Experience #1: BEAT BUSH REDUX!

Four years ago, during the run-up to the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, I posted a daily blog called Beat Bush. There were nearly two hundred messages delivered for more than six months that contained a simple, single sentence or short paragraph that pointed out the corruption and ineptitude of the Bush administration. Occasionally I made the greater argument against government abuses and the danger of apathetic citizens in a democracy. I exposed the politics of class warfare. Many times I addressed the complicity of mass media as promoters of government ideas rather than as reporters of wrong-doing with an obligation to truthfully inform the public of misdeeds done in our name.
Following are five excerpts taken from the first month's collection and sadly nothing has changed in America.

#1 - Goebbels quote "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

#9 - Democratic Dissent "To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them." Michael Parenti

#14 - Patriotic Goodness "The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions. A culture of militarism has saturated the public sphere, including academia, endowing all U.S. interventions abroad with a patina of patriotic goodness and democratic sensibilities beyond genuine interrogation. Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."

Carl Boggs

#18 - Support Our Troops (?) "The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about." Noam Chomsky

#30 - One Liberty at a Time In the name of fighting terrorism, President Bush and his administration have abruptly overridden rights protected by the Constitution and international law. Ideas foreign to American principles—detention without trial, denial of access to lawyers, years of interrogation in isolation—are now American practices. The danger of what is happening is more profound than the denial of justice to some individuals. The Bush administration is really attacking a basic premise of the American system: that we have a government under law. It was a novel idea when James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the rest laid it down at the end of the 18th century, and ever since it has been a distinctive feature of our polity: Political leaders are subject to the law, responsible to legal constraints on their power as well as to the vote of the people. "A government of laws, and not of men," John Adams first said. From the cages at Gunatanamo to a jail cell in Brooklyn, the administration isn't just threatening the rights of a few detainees—it's undermining the very foundation of democracy.

Anthony Lewis