A Pause in the Career of a Pundit

[digitaldiscipline]

I'm afraid my continuing silence around the palace will persist; I'm entirely too critical of what I see as a corrupt Executive Branch, and am apparently too left-leaning to do anything but cross swords with the other contributors [basically, if Liz says it, I'm saying or thinking the opposite, like two polarized lenses 90 degrees out of phase; Fran and I, at least half the time, are only about thirty degrees OOP].

It's disappointing and personally nauseating for me to be able to more readily believe the truth of the Tinfoil Hat stuff than the emanations of the White House; President Bush has, for me and many of the folks I converse about such things with, done such a comprehensive job of eroding the public trust in the Administration that no amount of NaCl seems sufficient.

I love my country and hate the administration. I'm one of those "Anybody But Bush" voters these days.

Nic Berg was a friend of a friend, and some link-chasing turned up entirely too many items that seem both more plausible and more monstrous than anything the Pentagon or White House has stated. It feels the same way anywhere I look at the govenment; it's fractally corrupt (examining any issue in detail seems to lead to an endless recursion of obfuscation, omission, or outright duplicity).

I used to trust our government not to be egregiously evil to its own citizens, and justifiably harsh to those who would do us ill. But now. . . all I see are an increasingly aloof and contemptuous cadre within the administration doing whatever the fuck they want, damn the foreigners, and, more troubling still, damn the American public and their rights, thoughts, and opinions.

Maybe I can conjure up a review of "Van Helsing" or something. *sigh*

Comments

[bynner.livejournal.com]

Alas, I am more-or-less inclined to agree. True, Bush is more extreme than most, but you may have noticed that it doesn't much matter who is elected or which ballot initiatives pass and which fail. The country is moving where it is under the direction of an aggregation of economic and political interests that simply lie outside the scope of our culture's nominative political process to control. Some things emerge or submerge in the short term... social items, mostly... abortion rights or whatever.

We have an entrenched aristocracy of career politicians beholden to the special interest groups who fund the media blitzes that the apathetic, uncritical public uses to decide between clone candidates A, B, and C.

Personally, I see this as the inevitable consequence of Democratization/Mediocritazation. The ruling class has no mantle of glory to live up to; we have taken it away in favor of the (blatantly untrue) slogan, "Any kid can grow up to be President." Without a philosophical obligation to the duties of rulership, all that remains is political expediency. Not that autocrats have the best record of governance either, but The Great American Empire is clearly falling after a mere 200 years or so... not a great track record in the annals of civilizations.

um.....

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

how comr 'the palace' link leads to me? i don't get it.

aside from that -yup, yup, yup...you got all the basics covered.

[axissilverhand.livejournal.com]

You messed up the html reference, and in so doing wrote a much more involving piece than you might have realized:

a href="" http://palaceofreason.com"="http://palaceofreason.com""

The URL this represents goes to the root LJ page of the person reading the entry. Neatly done, but probably not what you intended...

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how that happened, but it's corrected.

As Said Elsewhere . . .

[david-deacon.livejournal.com]

. . . I think he's the fucking Antichrist. Junior and His Handlers have forgotten that he didn't technically win the election. You run a country when you barely win a Presidential election in an entirely different way than when you win by a landslide. What pisses me off most is his arrogance, as if he'd won 49 states, plus DC. He lacks humility, and he has three things I don't usually like to see in the same human being: 1) a body temperature IQ, 2) a big chip on his shoulder, and 3) a whole bunch of thermonuclear weapons. God help us all.

[ivy]

Fractally corrupt. I'm stealing that. And yeah, that's pretty much my opinion as well. Picket, picket, screech, vote. Sigh. [hugs]