last person I expected to be so optimistic.

I think Bush's lasting legacy will be that he's fucked things up so badly it'll take 10 years to make much progress on fixing them.  The economy is a problem, security is a problem, foreign affairs is obviously a huge problem...  I sort-of think the Democrats would be better off if there's a  Republican president who has to try to fix things.

As for starting again, probably, but so many people are so jaded it's not gonna be easy.

This shit is going to take a long, long time to get fixed.  Like...until the Baby Boomers are all dead of old age, at least.

> As for starting again

What start again? The south was right. It's time to break up the US and let people go there own way. The union serves no purpose anymore.

"The south was right. "

Hmmm.

The South (speaking as a Southerner) was right to want to split away from the Union, but they did it for the wrong reason(s).

If the Confederates had followed up after the 1st battle of Manassas, things would have been different.  But instead, they let the routed Union army (with it's crowd of tourists) retreat unscathed.

>> I was convinced that our success lay in a short, quick war of desisive blows, before the Federals, with their vast resources, could build up a great military power; to which end a concerted use of our forces, immediate and sustained, was necessary, so that, weaker though we were at all separate points, we might nevertheless strike with superior strength at some chosen decisive point, and after victory there reach for victory now made easier elsewhere, and thus sum up success. Instead of this, which in war we call concentration, our actual policy was diffusion, an inferior Confederate force at each separate point defensively confronting a superior Federal force; our power daily shrinking, that of the enemy increasing; the avowed Federal policy being that of "attrition," their bigger masses grinding our smaller, one by one, to naught. <<
G. T. Beauregard, General, C.S.A

I've lost track of where I left off reading this:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Robert_E_Lee/FREREL/1/28*.html

Considering how much more money the South has gotten out of the federal tax/tariff system than it put in over the last 140 years, it should be the North complaining about the pains of keeping the Union together.

We feel the same about Quebec...