L.A. BRONCOS FAN
03-01-2005, 08:43 PM
We are living in a bizarro democracy. Up is actually down, liberty is taxpayer-funded torture and democratic authority is actually incredibly brazen and unapologetic imperial hubris.
Every day the front page of the newspaper is starting to look like one of those drug-addled scenes from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where innocent-seeming people sitting at a hotel bar are actually giant, malevolent lizards. Unfortunately, we don't have Thompson anymore to show us the lizards for what they are.
"I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it," he wrote last year. "Big darkness, soon come. Take my word for it."
Take, for example, the case of James Guckert -- a friendly reporter at White House press conferences who turned out to be a male escort with a fake name, Jeff Gannon.
The rabid right's long, sordid procession of gamblers, adulterers, drug addicts and falafel fetishists is making the Clinton years look like an after-school special. And yet, the Democrats still lose on moral values. Can anyone even imagine what would have happened if Guckert/Gannon had been shilling for Clinton instead of our current president? The country would have had a complete meltdown.
But wait: it gets much, much worse. President Bush and his entourage spent last week swaggering around Europe, lecturing the continent about the virtues of democracy and cooperation. Friday, Bush extended his lessons in democracy to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Until now, we've pretty much let Putin do whatever he wants because he's our ally in the so-called "War on Terror."
Putin, not one to let the opportunity pass him by, has done a really spectacular job of stomping all over the fragile little shoots of democratic institutions in his country. But because he's doing it under the guise of fighting a disastrous and un-winnable war on terror, the Bush administration feels his pain. We know all about that, after all.
And lest we forget, Bush promised just a month ago in his inaugural speech to take on "every ruler and every nation" that embraces tyranny and repression. As Russian specialist Michael McFaul pointed out recently, Russia is the only country in the world to experience an actual democratic backslide on Bush's watch. If this administration is truly committed to "ending tyranny in our world," upbraiding Putin for his increasingly repressive policies would seem like a logical place to start.
Bush, however, is learning that his own repressive policies have really undermined his Big Brother credibility. He used the closely watched incident in Slovakia to gently chide the Russian president, but even that met with Putin's sharp derision.
"We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS," Putin said, revealing how American power is viewed in Russia and how hollow and meaningless our democratic legitimacy is becoming.
And why shouldn't Putin believe that Bush has the power to hire and fire members of the press? He need only watch Fox News, a White House press conference or one of Bush's carefully orchestrated and screened-for-dissent town hall meetings to see the most finely-tuned and effective presidential propaganda machine in this nation's history. Sure, CBS makes its own rules. But does anyone believe that if Bush personally called up Fox and told them to can one of their pundits, Fox wouldn't do it?
Thompson was right: big darkness is already here. But like the lizards at the bar, we just haven't quite seen the horrible truth for what it is -- and we don't want to.
http://thedaily.washington.edu/opinion.lasso?-database=DailyWebSQL&-table=Articles&-response=opinionpage.lasso&-keyField=__Record_ID__&-keyValue=12193&-search
Every day the front page of the newspaper is starting to look like one of those drug-addled scenes from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where innocent-seeming people sitting at a hotel bar are actually giant, malevolent lizards. Unfortunately, we don't have Thompson anymore to show us the lizards for what they are.
"I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it," he wrote last year. "Big darkness, soon come. Take my word for it."
Take, for example, the case of James Guckert -- a friendly reporter at White House press conferences who turned out to be a male escort with a fake name, Jeff Gannon.
The rabid right's long, sordid procession of gamblers, adulterers, drug addicts and falafel fetishists is making the Clinton years look like an after-school special. And yet, the Democrats still lose on moral values. Can anyone even imagine what would have happened if Guckert/Gannon had been shilling for Clinton instead of our current president? The country would have had a complete meltdown.
But wait: it gets much, much worse. President Bush and his entourage spent last week swaggering around Europe, lecturing the continent about the virtues of democracy and cooperation. Friday, Bush extended his lessons in democracy to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Until now, we've pretty much let Putin do whatever he wants because he's our ally in the so-called "War on Terror."
Putin, not one to let the opportunity pass him by, has done a really spectacular job of stomping all over the fragile little shoots of democratic institutions in his country. But because he's doing it under the guise of fighting a disastrous and un-winnable war on terror, the Bush administration feels his pain. We know all about that, after all.
And lest we forget, Bush promised just a month ago in his inaugural speech to take on "every ruler and every nation" that embraces tyranny and repression. As Russian specialist Michael McFaul pointed out recently, Russia is the only country in the world to experience an actual democratic backslide on Bush's watch. If this administration is truly committed to "ending tyranny in our world," upbraiding Putin for his increasingly repressive policies would seem like a logical place to start.
Bush, however, is learning that his own repressive policies have really undermined his Big Brother credibility. He used the closely watched incident in Slovakia to gently chide the Russian president, but even that met with Putin's sharp derision.
"We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS," Putin said, revealing how American power is viewed in Russia and how hollow and meaningless our democratic legitimacy is becoming.
And why shouldn't Putin believe that Bush has the power to hire and fire members of the press? He need only watch Fox News, a White House press conference or one of Bush's carefully orchestrated and screened-for-dissent town hall meetings to see the most finely-tuned and effective presidential propaganda machine in this nation's history. Sure, CBS makes its own rules. But does anyone believe that if Bush personally called up Fox and told them to can one of their pundits, Fox wouldn't do it?
Thompson was right: big darkness is already here. But like the lizards at the bar, we just haven't quite seen the horrible truth for what it is -- and we don't want to.
http://thedaily.washington.edu/opinion.lasso?-database=DailyWebSQL&-table=Articles&-response=opinionpage.lasso&-keyField=__Record_ID__&-keyValue=12193&-search