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Wednesday, May 11, 2005

If Bush is so popular in Georgia, why doesn’t he just stay there?

President George “Valium-head” Bush visited one of Europe’s “newest democracies” (That is how The Wichita Eagle described it, May 10, 2005) and was met by cheers as he talked of spreading “freedom and democracy.”
As the article points out, he is not so popular in the rest of Western Europe, where people might actually know what words such as “freedom” and “Democracy” actually mean. To “Frat-boy” George, it means a country dominated by a single political party and a single religious agenda. It means caving into the petty desires of the religious right, allowing one political party to dominate all three branches of government, making sure the major TV networks realize that any rough treatment of the president means no access to the president.
Other aspects of US democracy is a total attack on our academic institutions to push out the country’s last few influential leftists, and a two party system that excludes all other points of view and leaves us with a faltering opposition party of has-beens whose best strategy is to imitate their opponents as much as possible.
If the Georgians didn’t like a one-party state, they wouldn’t like it here. If they wanted true religious freedom, they wouldn’t like it here, where faith based initiatives put secularly run government agencies out of business.
Then there’s the war. One day we are told by our news media that Afghanistan is just about pacified and under control. Then we’re told that a major battle took place in Afghanistan’s cave areas and two Americans were killed. (Eagle, May 10) We are told the Iraqis are turning against the insurgents and that rebels are mostly hired criminals one day, then told they are putting up serious resistance another. (Same Eagle addition, May 10)
Hearing Bush talk about “democracy” is like hearing Adolf Hitler talk of compassionate treatment of the Jews. For him to talk of “freedom” is like hearing Paris Hilton discussing Albert Einstein’s Theories of relativity.
What a wonderful fictional world we live in, where many people believe the universe came from a magician’s show and a brain-dead ex-frat-boy can pretend to lead the world’s only superpower.

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