Text 1100, 143 rader
Skriven 2004-10-21 12:51:00 av Michael Gothreau (1:134/33)
Ärende: Pure Genius?
====================
Hi All,

I see it now.  Pure genius.

The Democrats have been doing it for years, right?  Go after the stupid vote!

Is Kerry stupid enough to pull it off?  After all, the stupid vote is just
smart enough to see a smart man trying to con them, right?

No.  He won't pull it off.  Kerry, despite every error he knowingly makes, is
going to get the smart vote.  The stupid vote is going to go where it belongs:
Bush!

Bush has no problem slipping under the stupid vote's radar: he's one of the
stupid vote, himself.  Sure, he has smart advisors (who know that going after
the stupid vote is the ONLY way they can put this marrionette in the show for
another four years).

Only the stupid vote believes  American soldiers are fighting terrorists in
Iraq now.

Only the stupid vote believes the high-speed squandering of a surplus is good
for the nation.

Only the stupid vote believes God is the Head Puppetmaster on the job, pulling
Bush's strings to a divine plot that doesn't include His children in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Only the stupid vote cannot see the all too obvious hand of corporations and
other sovereign nations calling the plays into the game.

Only the stupid vote cannot see that these dark, rich players believe that
America has far more stupid people than smart.

Are you one of the stupid vote?  You'll know on November 2.  Well, maybe not
until sometime in early 2005...


http://radiofreeusa.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=4031

Opinion: Casualties of faith (21 Oct 04)  
  
  
MAUREEN DOWD
NY Time
WASHINGTON -- When I was little, I was very good at leaps of faith.

A nun would tape up a picture of a snow-covered mountain peak on the blackboard
and say that the first child to discern the face of Christ in the melting snow
was the holiest. I was soon smugly showing the rest of the class the
"miraculous" outline of that soulful, bearded face.

But I never thought I'd see the day when leaps of faith would be national
policy, when the fortunes of America hung on the possibility of a miracle.

What does it tell you about a president that his grounds for war are so weak
that the only way he can justify it is by believing God wants it? Or that his
only Iraq policy now - as our troops fight a vicious insurgency and the dream
of a stable democracy falls apart - is a belief in miracles?

Miracles make the incurious even more incurious. People who live by religious
certainties don't have to waste time with recalcitrant facts or moral doubts.
They do not need to torture themselves, for example, about dispatching American
kids into a sand trap with ghostly enemies and without the proper backup,
armor, expectations or cultural training.

Any president relying more on facts than faith could have seen that his troops
would be sitting ducks: Donald Rumsfeld's experiment - sending in a light,
agile force (more a Vin Diesel vehicle than a smart plan for Iraq) - was in
direct conflict with the overwhelming force needed to attempt the neocons'
grandiose scheme to turn Iraq into a model democracy.

J.F.K. had to fight the anti-papist expectation that his Oval Office would take
orders from heaven. For W., it's a selling point. Some right-wing Catholics
want John Kerry excommunicated, while evangelicals call the president a
messenger of God. "God's blessing is on him," the TV evangelist Pat Robertson
says, adding, "It's the blessing of heaven on the emperor." 

Mr. Bush has shown all the evangelical voters who didn't like his daddy that he
gets, as Mr. Robertson puts it, "his direction from the Lord."

When Paula Zahn asked the televangelist Tuesday whether Mr. Bush, as a
Christian, should admit his mistakes, Mr. Robertson said he'd warned a
self-satisfied Bush about Iraq: "The Lord told me it was going to be (a) a
disaster, and (b) messy."

Mr. Robertson said, "He was the most self-assured man I ever met." Paraphrasing
Mark Twain, he said Mr. Bush was "like a contented Christian with four aces. He
was just sitting there, like, I'm on top of the world, and I warned him about
this war. ... And I was trying to say, Mr. President, you better prepare the
American people for casualties. 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any
casualties.' " 

W., it seems, really believes he's the one. President Neo. (And his advisers
are disciples. That's why Condi Rice so willingly puts aside her national
security duties to spread the Bush gospel in swing states, and why Karen Hughes
raced to impugn Mr. Robertson's veracity after he described his chilling
encounter with W.) 

W.'s willful blindness comes from mistakenly assuming that his desires are
God's, as if he knows where God stands on everything from democracy in Iraq to
capital-gains tax cuts. 

As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address about the Civil War, one can't
speak for God: "The Almighty has His own purposes." 

Mr. Bush didn't just ignore Mr. Robertson's warning - he ignored his own
intelligence experts, who warned before the war that an invasion of Iraq would
spur more support for political Islam and trigger violent conflict, including
an insurgency that would drive Baathists and terrorists together in a toxic
combination.

As Michael Gordon wrote in his Times series this week on blind spots in the
strategy to secure Iraq, the Bush crew engaged in an astonishing series of
delusions: assuming they could begin a withdrawal of troops 60 days after
taking Baghdad; enabling the insurgency to flourish; abolishing the Iraqi
military and putting American lives at risk; misreading the obvious reaction to
an American occupation of a Muslim country.

C.I.A. officials were so clueless they wanted to sneak hundreds of small
American flags into Iraq before the war started so grateful Iraqis could wave
them at their liberators. The agency planned to film that and triumphantly beam
it to the Arab world.

The president has this strange notion that his belief in God means detailed and
perfect knowledge of everything that God wants. He may wish to keep his head
stuck in the Iraqi sand, but he may discover that the Almighty has His own
purposes.  




From the desk of...


   Michael
... "I hope you leave here and walk out and say, 'What did he say?'"
- George W. Bush, Beaverton, Oregon, Aug. 13, 2004



--- Devil's Point System 6.66
 * Origin: Office of Fidonet Secret Society (1:134/33)