Why George W. Bush is scared to talk to Cindy Sheehan


Cindy Sheehan is waiting for her opportunity to ask 'President Bush' why he started a war knowing full well that none of the justifications for that war presented to the American people with such heat and urgency were true. Of course there are no answers available that will mend the heart of a mother who has lost her only child. Mothers will do anything for their children. Now Cindy is doing the only thing she can do to bring meaning to Casey's death at 24. She is asking the question that the NeoCons cannot answer.
The NeoCons have no answers for anyone, only empty rhetoric that is beginning to curdle as soon as it is exposed to light.
Cindy will continue to wait.
As supporters continue to arrive to stand by Cindy the Crawford Vigil is becoming an embarrassment to Bush and his NeoCon administration. They will ignore it for now; that is what they do. They operate on their own rules. They have not yet decided which rules apply and need to refer to their operating rule book to find out. Rove wrote it; and it is followed slavishly.
Before Rove takes public action several things will have to be determined and tried.
First, Rove will have to decide how best to spin this inconvenient brush with the raw feelings of ordinary Americans if and when the vigil does not sputter out. Polling will take place; newspapers will be watched; and most importantly the ongoing campaign to defame Cindy, now commenced, will be given time to work. Internet operatives are now spreading ugly lies and spin designed by Rove, the Master of Mud. At this point they know everything about Cindy back to her grades in preschool. They know and are creating lies inserted in a soft murmur of concern and sharing.
The NeoCons are very thorough with research. It was using such research that allowed them to silence the myriad of ugly stories about Bush before his first Presidential campaign. They researched their own candidate and killed every possible source for gossip using threats and payments for silence. The same process works in reverse.
With the campaign to destroy her reputation will come the treatment of the seven veils of threats. As the veils re removed the threats become more visible.
If the threats of arrest and mayhem have not worked against Cindy then her supporters can expect to experience the same campaign of lies. Cindy and her supporters should beware of volunteers who will come equipped with drugs and guns to be planted and found. It will happen if Cindy persists.
The NeoCons are fighting a war on several fronts, not counting Iraq. Cindy is not the only issue. Before they respond Rove will have carefully factored in, with seven layers of probability, the potential impact of other events. One of these will be the indictment now proceeding in Chicago originated by the CIA over the high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush and his cohort, including Rove. As they grow more desperate Rove and his cohort will not become less bold; they have too much to lose.
Rove will ponder, could we plant guns and drugs at the vigil in Crawford and bring in law enforcement while at the same time planning an accident and or terrorist attack in Chicago? Rove is an efficient guy who does not like to miss a trick though given the response to the Subway Attack in London the NeoCons might be cautious – for a while.
After the approach is decided on then timing will be considered and the general spin will be determined by Rove. Bush is one of the factors. Rove will ascertain if it is possible for Bush to withstand the trauma of a meeting with Cindy. This is becoming increasingly problematical; Bush has come to believe he was actually elected president and, ignoring the increasing tide of evidence, thinks most Americans respect and approve of him. He is carefully protected from the truth; his tantrums are legendary; frightening and increasingly hard to control.
This will be an unpleasant interview for Rove if they decide the meeting must take place to still the media storm now beginning.
Then, if Cindy is still determined and it has proven possible to rehearse Bush so that he does not yet again address the grieving mother as 'Mom' because he can't be bothered to remember her name or the name of her dead child and if he can be persuaded to not treat the event as a cocktail party then Cindy might get her meeting if the other contingency plans look too problematical.
Bush's inability to make real contact with the victims of this war should actually be taken as a sign that he can still feel some small degree of shame – and that he doesn't like to confront the inconvenient truth about what he is going. It is unfortunate that nearly everyone cooperates with the illusion that this administration was actually elected and that Bush is President. He isn't. Not only did the NeoCons steal this last election they stole the one in 2000. The numbers from Florida, available only this month for the 2000 election, proved that to be the case.
The presidency of the United States is a valuable prize and the biggest thieves won. They had big plans and as is now becoming clear, the war in Iraq was just a warm up exercise.
That war started because Bush's oil friends were anxious to access the reservoir of oil sitting under Iraq just as Iraq was signing contracts with the French. Instead of invading themselves – a costly venture frowned on by the world community, they got Bush to do it. So the price has been paid by America's military, acting as effective mercenaries to Bush's 'core constituency.” Bush will profit largely from the blood Americans spilled in Iraq as will his big oil buddies. Americans will lose their children and pay the costs. Clever deal for those in power.
When you pump petroleum consider what it is costing in American blood.
Cindy is doing what must be done; the only thing she can do for her son and for the grandchildren she will never have. There is a war going on today, but it is not the petroleum snatch violently taking human life in Iraq; it is the war against the future of our children and all children.
America was stolen from us; we cannot have an honest election; The voting machines make that impossible both for Congress and for the presidency. And honestly, the leaders we had were just less efficient thieves.
Our courts have been stacked with judges picked and tutored by the same NeoCons. All of the means for peaceful change normal to the process of American political discourse have been ripped out.
When there is no hope you find it where you did not think to look.
Cindy can ask the President why her son died and why this war is a noble cause. She and others can demand answers. The human story of Cindy and her son touches each of us; it penetrates into the soul of America. Each of us loves and lives in the web of human relationships; each of us understands what Cindy felt and what she is facing.
All revolutions start someplace. This one is starting with one mother, but Bush should remember that each of our military now serving comes equipped with one of their own.
Thank God for mothers.

An Honorable Rhetoric; an Ugly Reality - The Bush Inaugural Address

When my oldest son was small I always knew it was time to examine his activities when he felt moved to tell me multiple times that something was true. So when he told me that it was not he who blew up his sister’s Cabbage Patch Doll in a glorious display of the power of gun powder collected from caps I knew perfectly well who had reduced the cherished plaything to a shredded pile of lettuce leaves. Parents know this. Frequent repetitions of such denials drive the point home.
This familial insight becomes politically relevant when considering the content of the recent inaugural address delivered by President Bush. If you use the vision of “freedom” and “liberty” that many times you are not talking about either. But your actions will outline the bald truth.
Do not mistake rhetoric flights, no matter how filled with blandishments of surpassing beauty for anything but public relations. Their emoted words do not match reality but such effusions do provide us with valuable insights.
George Bush used the words ‘liberty” and “freedom” over forty times in that recent speech. He gave that speech surrounded by more security than has ever stood between a monarch and his subjects at any time in history. So turn down the volume control on your mind and watch what he is doing. It is what they do that is true.
We have invaded a foreign country and plan more of the same.
We are selling the natural resources of that country to pay our costs and to make a profit.
We are ignoring the continued presence of terrorist’s threats.
We must now tolerate the presence of an internal military police force miscalled “Homeland Security” that is mandated to spy on us, imprison us, and take our property with impunity.
Our right to free speech is under fire.
Women must again worry that they might not be the ones who ultimately control the right to choose whether or not to give birth.
Marriage, and the definition of the same, has become a matter of state policy. Military serving in Iraq are sent in harms way without body armor.
Our returning veterans are ignored to death.
The message conveyed through the clear lens of reality bears no relationship to “freedom” or “liberty,” two words denoting the emancipation of the human spirit to choose for itself the course most resonate with our sense of the sacred. It is not freedom when we cannot speak out; it is not freedom when we dishonor our obligation to veterans. It is not liberty when the government usurps our right to choose for ourselves. It is not freedom we protect when we use lies to justify an invasion. We are not thus made more secure. Freedom is nowhere in that equation.
A true liberty is founded only in the empowerment of individuals. Our government was originated as a tool to let a free people govern themselves, providing for a common defense and for such services as they were unable to supply for themselves. That has not changed. The vision of America is still valid. If there is a difference it is that now we have many more ways to provide those services without recourse to government.
In each of these matters the rhetoric used by President Bush fails the test to match reality. Each day that slips by finds us less free.
As our Founder Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” He was right. He would have been confounded by the world today, shocked by the use of rhetoric as a means of deceit.
Who among us has not experienced those who lie to get their way? We must not let the trappings of power overcome our discernment. We must not become afraid to speak out. It is bad, but it can get worse.
This administration has institutionalized the use of political operatives in the media, paying these agents for presenting their assertions as objective fact. In the case of Health and Human Services head Tommy Thompson, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher was paid a reported $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote administrative proposals. This is a species of lie new to politics; a conversion of the formerly independent media into an arm of the administration.
It is impossible for ordinary Americans to know what is happening under the cover of authority – but we can watch what they do and compare it to the rhetoric. And as the two diverge we can judge them. Turn down the volume on the rhetoric. Actions speak louder than words.

The Confidence Game: The Reality of Rove: NeoSpeaking in America




"Karl's got my complete confidence," Bush said.
Sometimes without meaning to a person in public office will tell you the truth. It happens. As Plumegate has continued to shock and appall most Americans with IQs over 60 have cringed as Bush again played the Rove Card. In case you missed it this is how that play works.

Spin reality until the lines of fact are moving too fast to see the truth.
Drag your feet getting the evidence.
Attack, attack, attack
Opine and obfuscate.

All politicians know that you must give people time to be distracted by something, for instance the convenient terrorist attack in London, before they will move on.
It has become a formula followed like a regimen of oral hygiene.
The NeoCons finish off by moving on in a panoply of inspiring rhetoric to bury the truth.
We have seen it before. This is NeoSpeak at its best – or worst; a form of communication that says everything about the NeoCons.
Americans really need a way to translate what NeoCons mean. The NeoSpeak Lexicon is very easily translated when you know what to look for. It might be helpful to understand where NeoSpeak came from. Here is what happened.
NeoCons adopted the rhetoric of Libertarians, those very confused and geeky political wannabes who started their own party in 1971 and wore the gold dollar signs slung around their necks like the ankhs worn by hippies in the sixties. Libertarians prated on about liberty, individual rights, the sovereign integrity of the people, the majesty of markets, taxation being theft, and other wonderful ideas that resonated with a public that is totally fed up and ready for a change, having tried on Nixon and found he was a bad idea.
It was a revolution of rhetoric, thin on reality.
Libertarians went on to spawn think tanks that came up with economic tools like, privatization, deregulation, outsourcing, and seeing services as 'profit centers' even when provided through government.
In the beginning many of them meant it and some still do; for all too many it became just about selling rhetoric stripped of reality. Their rhetoric, which moved America, brought in the bucks so that their national office could stay open and the donations and the 401Ks would continue to be juiced with funds. The Real Right noticed and spawned its own versions, emulation being the sincerest form of flattery. It did not take long for the Left to follow; economics of the market replaced the debunked rhetoric still lingering from progressivism.
The rhetoric of freedom was glorious, resonating with all of the memes that Americans believe and feel when they look at the Statue of Liberty or hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud. America was ready for a new vision and it was the Libertarians who supplied that need. Or at least the rhetoric.
The NeoCons picked up on the rhetoric because it worked – they recruited Libertarians intentionally. This immature, larval form of NeoCon liked that people got teary eyes and wrote checks; they also liked the fact that ordinary people voted for, worked for, and most importantly, trusted those who emoted the words.
Trust, with that you can pick their pockets with impunity.
If it could work for Libertarians it could work for anyone. The stage was set.
The public has been slow on picking up on the disconnect between rhetoric and reality. They are too busy trying to survive economically and care for their families to give politics their full attention and, thanks to Hollywood, it is natural for them to confuse fiction for fact.
So the NeoCons use the words, “freedom in Iraq,” to mean, “Hey, there is a lot of oil there – let's go privatize it!” Bush talks about 'self-government' which clearly means when spoken by a NeoCon, “This is my country – let's change the name to Bushland.” After all, as Strauss said, the ruling elite, NeoCons, had a right to lie if they were destined to have power and since they have power they are therefore not lying. The logic is in the bottom line.
The truth is the NeoCons wouldn't be able to talk at all if they were not lying. They would just stand there like the Italian in the joke who is tortured but because he is tied up and cannot spill his guts.
Everyone knows the Emperor is naked but no one can do anything. The courts are the property of the NeoCons, thanks to the last twenty years of politicizing the Federal benches with nodding headed NeoCons and Congress – they were elected using the same voting machines that put Bush in office.
The NeoCons stole the last election, the forensic analysis made that clear – but is Congress doing anything? No. The separation of powers in government has gone the way of the Do-Do bird. Also, Rove scared them, too.
So Karl Rove has George W's complete confidence. Think about that. This means, given the evidence, that ol' Karl is doing exactly what the Bush Boy wanted him to do, namely win at all costs – or at a profit, as the case may be. That is why Daddy Bush hired Rove in the first place over 20 years ago. Rove's ability to convert everything in sight into a profit center for corrupt government and for the accumulation of raw power, is his best feature. He perfected this strategy in Texas. His ability to convert public assets to private ownership is staggering in scope and concept.
Bush can't FIRE him. Rove both knows too much and, really, it is hard to fire your brain. You could replace Bush Boy but not Rove.
And no matter what, the Left continues to act astonished. It is like one of those slapstick comedies from the 30s or like the Wiley Coyote cartoons. After a while everyone who is really watching knows what is about to happen. Except Liberals, evidently.
Both sides are suffering from different but related types of myopia. The NeoCons know that as long as they use the rhetoric of freedom destroying the reality of freedom does not matter. Since the Left has always done the same less efficiently they are finding it impossible to respond.
George W.likes to imagine himself looking like his official portrait; Cheesy smile gleaming, the flag burnishing his rosy cheeks and fluttering behind his imperial presence. Close your eyes and imagine it, if you can stand it. But above is how he really is, Bush, the War President. The flag is exactly t he same; our flag dishonored by lies the NeoCons hide behind.
Bush and his brain; together they are deadly to freedom; two grasping teenagers living out a fantasy that has become our nightmare.

That image in also available at: http://www.cafepress.com/stopneoconning
Now you understand the NeoCons and you can buy a mug with the mug of the War President on it.

How The NeoCons Stole Freedom: The Story of Earth Day - First in a Series

What do the environmental movement, the United Nations, and the Republican Party have in common? Each was successfully taken over by the elements we now are beginning to know as NeoCons either in this generation or earlier.
Forget the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati. It isn't a conspiracy, it was just 'good' business.
When America celebrated Earth Day this last April 22 it was celebrating the day the environmental movement was taken over by elements we now identify as Neoconservatives – although the people so identified are not new and are certainly not conservative. More on that later.
The original Earth Day is not forgotten, however. It has been celebrated since 1971 in the Peace Garden at the United Nations at the moment of the Spring Equinox with the ringing of the Peace Bell. Those who remember the original goals of the environmental movement included peace for the human family as a whole have preserved the original local and global focus.
Ringing bells sound across the globe at the moment of the Equinox which is shared by all living things. The founders of the Earth Society, among these John McConnell, Margaret Mead, and Helen Garland, had looked for and identified a day of renewal that spoke to their goals for the then nascent environmental movement. They saw a world of people who valued living lightly on Earth, who saw small, local solutions as the ones that best connected people to each other and to the Earth. It was a moment that resonated perfectly with the work of such native San Francisco institutions as the Sierra Club when it was small and personal, assuming individual accountability, responsibility, and simply doing the right thing. It was therefore entirely appropriate that in 1970 Equinox San Francisco became the first official entity to recognize Earth Day.

If all of this is true then why do so few know? How did the commercialized version with its emphasis on the banal and its website so void of meaningful content manage to displace the very different values of the original celebration? Money and spin can accomplish nearly anything if all you care about is the short term profits.
The birth cry of the environmental movement was silently but effectively stifled by an earlier generation of the same interests who now occupy the White House and run our courts and Congress. Using money and misdirection as tools they stole the moral high ground and stopped the movement in its tracks. With it they stole our institutions and the soul of America.

The techniques are simple.

1. Steal credit for the work of others.

2. Use brand new or recycled and stolen organizations to create a respectable front.

3. Place relatives and people you can always control into[positions of power and prominence to eliminate our networks and establish theirs.

4. Find a REAL organization to authorize some fraction of your agenda.

5. Pontificate as you obfuscate. (Lie)

Sound familiar yet? And with any luck the perpetrator can get away with it cold and still be cashing checks generations later. These are the techniques used by the present April Earth Day Cabal thirty years ago and it is still working for them today.
That is what they did. A quick visit to their site reveals that it is all oriented to dumbed down platitudes with not a viable alternative in sight. Educating without content or focus on independent thinking is perilously close to what is going on in our schools today. A review of their big donors is even more revealing.
What was being stolen was the moral leadership of a movement that 35 years ago could have made real alternatives available. That was one outcome, but it is the lesser issue. How this was done and the values it injected into our culture is at least as important.
While stealing a movement that enabled those responsible to focus the
public on irrelevancies and platitudes the perpetrators were also demonstrating that how you treat others does not matter as long as you end up with the credit and money. We see every day how much talking about morals and ethics works. In fact, talking about it while doing the exact opposite has become permanently installed in the tool boxes of so many of us that we no longer even notice. 35 years ago the devaluation of values had just begun. Then Americans still believed they could believe.
Today we celebrate men like Karl Rove because he is expert in lying and
cheating. A culture that rewards getting your way with lies, manipulation and plain violence has signed its death warrant. Ignoring what happened with organizations like the Earth Society can be best understood using economic terms.
It is an economic principle that bad money, meaning money with less ability to hold value, drives out good money, for instance gold, that has objective, lasting value. By occupying the same niche as good money, bad money displaces it because the good money is too valuable to be spent. In the same way good ethics, behavior that invests the individuals in long term relationships founded in trust, is driven out by bad ethics, forcing individuals in look for other means of guaranteeing they will not be ripped off. The increase in commercial packaging to prevent shop lifting is just one sign of this decay.
Cooperative commerce is good money; War commerce is bad money. With
cooperative commerce we build out into the future like a bank account filled with trust and good will. In the second we loot the bank account leaving everyone to starve.
What you do is what is true. Words too often lie.
We should have noticed 35 years ago. Dennis Hayes stole the name, Earth Day. He has consistently demeaned and sneered at those whose idea he stole. He has represented a very different set of values and acted those values out through his actions by delivering sappy mottoes in place of viable alternatives for both the environment and for the world.
How did the NeoCons achieve their place of prominence? Using the same tools employed by Dennis Hayes. And we let it happen. But we can still change it. The solutions are still local. The means for change is still personal accountability. All decent people, right and left, share a common vision that can unite us to act. Now it is time to turn that vision into our common reality.
And celebrate Earth Day on the Equinox.

Karl Rove: The Rapture in the Rose Garden


George Stephanopoulos should not have been surprised last Sunday morning when Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson opined that liberal judges are a far greater threat than are terrorists. Pat is telling the truth; he is, however, fudging the context of these facts. Those facts reveal that liberal judges are a threat to Pat's second job, the one that has made Robertson and Reed both politically powerful and wealthy. Both support this administration no matter what it does. Why is that?
Either for more than a generation Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed have worked covertly as political operatives for the powers of and behind this administration. Or they believe that the Rapture is coming and that it is their responsibility to make sure all of the Jews return to Israel to die so that Pat and Ralph and George Bush can be bodily lifted up into the arms of the Almighty.. Do they all believe this? If Bush really believed this he would have been far less likely to install off the grid solar technology at his 20,000 square foot ranch house in Crawford Texas. And they would be planning a meet up with the Almighty in the Rose Garden.
I know how I vote. Given the long term investments and off the grid retirement homes they are not expecting to go anywhere. Historically, those who believe the Rapture is coming divest. This has been true of sects throughout the last 2,000 years. True Believers buy white robes and head out to the hills to meet their Maker. Are there white robes hanging in the otherwise empty closets of these august leaders of pious prose?
In that case they are political operatives strutting their stuff in the vestments of virtue while living the lavish lives of plutocrats. Their work is creating cover for this administration as it continues to place politically useful judges on the federal bench and NeoCon insiders in other seats of influence. Bolton into the United Nations would be an example of the kind of work their ilk undertakes.
We need to recognize how pervasive the use of unidentified PR flacks has become. As the independent voices continue to be muted the decibels emitted by NeoCon flunkies is going up. This administration is desperate to change the present course of opinion. Just 100 days into his second stolen term George W. Bush has won the distinction of a vote of least confidence from the American people. Around the world he is hated, feared, and despised.
The NeoCons are therefore pulling out all of the stops and using all of their formerly covert weapons of truth realignment.
How many journalists clustered around the seats of power in Washington D.C. and the Wall Street Journal in New York are actually political operatives? Someday soon a real investigative journalist with an honest and fearless editor at a paper not owned and controlled by management that leads back to the NeoCons will dig out the connections and how the payoffs took place. Then we will start to get a grasp on just how deep and wide this conversion of journalism to public relations personnel has gone.
Churchmen present a more complex problem. Churches are not liable to the same kind of reporting and their parishioners are going to be a very long time believing it. Some truths are too painful to face.
One wonders what Jesus would do if He were here now. We know He had no problem throwing the moneychangers out of the Temple. What would the Man who walked among us teaching simple love, charity say to Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed? If it is true, stealing through deceit by using the pretensions of journalism and the sanctity of the church is worse than money changing.
Through their actions shall we know them. What we don't yet know is doubtless much worse.
How the Rove Cadre view such institutions as the church and journalism explains a lot. They have taken the job a nd responsibilities of “journalist' and converted that to a tool useful to them. They have taken a religious viewpoint that was apolitical and converted it into a tool of foreign policy and electoral power.
They have established pundits, think tanks, writers, radio talk show hosts, and experts of all kinds who, for very nominal amounts of money paid out in respectable salaries, royalties on books, and huge speaking honorariums, produce the interpretations that affirms the NeoCon spin. We have had inklings of these through the hysterical rantings of such writers as Anne Coulter whose books they promote.
So what else are they doing we haven't noticed yet? That is the six trillion dollar question. It is the question that should remain in our minds as the deficit continues to climb towards overload and the chattering and nervousness in markets around the world stretch the economy to breaking.
We are in the middle of a book that would have been too scary for Stephen King to write. And unless something is done the end is going to be very, very bad.

Good News: Voter fraud can be handled easily and without voting machines.
Better News: We can also inject some backbone and ethics into the body politic
Best News: The truth really can set you free.


The model that our Founders had in mind when they were working out the forms for America’s elections were clear and simple.
Stand up and be counted. Literally.
Most of them came from towns that used the yearly meeting to settle issues. Some of those issues were strenuously debated. Voting was accomplished by raising hands and counting. The secret ballot was a concept beyond their experience. At the close of the Revolution in which so many of them had fought and died the idea that any individual would be unwilling to stand up for their vote when they had so recently risked life, fortune and honor for their freedom would have seemed alien.
So how does this relate to the issue of fair and just elections and Diebold voting machines?

It goes to the issues of our cultural insistence on confidentiality, the character required to exercise franchise, and the real value of reputation.
There is no right to privacy in the Constitution. No one back then imagined that the Constitution would be used to assert a right to deceive others. Nowhere is it written that there is some convenient privilege to pick up and leave behind obligations voluntarily assumed and fail to reveal those liabilities to our new circle of acquaintance No one imagined a world where a sexual predator would be released from prison and move next door to you and your child without your knowledge. .
Such an idea would have astonished the Founders. A person was their word, and a signed piece of paper could not change the moral bankruptcy of the individual who defaulted.
The Founders all came from small towns and a sprinkling of cities where it was sometimes impossible to be unaware of the reputation and history of most of the people living nearby, either first hand or at one remove. So reputation, your personal history, was the bottom line in the currency of trust.
A good reputation was an asset. A bad reputation was a liability.
When honorable people fell on hard times the community’s extended help was often modified by the reputation of the individual needing assistance.
Demeaned as small mindedness by a generation eager to issue itself unearned wealth in counterfeited reputation the very concept of reputation was replaced by the concept of ‘privacy’ and complicated further by dividing our lives into ‘personal’ and ‘business.’ It was an idea with all of the validity of allowing government to print money unsupported by an objective standard of value.
Bad ideas drive out good when they enable theft. When that happens we are allowing an inflationary standard for truth, assuming that reputation has no real meaning. But, of course it does. Most of us reveal who we are most clearly to those with whom we share the most intimate ties.
Men who abandon their wives and children, women who deceive their husbands, men batter and who drink the family income, each of these earns their reputation.
Those who insist the most loudly on privacy are generally those with the most to hide and the sappy assertion that individuals behave differently in their personal and professional lives may well be in for a shock when the cash box disappears.
The right to privacy has impeded our ability to know each other and therefore driven up our transaction costs in relationships. The insistence that we be able to vote anonymously, a whiny divorcement from responsibility, created the essential avenue for stealing elections, the crisis that now confronts us via the Diebold voting machines produced by Rapture Republicans and armed with software backdoors by the Neocons, Unlimited.
So the answer to the problem is to start standing up to be counted on Election Day.
It can be simple. Perhaps we could even vote from home, many of us. Your vote and the votes of your neighbors could be available on line. You can go look – and Americans will do just that. An increase in interesting conversations across the back fence could be counted as an advantage, not that many of us will really be surprised.
Changing how we vote may then also make us think who we are voting for – and that could be a change that is even more sorely needed today.

How Close is too Close? How the NeoCons used fear to stifle free speech

First, it must be said that every political viewpoint, Right, Libertarian, and Left, have their flaky and weird factions that are routinely given far too much attention by the media. They get media attention because they make great copy. Threatening to blow up the bowling team will always garner you more attention that complaining that the color of the team tee-shirts makes you look even more sallow. These individuals evidently get off on the adrenaline rush they get by being outrageous. It would be interesting to see the media do an in depth study of their backgrounds with attention to their other asocial behavior, which is certainly there from those I have known personally.
People are pretty consistent if you know them over time and in depth.
The EarthFirst! Fanatics and their ilk should not be encouraged any more than the hysterical Abortion Clinic Bombers should be glamorized. Neither represents the movement they are trying to hijack. Shame on them.
The media should also get a sharp rap on the knuckles both for their laziness in looking for the most outrageous story over and over again, thus providing copy with a minimum cost in thought and journalistic output, and also for cooperating with the powers that be in ignoring the real ground swell for protest from the American people evidenced first at the Democratic Convention in Boston and now at the Republican Convention in New York.
Protesting the establishment is more American than political conventions and predates them. The American Revolution was, after all, a protest using the means available.
But we want our protests today to be non-violent, of course.
So, if Central Park is too close for the comfort of the powers that be in New York and Coney Island also makes then nervous how far away do the authorities need protestors to stand?
This is not a rhetorical question.
I fear that the answer will be someplace rather remote, say on the football field of the Brigham Young University in Utah or if that is too close to electrical outlets then out in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Snideness aside, the question still remains. Where can the protests take place? Those who are unhappy, and at this point that is a very large number of people from every conceivable viewpoint, they need to be told immediately so they can begin organizing and the intelligent media can cover them. The overwhelming number of Americans protesting the policies of the Bush Administration are honorable, decent, Americans and have an absolute right to make their opinions known. Using terrorism as a justification for stifling protest violates the foundational vision that is America and should not be tolerated.
While we are waiting for the powers that be to emerge from their NeoCon huddle with their buddies in New York and determine what location will be the most impossible for protestors to use efficaciously we might turn our attention to how we can make our opinion known while staying quietly at home and going about our business.
This is my suggestion.
Most of us own and cherish the emblem and symbol of the country we love, the American flag. We can show the flag, using its radiant stripes and glorious stars to speak for us by hanging it upside down, or with the blue field down where it will be clearly visible.
When I do that I will be saying, “Please God, do not put either of these Bozos in the Oval Office.” Personally, I will be voting for Susan B. Anthony this time around so it will not be my vote that affirms the candidacies presently offered.
Susan B. was a woman of principle. When she lived she spoke truths with which I could agree on human rights. She stood up with singular courage to the establishment and never backed down. She is now dead, and some would say that the only good politician is a dead one. I would not go that far but certainly now she will never disappoint me.
Be American. Show the flag if you love your country. And God bless us and the nation that we love.

Coulter: Using the sex card to sell the NeoCon Agenda

The puzzle for the intelligent reader is to pick out a thread of sanity in anything Ann Coulter writes. I have an advantage here because I raised five children and therefore recognize the ploys being dragged out from Ms. Coulter’s little box of tools. Yelling loudly when you have not a shred of justification is a strategy I have had to deal with many times. So is misdirection and fatuous assertions of authority. “Nicky’s Mom said we could” and “Dawn wanted us to roll the water balloons off the roof” make more sense when they are coming out of the mouths of individuals who have not yet begun preschool, however.
Ms. Coulter will use anything that will work. She has a lot at stake.
Ms. Coulter has managed to become a multimillionaire by accepting a job for which she is uniquely qualified. Those who employ her have a hard time finding candidates for this particular position because it demands an unusual intersection of personal skills and good looks combined with a sublime lack of rationality, ethical insight and good taste. At one time in the history of America public discourse followed rules of minimal civility. Maybe someday that will again be true.
The job Coulter fills is to provide a woman’s point of view; ‘commentary,’ attacking those who question any policy of the NeoCons. In case you are in doubt, the NeoCons are the esoteric, Straussian Illuminati-wanna-bes presently running our country right into the ground in hopes of solidifying a base of support and perpetuating their personal fortunes. Coulter’s astonishing and not even funny harangues are protected by the 1st Amendment and enabled by her cool good looks and ‘charming personality.’ They are intended to create the impression that women, at least some women, are on board while stifling objections from those who would normally have delighted in attacking her bizarre statements.
She is well aware that men, who comprise most of the world’s real commentators, are very reluctant to attack her as they doubtless would if she were less esthetically enhanced. Ever hopeful of getting lucky men dislike attacking attractive women. Biology, the unspoken driver of nearly all human action, trumps all. The NeoCons never miss a trick, a word that works rather well in this context.
In her most recent regurgitation of bizarre opinion Ms. Coulter asserts that Liberals love Saddam Hussein, likens them to insects, accuses them of being unable to think for themselves, compares Bill O’Reilly to Jesse Helms, and cites George S. Patton, Jr. as an authority. And in that case she is not wrong. I have a poster of him, one of my heroes on my office wall. But he would have despised Coulter; Patton was a true patriot.
From there she paints the happy picture of the citizens of Iraq recalling a governor within three years and accuses a fellow female columnist of having PMS because all Iraqis are not endlessly grateful for our kind attentions to their civil liberties. These things take time, Coulter says. Someday the Iraqis will be sending thank you notes.
According to Coulter all Liberals are evil and should be taken out and shot for treason. Not being a liberal I was originally amused.
No more.
It is a mistake to spend time trying to respond to what she says. It is time to pay attention to why she is employed, given a forum, and assured millions in compensatory perks.
Always follow the money. Most people involved in politics are there because of money, sex, or power. Money is infinitely fungible.
Ann Coulter is a tool. She is the most visible NeoCon female pundit and has provided an essential service to the interlinking collation of special interests that drive the present agenda to place a monarchial type of government in America; with them in perpetual charge, of course. The trappings of an imperial presidency are falling into place.
According to their faith, Straussians are ‘destined to rule.’ What they are doing now is simply acting out the logic of their personally constructed agenda. We can usefully refer to it as the NeoConning Manifesto.
It does not surprise me that they have tried to accomplish such an end. The power hungry will be always with us and Straussians are not very different than those who preceded them. What surprises me is that those who are really committed to individual freedom and the vision that is America have shown all of the intestinal fortitude of golf balls in opposing them.
The real Republicans cower in their golf clubs, looking for more balls or trying to find a way to profit from the coming tide. The Liberals just look clueless or try to find a way to profit from the coming tide. If they have balls they have yet to find them.
The present tense of this little melodrama became possible at the same time that Nixon, with an unadulterated stupidity only he could have summoned, instituted Wage and Price Controls. At the same time that Republican thinkers all over the country dropped out of that Party a subset of these disgruntled individuals formed a new political movement. The political vehicle was the Libertarian Party. The policy that originated in those now main-stream think tanks is now the current political rhetoric for both parties. With exceptions.
Into this Nixonian power vacuum was drawn those who are now at the core of the NeoCons; former liberals who brought with them the tactics that they had learned in hard scrabble socialism. Their commitment was to gaining and exercising power. These include the Kristols and their close friends.
Attractive nuisances always draw flies. The corrupting potentials of power are too well known to be restated here.
It was not a conspiracy except in the classical understanding of that term. Those who grasped for power over others, having common goals, have drawn together in a cooperative effort to subvert the checks and balances still remaining to us from the Founders.
So here we sit, on the edge of an American fascist state looking at more of the same old Dems, in desperate need of a hero to lead us back towards Liberty.
Mostly, when you wish for something it doesn’t happen, but this time it may well be different. The grasp of the Neocons on America is not yet complete, and if we find that certain someone Anne Coulter may be writing obituaries in Podunk, Idaho at this time next year.

The Lurid Fantasy Life of Ann Coulter

It is not true that Ann Coulter’s last date was with Joseph McCarthy. That is outrageous. Ann may well be fascinated with and obsessed by Joseph McCarthy; he may well be her fantasy soul mate, divided from her forever by death a la Somewhere in Time, but she never dated him in this reality. No one ever accused Joe McCarthy of being a child molester. The man died on May 2, 1957 when Ann was just a very small girl.
In the interests of truth in reportage we looked for evidence of Ann’s age and found reports varying between December 8, 1949 to the same day in 1966. Since the right to lie about your age is the First Amendment of the Woman’s Bill of Rights we dropped the issue.
Anyway, her regular escort and the man with whom she spends time is Matt Drudge. That also raises questions, but again, despite the present struggle on the part of Republicans of the Neo-Con predilection to install monitoring devices in our bedrooms we will not inquire as to the specifics of her relationship with a man who is commonly known to be as gay as Oscar Wilde.
In her current book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which has carried her from the ghetto of political punditry onto the normally politically neuter pages of People Magazine, Ann continues her political bodice ripping by taking the specific accusations Joe hurdled at individuals and with collectivist aplomb that would elicit envy from Joseph Stalin, denounces in its varied entirety all individuals who are Liberal, Moderate Republican, and Democrat as guilty without benefit of trial of what was, the last time I checked, a capital offense; treason. I did not see a mention of Libertarians. But I am sure she also denounces them. Not that anyone pays much attention to Libertarians although when Ann tried to run for Congress as a Libertarian from her home in Connecticut the motley Libertarians united in saying, NO to Ann. Ann went on to describe the group as nerdy types still sleeping on Star Wars sheets and living in their mothers’ basements. True but unkind.
Coulter occupies a curious placement in the NeoCon attack strategy. She is an attractive female who is registered Republican and is ready, willing, and able to take on search and destroy missions against other women. There are a few others but Coulter is the Right’s shrillest feminine voice for those who are the least rational and most inclined to hysterical belief in conspiracy theories of all kinds. Most Republican women, members of NFRW, would suffer heart palpitations if they were subjected to her in the pure form. The Left’s feminine voice of hysteria can be nearly as shrill but there are more of them and they are generally ignored. However, they, unlike Coulter, do not write best selling books and gather a cult following, mostly male and mostly miserably single.
Coulter’s ‘discourse’ depends not on facts but on the emotional wattage of her attacks used with the scalpel-like precision of a machine-gun in a Terminator movie. According to Coulter women should never have gotten the right to vote and should never enjoy equal rights. She was bounced as a columnist for National Review for calling on America to, " invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” in one memorably typical moment of testosterone overload and collectivist excess.
Collectivism is ugly, no matter who uses it as a means to demean.
Not that she depends entirely on collectivist tactics. Coulter is not above whimpering like a woman and having tantrums when such tactics will work.
Faced with the specter of a real debate with a fellow conservative who has been critical of her disregard for fact checking and rationality she was heard whispering to the TV host, Barry Nolan on his show last week, Night Beat, out of Brookline, Mass., that they could not have the rebuttal speaker previously scheduled and waiting in the wings. Fear and tears trembled in her words, which she did not realize the potential speaker could hear. The speaker, Dan Bouchers, was cut immediately. Ladies must be protected, after all. You can learn more about what Dan thinks on his site: coulterwatch.com.
Bouchers has a record of ignoring Coulter’s pulchritudinous appearance to focus on what she says. Most media hosts are not made of such stern stuff.
The issue that should draw the intelligent mind is the means Coulter uses to accomplish her success – which has not been to encourage dialogue and move discourse but to fatten her own pocketbook at the expense of intellectual honesty and a decent regard for civility.
Ann uses fear and hate as weapons and hides behind her appearance. One wonders what would have happened if instead of looking like Anna Nicole Smith and sounding like Adolph Hitler she had looked like him and sounded like her. One wonders.
In the final analysis we speak the truth more from what we do than from what we say. What Coulter has been doing is profiting from selling the rhetoric of hate. While the eyes of the credulous are on her bottom, her eyes are firmly on the bottom line.