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From Evil GOP Bastards

and you’ve got to love this one

Born on this day in 1903.

Quotes:

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Speaking of cuttlefish, there’s this other George…

“The march to war affected the people’s confidence. It’s hard to make investment. See, if you’re a small business owner or a large business owner and you’re thinking about investing, you’ve got to be optimistic when you invest. Except when you’re marching to war, it’s not a very optimistic thought, is it? In other words, it’s the opposite of optimistic when you’re thinking you’re going to war.”  – George W. Bush, February 2004

Bill Clinton  for the election, speaking at a Maryland rally for Senate nominee Ben Cardin, explained the Republican strategy:

You have to vote for us because our opponents are no good and and because they will tax you into the poor house. And on the way to the poor house you will meet a terrorist on every street corner. And when you try to run away from the terrorist you will trip over an illegal immigrant. Isn’t that their thing? That’s what they are saying.

But it isn’t just their election strategy, the current government wants us to live in fear. It’s like they are using the Orwell’s ‘1984′ as their play book.

“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”

A Chicago man was briefly detained on Saturday after he spoke on his cell phone in a foreign language.
According to the Seattle P-I:

The man was speaking Tamil, a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, on his cell phone at the departure gate and on the aircraft. An off-duty airline employee heard the conversation and informed the flight crew.

The man also apparently said something in English about a sporting rivalry at his alma mater.

It’s refreshing to see that racism is alive and well here in the Northwest.  I hope they follow up with the airline employee who started this whole thing.

Is life in America really so scary that a man speaking in a foreign language on a cell phone would prompt such a reaction?

Here’s what Keith Olbermann had to say about it:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential
administration.

“At least I tried,” he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden. “That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the
right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they
did not try. I tried.”

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and
triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous
as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by
any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its
predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled “Bin
Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”

The Bush Administration did not try.

….

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts-that he was
president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our,
unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or
shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the
responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency
since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

….

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this
slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it-who try to
sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who
sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews-have simply skipped past its
most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin
Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same
people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan
and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he
did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie “Wag The
Dog.”

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri-the future attorney general-echoed
Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky
witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

….

Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have
felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even
the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of
the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair-writing as George
Orwell-gave us in the book “1984.”

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar
to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in
the good of others; we are interested solely in power…

“Power is not a means; it is an end.

….

The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us-then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war
in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did
9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which
doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding;
which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true
American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

There’s more here.  Watch it here.