The week away from the election is going ok. I’ve only read (feel sorry for my) arts criticism at Salon. I haven’t looked at dKos in two days, and I snooze-barred my way through Morning Edition. I doubt I’m missing much, although one friend who is supposed to come up to Milwaukee with me to get out the vote on election day said something about how polls are showing that Illinois might be going to the GOP, so he’s now inclined to stay in IL. Of course, if IL goes to the GOP, then there is no chance whatsoever for Kerry to win. But I digress… I am still, of course, reading a bunch with all this new free time, and I wanted to share a few quotes about the administration from a print article I read last night, below the fold.
By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers, and fascists to run the Government, [the president] was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both… but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long.
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[The administration] has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with “the Government” was either paranoid or subversive.
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[T]he most disturbing revelation that emerged from [the] hearings was not so much the arrogance and criminality of [the president's] henchmen, but the aggressively totalitarian character of the whole Administration. It is ugly to know just how close we came to meeting Orwell’s deadline.
The source? If you haven’t guessed, it’s Hunter S. Thompson’s, “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker,” the opening article of The Great Shark Hunt, written on New Year’s Day, 1974. I don’t know, yet, what it means that all of the above quotes could be so easily attributed to the second Bush administration. Either dissenters have been crying wolf for over 30 years, or there was a creepy symmetry provided by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s prime-time admission of being won over to the GOP by Nixon back when he first came to the US. Still, that Thompson can echo complaints we have now both in 1992 and 1974 must show something about how things simply are not getting fixed around here. I don’t know.
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