Fear, superstition, disinformation fool 30 percent of the people
Tom Maertens
from The Mankato (MN) Free Press
Opinion polls consistently show that 70 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Seven years of George W. Bush have given us permanent war and orchestrated fear-mongering, suspension of habeas corpus, domestic military spying, uncontrolled spending, huge deficits, handouts to Big Oil, torture, obsessive secrecy, and rejection of science.
So who still supports the Bush administration?
According to George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, millions of Americans are in the grip of a religious hysteria and want war in the Middle East in hopes of hastening “The Rapture.” Although their views are “bonkers,” says Monbiot, the Rapture Ready constitute one third of the GOP base, and some of the party’s leaders.
The real Republican core, however, is the white male yahoo still angry about LBJ’s civil rights legislation, the target of their “Southern Strategy” as described in the book by Alexander P. Lamis “Southern Politics in the 1990s.” As Lee Atwater, Karl Rove’s mentor, infamously described it, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N----r, n----r, n----r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n----r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and … cutting taxes, [so] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
As for the remaining Bush supporters, their only concerns are nationalizing women’s bodies and/or passing their debts on to future generations. Oh, and empowering the bedroom police.
What Bush and the GOP have demonstrated is that fear, superstition and disinformation, amplified by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others, are enough to fool 30 percent of the people 100 percent of the time.
Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
from The Mankato (MN) Free Press
Opinion polls consistently show that 70 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Seven years of George W. Bush have given us permanent war and orchestrated fear-mongering, suspension of habeas corpus, domestic military spying, uncontrolled spending, huge deficits, handouts to Big Oil, torture, obsessive secrecy, and rejection of science.
So who still supports the Bush administration?
According to George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, millions of Americans are in the grip of a religious hysteria and want war in the Middle East in hopes of hastening “The Rapture.” Although their views are “bonkers,” says Monbiot, the Rapture Ready constitute one third of the GOP base, and some of the party’s leaders.
The real Republican core, however, is the white male yahoo still angry about LBJ’s civil rights legislation, the target of their “Southern Strategy” as described in the book by Alexander P. Lamis “Southern Politics in the 1990s.” As Lee Atwater, Karl Rove’s mentor, infamously described it, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N----r, n----r, n----r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n----r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and … cutting taxes, [so] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
As for the remaining Bush supporters, their only concerns are nationalizing women’s bodies and/or passing their debts on to future generations. Oh, and empowering the bedroom police.
What Bush and the GOP have demonstrated is that fear, superstition and disinformation, amplified by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others, are enough to fool 30 percent of the people 100 percent of the time.
Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
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