The name of the beast

Turn up your iPods America. Get out the skateboards, turn on the ball game, tune in to Rush and pop open another Budweiser. Watch American Idol, download some ring tones and text your buds. We're almost there; we're almost stupid enough, angry enough and confused enough for the fascism we've wanted for over 75 years to take effect. Sure, the rich get richer and the smart eventually get smarter, but dumbass America never learns.

Some questions on a new Newsweek poll are frightening. Somehow, the disinformation machine has 41% of Americans believing Saddam Hussein was involved in planning, financing or carrying out the September 11th Attack on New York. Somehow a majority don't know that the attackers came from Saudi Arabia.

That 59% know Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House but 81% can't tell you who the Chief Justice is, indicates to me that whatever news they are getting is from the right wing rabble-rousers hell bent on making Nancy Pelosi the next Jane Fonda. The 20% who think that Saddam's non-existent nukes were found; the 15% who think Osama has been caught or weren't quite sure are less surprising. That no doubt represents the irreducible fraction of irredeemable idiots and is roughly equal to the percentage identifying themselves as Republicans.

So when I read about how Cheney has since his election, felt that he was a special branch of government designed to be above the law and not answerable to the people or their representatives, I'm not surprised. A man who answers "fuck yourself" to a senator who has a right to ask the question of who Cheney actually works for; a man who burns records when he bothers to keep them, who ignores subpoenas and makes money from a war he helped promote with falsified data and the suppression of facts, is just the sort of big league tyrant stupid, hysterical and ignorant populaces turn to. A man who has restructured the Executive branch by fiat and in defiance of the law would once have caused a revolution, but today one hardly hears of support for impeachment or even censure.

Yes, his popularity ratings are abysmal and yet the man who could stop him in his tracks is silent and supportive - and we elected him. I'm afraid that given the chance we'd do it again and I'm worried that we won't even have the chance come 2008.