[Mb-civic] From the Moscow Times

[JCarrozo at aol.com]

Global Eye 

No Ways Tired


By Chris  Floyd
Published: November 5, 2004 

Well, that's it. The great American  electoral agon is over at last. Now 
George W. Bush -- the duly elected,  finally legitimate president of the United 
States -- can get back to doing what  he does best: killing people for corporate 
profit and personal  aggrandizement.

Yes, it's a hard blow for the world. Yes, it's a deep  shame for American 
democracy, poisoned by lies, fear, greed and hysteria. Yes,  it means that tens 
of thousands of innocent people will now be killed -- by more  war, more 
neglect, more ignorance, more repression, more brutality, more hatred,  more 
fanaticism. Yes, it means that the planet will be gashed with more wounds,  smeared 
with more filth, left to wither and die. Yes, it's a giant step backward  for 
the human spirit, back to the muck of arbitrary rule by vicious elites and  
their ham-fisted goons, their well-wadded courtiers, their yapping sycophants.  
Yes, it means that somewhere out there, in the blood-dimmed haze of a dark age  
falling, Lucifer and bin Laden are lighting cigars and raising a glass to 
toast  the victory of their good friend George.


These are the facts, and  they can't be altered. But how to respond to this 
catastrophe? Shall we weep,  moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with 
sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit  upon the ground and tell sad stories of the 
death of republics? Shall we cower  in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for 
the Lost Cause, for vanished  glories and broken dreams? 

Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads  high, laughing fools to scorn, 
rejecting at every turn the moral authority of  murderers and thieves to rule 
our lives, determine our reality, act in our name?  Let's dispense with 
lamentation -- give not a single moment to that emotional  indulgence -- and get 
right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down  harder, dig deeper 
and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing  beneath the 
slag-heap of ruin that Bush and his terrorist partners have made of  the world. 

Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist -- without violence,  the weapon of 
the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in  thrall to 
the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their  ape-lust 
for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight  these 
pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and  rape it 
like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find,  exposing 
their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered,  perverted and 
betrayed. 

This is not an insurmountable task, no matter  how impervious the Bush 
Machine -- that monstrous conglomeration of judicial  bagmen, Congressional rubber 
stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio  ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, 
neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war  profiteers, think-tank bleaters, 
Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts  and woman-haters -- might appear 
at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite  four years of the most 
relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation  and fearmongering ever 
hurled against a free society, more than 55 million  people voted to reject Bush 
and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of  aggressive war; his gulag system 
of torture and lawless detention; his savage  assault on civil rights, the 
environment, working people and the poor; his  systematic destruction of social 
programs; his transfer of sovereignty from  individuals and communities to the 
iron grip of his corporate donors; his  trashing of hard-won international 
agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional  arms, war crimes, global warming, the 
rights of women and the protection of  children; his unleashing of rabid 
religious zealots into the bowels of  government to set policies on science, 
health, education, welfare, while sucking  up billions in public money to fund 
their sectarian causes.

Such mass  dissent -- even in "wartime," in the face of the Machine -- is 
surely cause for  hope. Moreover, recent academic studies show that a large 
majority of Bush  supporters actually disagree with him on everything from the 
Kyoto Protocol to  missile defense to international law to workers' rights -- but 
somehow believe  that he shares their views. Most Bush-backers also still 
believe that Saddam  Hussein and al-Qaida colluded in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks 
and that Iraq had  weapons of mass destruction -- yet this same majority says 
that the conquest of  Iraq would be illegitimate if there were no WMD and no 
9/11 connection. Thus  more than half of the Bush voters on Tuesday oppose his 
actual policies,  including the criminal war in Iraq -- they just don't know 
it yet, because  they're mired in carefully cultivated delusion.

Of course, many Bush  voters are willfully deluded, glad to be suckered and 
betrayed. They love the  ludicrous puppet-show of his supposed greatness, his 
all-seeing wisdom, his  mandate from God. They get teary-eyed at the thought of 
his honesty and goodness  -- while he kills 100,000 innocent people in Iraq, 
as a new medical study shows,  with a brutally stupid military aggression 
based on lies and fantasies,  fomenting more terrorism with each new barbarity and 
gorging his cronies on  blood money. This hard core will never respond to the 
truth. 

But if we  can enlighten even the smallest percentage of Bush's razor-thin 
majority, then  support for his murderous folly and waste will quickly erode. 
One by one, the  puppet-strings will snap, and America's headlong plunge into 
tyranny, bigotry  and endless imperial war can perhaps -- perhaps -- be halted, 
even  reversed.

It's worth the fight. Let's take it on, let's take them down.  In the words 
of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to  sanity and 
justice starts now.
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