Delysid #1

GazettEditor's Note: This is the first in, hopefully, a long line of posts from a new member of the GlobePoking team, Delysid (delysid at spymac.com)
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38°53' North; 77°02' West

Is it just me, or is the palpable whiff of fascism hanging over the Bush campaign and the 2004 US election becoming more of a chilling stench as the days pass?

Two exhibits are offered for your perusal:

1) The first, from the Village Voice, about an anti-gay marriage protest would be merely head-shakingly disgusting if not for the fact that if Bush obtains a 2nd term, by hook or by crook (likely more of the latter), people just like these will be running the country.

"....Fear was invoked by speaker after speaker. "There's a deep division in America," said former presidential candidate and right-wing activist Gary Bauer, to ecstatic cheers. "The winner gets our children, and the right to tell them what to believe about life and death, and love and sex, and freedom and slavery. We have been losing this war. We have had to drink time and time again from a bitter cup because our opponents control the courts. I have had enough. On this I will not surrender. On this we will stand and fight."

Now, of course, once the sucker punches like this have been applied the cornermen always jump into the ring, white towels flying, and start applying salve to the wounds:

"We are not gay-bashing. We are doing this because we love gays and we want them to have the best of life as well," said Chuck Colson, Nixon's chief counsel in the Watergate era and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries."

You may remember Chuck 'E's In Love'. When last we met him he was running the plumbers for Tricky Dick, blowing up liberal think tanks, putting together enemies lists, and screwing the screwheads like Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Newman and Bill Cosbie by sending the IRS after them. Chuck E was also one of the few of the Watergate conspirators who actually did hard time. In fact, Hunter Thompson considered Colson to be so unprincipled that he abandoned a well choreographed fantasmagorical late-night effort to kidnap Chuckie, tie him to the back of a rented white cadillac convertible, and drag him screaming down Pennsylvania in front of the White House because, 'the bastard would probably enjoy it'.

2) The second, a major New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind on Bush's faith-based presidency, is an absolute must-read, and has been making quite an impact stateside. If you read only one thing political before the US election read this, and more, from Suskind:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

So, there you have it, straight from the Horse's, whoops, Rovian's mouth...Reality doesn't Matter....

Ya right.

Go tell it to the dead people on all sides....or better yet, their families, friends and loved ones.