I have for some time now summed up Bush voters as an alliance of the following: the Dupes, the Zealots, and the Corrupt.
Well, in accordance with Abraham Lincoln's dictum, it looks like the Dupes are at long last pulling away from the other two groups.
Don't expect me to apologize for calling them Dupes - they were quite clearly and enthusiastically duped. They were led by the nose by a conservative-owned media into thinking that somehow George W. Bush was an all-right guy, and that somehow that was the only qualification to be president. That the stiffs opposing him were elitists and intelligentsia, and that somehow electing a person who is smart was personally offensive. They were baffled with bullshit and dazzled by duplicity, and handed over their vote because they eagerly swallowed the lies.
They were, in short, fucking idiots.
I'm not a politician; it's not my job to make people feel good. These assholes have fucked up my beloved country but good, and when they petulantly whine that they might continue to vote Republican becase I, or more generally "those liberal elite", were mean to them and didn't pander to them, well they can go fuck themselves. If shooting themselves yet again because they just can't stand being condescended to seems like the best decision, they are as stupid as I feared they were. At this point I don't much care - they've already fucked things up good for all of us.
That said, I am actually very glad that the dupes have apparently begun to realize what a colossal fuckup they made. Yes, we have all been getting poorer - at least, those of us earning less than the high six figures a year - and we have been having our freedoms peeled off like the layers of an onion, and very important government functions are being run by a bunch of incompetents, and it's nice that these people are finally beginning to wake up and notice. A couple of years late, certainly, but not too late to maybe get something right for a fucking change.
It's also interesting to see just how large the 'Dupe' block was. Seems to be about twenty some-odd percent of the Republican vote; I wonder how many of the suckers are honest Conservatives who held their nose and pulled the lever for the Party, how many of them are middle-of-the-road Americans who happen to be surrounded by loudmouth Zealots and didn't bother to think for themselves, how many are apolitical apathetics who made their choice at the last minute based on the lies coming from their teevee, and how many are just fucking retards.
Well, probably not many retards - that's about the only group left who haven't realized what a clusterfuck this administration is.
The Zealots, of course, are still vigorously defending the Party of Corruption, and those few thousands of actual rich and Corrupt are still bankrolling their media empire. But this worst of all Presidents is down to about the level of support Hitler had when he staged his coup.
Yes, I went there. No, Bush is not Hitler. Bush is more like Robert Mugabe; incompetent and completely amoral. But I'll refer to Hitler when it seems appropriate; see if you can gainsay my statement.
Anyhow, this tirade was set off by the latest little revelation of how far our freedoms have slipped - the FBI is apparently going through the phone calls of major media outlets to find out who they've been speaking to, without actually having to tell anyone (link).
Now, if your first reaction is "well, the FBI needs to do that to find out who has leaked sensitive information," congratulations, you're a Zealot. The fact that the FBI, specifically because of this Administration (and its pet Congress) can now issue itself a National Security Letter whenever it wants and look at the phone records of anyone they want, for any reason they choose, does not bother Zealots, because they have absolute faith in the Party and the Leadership. Party is all that matters to a Zealot. A Zealot's America has no room in it for those who disagree.
It's just so frustrating to me that Osama bin Laden basically won. Oh, he's no mastermind - he didn't know, back when he gave George W. Bush the best present of his entire life, that America would go into an orgy of destroying its own freedoms. But that single act of mass murder has, through the agency of the worst Administration in the nation's history, successfully assaulted the liberties and good qualities that this nation has held onto for over two hundred years. We now have secret police, listening to our phone calls and acting without accountability. We now have camps for prisoners who are offered no recourse to the legal system. We now disparage science and competence and have party hacks running our most important agencies. Where Russia has become a little more democratic, we have become a little more like the USSR.
But let it not be said that I am not glad to have the dupes aboard, or at least off the SS Corruption. The only thing that would make me more happy than having them all vote "the right way" this time would be if they were to wake up, realize the moral bankruptcy of the present Republican party, and actually cease to be dupes at all.
- Sun Ra