Not just the scare tactics, but the outright lies

[Humor_In_Cuneiform]

are what * has used to seize increasingly more power.

Again, why does anyone believe anything he says anymore? I know why some people do, but no rational human being ought to.

He says he is protecting us.

It is a power grab pure and simple.

This is not the "culture of corruption."

This is the culture of hegemony, of might makes right, of the ends justify the means both domestically and internationally.

All of the above being totally inconsistent with the values of the US of A.

The Clinton administration did a much better job of keeping us safe, AND of not
trampling on our rights and liberties or bullying the world.

[firefox]

1. It's the new improved protection racket- all for the protectors of course

[Lexingtonian]

2. See, you're being reality-based

and interested in being proactive and adaptive. You care about the future. The people who stand by him simply do not.

As long as Bush stymies the parts of the world they resent and fear, and gives them the occasional victory over it, and keeps it pretty easy on them, they're with him.

You have to understand their movement as a failing 'evangelism' of sorts. In the beginning, 2000 and 2001, they thought they could get their Utopia and convert the oh-so-Fallen country to their own image (hollow, ugly, and mediocre as it may have been). '9/11' changed everything for them, turned the world into a Dystopia- but Utopia could be recovered by winning the Manichaean conflict with all those Dark Forces that lurked in the world. To attack the Evil somewhere would provoke it to assemble and fight there. This effort- Iraq- proved to be a lot dirtier and less redeeming than imagined, indeed: banal and degrading. Then there was a period of invoking 'will' and 'resolve', of fighting in the trenches and from the pulpits, with faltering desire to do anything and no production of anything good. Now all that is exhausted, the whole campaign to remake or win the world to their banner and 'values' and way is lost. Domestically, Democrats and true Independants have walked away from the crap entirely.

On November 30 George Dubya threw in the towel on the expansionism and triumphalism doctrines. The 'evangelism' is a failure. Almost only Republican True Believers remain in the Faith. The essential doctrine is an occultism, and Dubya essentially went back and revamped the basic definitions and doctrines with his Believers. He re-declared himself the magus and high priest, with superior power and superior knowledge to all others. He re-declared them as The Initiated, the ones who stand to win and to be sanctified and elevated if they remain true to the cult Faith. He re-declared the non-initiated and critics/opponents as Traitors, Turncoats, Weak, Evil, and Deceived.

Now it's simply a cult vs critics fight. But for Bush to take the High Priest role, he has to have demonstrable superior power, knowledge, and efficacy with which to awe and inspire his supporters and demoralize the critics and opponents. And for that he has to overreach on Presidential military powers to achieve propaganda victories, has to violate the intelligence laws to have "secret" knowledge, and has to symbolically punish Evildoers via torture, imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, extraction of confessions, public recantations and supplications, and psychological warfare. It's not destroying their bodies that matters in this fight, it's humiliation of their Deity and mockery of their service to It/Him to it that does.

This is the War of 'Civilizations' you've heard so much about.

I don't know whether to think of it as paganism, medievalism, simply barbarism, or idiots who believe their comic books.

Well, the next year should see substantial shear-out from the Republican coalition as some of its members- the so-called moderates- finally decide that the pain of adapting to reality isn't worse than going on in this nightmarish cartoon run by morons for morons.