In his 1946 essay, "The Prevention of Literature," George Orwell made the observation that Communists and religious fanatics "are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent."

even in the Bible, god can overlook a little adultery.

an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba had admitted to turning over counterfeit documents to the US embassy in Rome last year suggesting that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical, responses.

Kipling's verse applies equally well to jungle or desert: If they question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

"'It's clear that Islam is on the way to disappearing,' Elon asserts with certainty. 'What we are now seeing across the Muslim world is not a powerful surge of faith but the dying embers of Islam. How will it disappear? Very simply. Within a few years a Christian crusade against Islam will be launched, which will be the major event of this millennium.

"They seemed confused and arrogant and nervous," said Ali's mother. Other neighbors complained of being threatened with rifles in their faces. They quoted English phrases they said they had heard from the soldiers: "Shut your mouth." "Not your business." "If you speak, I will kill you."

President Johnson April 7,1965.
The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied.
Why are these realities our concern? Why are we in South Vietnam?
We are there because we have a promise to keep.
We are also there to strengthen world order. We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance.

The basic Dubya narrative is the transformation of a roistering Prince Hal into a heroic Henry V (as dramatized in the agitprop version of Shakespeare's play staged this summer in Central Park). In DC 9/11, the young Bush—spoiled frat boy and drunken prankster—is subsumed in the image of the initially powerless president. The movie is thus the story of Bush assuming command, first of his staffers (who attest to his new aura with numerous admiring reaction shots) and then the situation. He is the one who declares that "we are at war," who firmly places Cheney (Lawrence Pressman) in his secure location—not once but twice. (To further make the point, Chetwynd has Scott Alan Smith's Fleischer muse that the press refuses to get it: "The Cheney-runs-the-show myth is always going to be with some of them.") Rudy Giuliani, who eclipsed Bush in the days following the attack, is conspicuously absent—or, rather, glimpsed only as a figure on television.
Ultimately, DC 9/11 is less a docudramatic account of historical events than a legitimizing allegory.
Indeed, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have done so much for Bush's presidency one might reasonably suspect they're being held in a witness protection program.

And that was before last week, when the U.S. government approved a program that allows the shooting down of civilian aircraft and two days later indicted three Cuban military officers for shooting down two civilian aircraft

it seems that the release of 911 'transcripts' only includes the wtc - not any of the calls from the phones in the planes - yep - the ones that are disputed... why arent they included and why hasnt the media mentioned this?

The transcripts ``show people performing their duties very heroically and very professionally on a day of horror,'' Port Authority spokesman Greg Trevor said.

A new Office of Homeland Security has been established. Now I thought that the Department of Defense was supposed to be protecting the homeland. [Laughter.] Now if they’re not, the question is: What is the Department of Defense doing?

The attack on September 11th broke three different terrorist laws. In other words we already have laws on the books that they broke.

Frederick Douglass. And he said the following:

“If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the mighty roar of its awful waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them. And these will continue until they’re resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”


"False consciousness" is a term favored by the left as a label for people’s systematic failure to understand adequately and respond to social reality.

In 1944, for example, at the peak of World War IIrelated production in the United States, war spending was equal to 42 percent of the U.S. gross national product. This was a loss to the economy. By contrast, even the worst year of the Great Depression, 1933, cost the U.S. economy only about 35 percent of GNP.

Nearly 12 percent of the women who graduated from the United States Air Force Academy this year were the victims of rape or attempted rape in their four years at the academy in Colorado Springs / nearly 70 percent of them said they had been the victims of sexual harassment

Bush Has Not Attended Even One Funeral Of A U.S. Soldier Killed In Iraq
George W Bush: "There's only one person who is responsible for making that decision , and that's me. And there's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids on the death of their loved ones. Others hug, but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug, and that's me, and I know what it's like."

Fox News channel talk show host Bill O'Reilly says "shut up" the way other people say "um."

LBJ also got his allies at the Federal Communications Commission to approve the sale of Austin radio station KTBC to his wife and then to approve longer hours on a much more desirable part of the AM band. The result was instant wealth for the Johnson household

old soldiers never die; young ones do.

2/13/98 -- Could it be that we're witnessing an attempted coup in progress?

Democracy, we hardly knew ye.