Anonymous
Attacks from 'war president' are unrelenting
Thu Mar 4 14:07:29 2004
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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16541

03.04.04

Attacks from 'war president' are unrelenting -- time to return fire

By Geov Parrish


This year's presidential race is going to be the most important the
United States, and the world, has seen in decades.

At least.

And it is going to be very, very nasty.

Liberals had better stop being nice, stop being complacent or cynical
or despairing or disengaged, and take your gloves off.

Now.

Like it or not, the president who came in promising to unite us has
created, in only three short years, the most polarized and the most
bitterly politically divided country since Reconstruction.

His team has created more anti-American hatred around the globe than
has ever previously existed in history.

Those same political strategists have shown that they will stop at
virtually nothing to gain and exercise power, and will do so almost
exclusively to enrich their hyperwealthy friends and feed their warped
ideological crusades -- crusades that, if presented honestly, would be
rejected by the vast majority of their countrypersons and the rest of
the world.

This is a war.

It's being fought like one, whether or not we participate, and we are
all targets.

We'd better start acting like our asses are on the firing line.

They are.

I don't hate George W. Bush; I do hate what he has done and is still
doing to our country and to my planet, and I do intend to do
everything in my power to ensure he and his cabal don't have another
four years to abuse their public trust.

But now comes the hard part.

The excitement and headlines of the Democratic primaries are over.

It will be a long, hard slog to November, interrupted only by two
party conventions/infomercials and the power of the White House to
control the headlines of a news media whose critical thinking muscles
are atrophied beyond recognition.

We can already see how this will go.

If you have any doubt how the White House will attack John Kerry, look
at its last great sales job: the invasion of Iraq.

For months, we were besieged with exaggerations, accusations, planted
stories, and outright lies.

No fib or rationalization was too ridiculous; as soon as one was
disproven or shot down, three more were trotted out.

Eventually, some stuck, for a while.

But more to the point, the White House wore down public skepticism
just enough, and just long enough, that their raw power could do the
rest.

If it all turned out to be a fraud, who cares?

This is what ruthlessness looks like.

John Kerry has decades' worth of votes and public statements from
which this sort of malicious playbook can be stocked, and the attacks
have already begun.

The question is one of perspective: by virtue of sheer scale and
audacity, George Bush's crimes against the public trust dwarf any
policy reversal John Kerry, or most any other politician, has ever
contemplated.

But if Kerry and his supporters wring their hands and spend the next
eight months answering every charge and talking nobly of future public
policy, they'll deserve to lose.

The issue this year is nothing other than George Bush's attack on 300
million of us, his betrayal of what is best in and about America:
front, back, and center.

Defense doesn't win wars.

And that's what this is: war, one we didn't start, for nothing less
than the future of the country, the world, even.

The six billion of us without any trust funds to finance our tickets
to Mars are pretty well stuck with this one planet.

We'd better start acting, all of us, like no one government, let alone
one politician who says he talks regularly with God, has the right to
recklessly endanger it and the lives of so many of the people on it.

Get angry about it.

You should be.

That goes triply for those of us with the privilege and responsibility
of being eligible to participate directly in this year's U.S.
presidential election.

Vote, sure.

And register ten more people to vote, or fifty or a hundred, and then
make sure they do it.

And if you're in a state where Bush won't win, send money or time or
people or yourself or all of the above to a place where he might.

Use your passion, your brains, your desperation, the fact that THIS IS
OUR COUNTRY.

Shut his well-moneyed machine down in its oily tracks.

If you were defending yourself, your spouse, your loved ones, your
kids from a life-threatening menace, you wouldn't engage in polite
debate with the menace.

You'd do what was necessary to make sure it could do no harm.

That's Election 2004.

Your job prospects are on the line.

Your retirement.

Your future health care.

Your civil liberties.

Your constitutional rights.

Your kids' educations.

Their kids' portion of the insane debts now being paid off to the
hyperwealthy, assuming there's a natural world left to be poor in by
the time these parasites finish any second term.

And, beyond it all, it's your city or town increasingly likely to be
targeted by some fanatic from some far side of the world who hates
what your government did to murder his family.

What else is there?

What other issues matter?

Act like you're in a war.

You are.

Every day you wake up, do something about it.

You have until November.

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