the wrong side of history

when historians look back on the bush jr. era, they will undoubtedly see that bush’s arrogance, anti-intellectualism, and messianic delusion that he is somehow the world’s greatest defender of freedom had a lot to do with his public and foreign policy shortcomings. but, while it is easy for any detail-oriented policy wonk to discuss at length how bush is a massive failure in just about every aspect of policy, he does have his defenders. in fact, there are certain intellectuals who formed the intellectual basis for many of his policies, most notably, the neoconservatives who have many of their kind holding prominent posts in his administration. and the main magazine that publishes pure neoconservative intellectually masturbatory nonsense is the weekly standard. when reading the weekly standard, it is often difficult for a rational, well-informed person to avoid feeling like they are going to puke, or wondering whether the people who write the articles actually have brains or are complete dipshits. but when we talk about a neoconservative or a neoliberal, we have to remember: a neoconservative is completely different from a real conservative, and a neoliberal is completely different from a real liberal. neoconservative intellectuals like the people who write articles at the weekly standard are not conservatives, nor are they liberals. they are a different beast entirely, one far more dangerous and far less rational. here i will try to summarize their ridiculous worldview and why they are on the wrong side of history.

the neoconservative movement was originally started by followers of max shactman, who was an american communist thinker and a follower of leon trotsky. other early neoconservatives were irving kristol (the father of weekly standard editor william "bill" kristol), university of chicago economist leo strauss, and james burnham, a founding editor of the national review. max shactman and his followers originally believed in communism and trotsky, but at some point, shactman became disillusioned with communism and trotsky, and he ended up being staunchly anti-communist. they replaced the communist doctrines of worldwide proletarian revolution with their own doctrines of worldwide democratic revolution against dictatorships and communist regimes. they became firm believers that “people everywhere just want to be free”, and that one-size-fits-all western-style multi-party democracy should be the form of government in every country in the entire world, regardless of that country’s specific circumstances, culture, or history.

the neoconservatives, or “neocons” for short, also are strong believers in capitalism, and they oppose socialism, left-wing movements, and communism with equal fervor. they have particular disdain for anyone who sympathizes with or proclaims their support for anyone they consider to be too left-wing. just as important to them as their belief in democracy is their belief in free-market capitalism, and they do not support democracies in which socialist leaders get elected and then nationalize industries. they view any socialist leader who acts in such a way as an undemocratic tyrant, even if such a leader has the support of the vast majority of their country’s people. neoconservatives view everything from the point of view of the united states’s ruling class and its interests, and as such, they have a very skewed view of things, especially things that happen in other countries whose class structure is different from in the united states. they cannot understand why anyone would support a socialist, even though their movement started out with former socialists, because they think that history has proven that capitalism is correct and all other forms of economic organization are fundamentally flawed. moreover, they assume that working-class people in third-world countries ought to understand the supposed benefits of free-market capitalism, and that if they vote for socialists, they are voting against their own best interests and are being coerced by propaganda which, in the neocons’ view, must be untrue.

the neocons believe in a highly interventionist foreign policy for the united states, and they believe in having military spending be as high as possible. they think the united states should be the world’s only superpower, and should keep its military spending many times higher than any other nation, and use its great military might to promote the great causes of capitalism and democracy. they also believe that capitalism and democracy can be forced on other people by the barrel of a gun. and, they are willing to compromise on the democracy front; instead of supporting a “temporary dictatorship of the proletariat”, they support a “temporary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. they are very elitist and do not take in consideration the views of average people; neocons believe that they are smarter than everyone else and that they have a monopoly on the truth. as such, they refuse to believe anything that offends their sensibilities, instead dismissing it as lies and propaganda. they believe that the united states is the greatest force for good in the world, and in their eyes, the united states can do no wrong. they think united states foreign policy is always righteous and good; the only thing they criticize about united states foreign policy is when it is too weak or diplomatic, when we do not flex our muscles and bend others to our will. they think that people such as noam chomsky who criticize u.s. foreign policy are crazy cranks who are completely out of touch with reality, and that anybody who even considers that the united states has less than noble intentions with regard to the rest of the world ought to be confined to the loony bin.

so, the neocons, these aggressive defenders of the united states ruling class, are at best useful idiots for the large corporations, defense contractors, and other elements of the ruling class. the people who really understand what is going on do not have this same black-and-white view of everything being either totally right or totally wrong, and no shades of gray in between. the people in the ruling class who really understand things have a much more nuanced, shades-of-gray view of reality that can account for the true nature of things, and because they are able to perceive reality in a more-or-less reasonable manner, they are much better situated to act effectively and be successful. but neocon intellectuals are not really that smart. they are tribal, us versus them type thinkers, unable to ever see the bigger picture of any given situation. neoconservatives view every conflict as a zero sum game, they never question whether they are right, and their sole purpose is to win at any cost. as such, they are very out of touch with reality and unable to deal with changing circumstances or with the consequences of their own actions. they are like little children, going around making messes, and then blaming it on other people and saying they were right.

so, president bush is surrounded by neocons, and they have brainwashed him into their ridiculous ideology, because it appeals to him. besides their magazine the weekly standard, the neocons also have their own special little think tank, the project for a new american century. they have considerable appeal and influence inside the larger conservative think-tanks, the american enterprise institute and the heritage foundation. but, they are not conservatives. a conservative is someone who values, first and foremost, tradition, who likes stability and the rule of law, who tends to think society is in a state of moral decay and that religion should play a more prominent role in restoring traditional morality. conservatives instinctually oppose all change, except change that makes things more like the way they used to be, back in the “good ole days” that all conservatives look back on so wistfully. conservatives believe in moral absolutes, and they do not think that any society could have its moral absolutes get better over time, since absolutes are set in stone. the only way a society can become more moral, in the conservative view, is if it increasingly embraces tradition and if new ideas that conflict with tradition become less and less common and less and less popular. a neoconservative is not a conservative, not by any means whatsoever. they are incompatible viewpoints, and the neoconservatives have only temporarily allied themselves with the conservatives to support george w. bush. in the past, neoconservatives have sometimes allied themselves with liberals when it was convenient for them to do so.

and what are liberals? a liberal is someone whose primary concern is making the world a better place, and helping out those who need help the most. the liberal thought framework is one of oppression-liberation. liberals identify many groups of people, or sometimes causes such as the environment, that they see as being oppressed, and then they set out to liberate whoever is being oppressed from that oppression. the notion of political correctness was invented by liberals to castigate conservatives that the liberals viewed as being the oppressors of various minority groups. the purpose of political correctness is to ostracize from polite society anyone who makes uninformed remarks insulting an entire category of people, i.e., someone who makes illegitimate overgeneralizations about large groups of people in order to make those groups look bad. there has always been plenty of backlash against political correctness, because sometimes there are certain advocacy groups that accuse innocent people of making uninformed overgeneralizations, when in fact the people accused of this thought crime were simply pointing out an undeniable truth. for a perfect example of this, you can look at the reaction various jewish/pro-israel/zionist advocacy groups had to the paper by john mearsheimer and stephen walt about the pro-israel lobby in the united states. however, in many cases, people actually do say ridiculous, unfounded, hurtful things about large groups of people that are unjustified. for example, many leading conservatives, even today, denounce homosexuality as immoral and an abomination that should be outlawed. it is this type of “hate speech” that is unacceptable to most liberals, but liberals have assisted and helped each of the minority (or in the case of women, majority) groups they see as oppressed in forming their own advocacy groups, and it is these advocacy groups who sometimes try to cross the line in terms of making certain kinds of free speech impermissable. however, since liberal thought can sometimes lead people to have a dogmatic view of viewing one side as the oppressor and the other as the victim (for example, feminists who view men as oppressors and women as victims, or civil rights activists who view white people as oppressors and black people as victims), oftentimes many liberals support advocacy groups for groups of people they are not a member of, even if this is against their own self-interests. this is because the liberal is someone who views the interests of oppressed people as more important than their own interests. liberalism is a very useful and good frame of reference for thinking about things, as long as people do not get too dogmatic about which groups are oppressors and oppressed, or about accusing everyone of hate speech without considering the merits of the arguments other people make.

so, what exactly is “neoliberalism” then? neoliberalism is usually used to refer to something completely different from liberalism. neoliberalism refers to a certain set of economic policies, namely, global free trade without restrictions, and free-market capitalism. now, this does not fit well with modern liberalism and its oppression-liberation ideological framework, but neoliberalism is more rooted in what is known as “classical liberalism”, which is distinct from today’s liberalism. classical liberalism developed in the 1800s among those who wanted to achieve positive change, but it has an entirely different thought-framework. in the classical liberal framework, there is an eternal struggle going on in every country, between tyranny and freedom. the more power the government has, the more tyrannical it is. the less power the government has, the more freedom there is. classical liberals also oppose forms of systematic inequality such as slavery, because they think everyone is entitled to freedom, and nobody should have the authority to deprive others of their freedom without consent. however, classical liberalism is resolutely capitalist in its economic outlook, viewing excessive taxation as a form of tyranny. a classical liberal would uphold the right of any person to act in whatever manner they please as long as they do not do anything illegal; moreover, they would want the government to have as little intrusion into people’s lives as possible, except when intrusion is needed to fight non-governmental tyranny such as slavery. classical liberalism eventually split in the 1930s into franklin delano roosevelt’s modern liberalism and the resolutely capitalist libertarianism. ayn rand was a prominent figure in early libertarianism, establishing a philosophical ideology called “objectivism”, and promoting the autonomy of the individual, opposing all forms of governmental tyranny, and upholding free-market unregulated capitalism as the best economic system. however, the vast majority of liberals have gone in a different direction since then, embracing the idea of a “mixed economy”, where the government plays an activist role in the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, in order to combat the tyranny of the wealthy. neoliberalism, on the other hand, is an outgrowth of classical liberalism, not modern liberalism, and neoliberalism has much more to do with libertarianism than with modern liberalism. neoliberalism is basically just the economic philosophy of libertarians, which is much more popular among the ruling class than the social philosophy of libertarians, which the ruling class views as subversive and dangerous. essentially, neoliberalism is just an economic philosophy, and it does not address any viewpoints except economic ones. and the few viewpoints it does express are: free-market capitalism is good, free trade is good, tariffs and trade barriers are bad, labor unions are bad, and socialism is bad. so, ironically, neoliberalism is more popular today among republican politicians than democratic ones. in fact, the neoliberal ideology is a subset of the neoconservative ideology; neoconservatives believe in all of the neoliberal ideology, but they also have more ideology that they add to it, with regard to foreign policy, militarism, and the best form of government. so, with that in mind, it should not come as much of a shock that neoconservatives have allied with liberals in the past, at times when the liberals were supportive of the same types of foreign policy that neoconservatives advocated. in fact, they were a key part of bill clinton’s constituency, supporting his military adventurism abroad and his free-trade agenda with other nations. but, in the 2000 election, the neoconservatives backed george w. bush overwhelmingly, and since that time, they have tied their fortunes to his. the reasons for them backing bush rather than gore are straightforward: they thought al gore had some dangerous leftist rhetoric sometimes, and wanted to support someone they could reliably count on to support free-market capitalism and the u.s. military.

so, what have the neoconservatives actually done? well, they were the principal architects of the decision to invade iraq, having been arguing in favor of invading that country for years. they are very hawkish about military matters and anything relating to national security. the neoconservatives trust the bush administration, so they are willing to trust giving it virtually unlimited authority, not realizing that future administrations might misuse it. neoconservatives are quite an arrogant bunch, and refuse to admit to being wrong about anything; instead, they nitpick the arguments of others for flaws, rely on straw man arguments and guilt by association, and try to portray themselves as natural allies of the conservative cause. neoconservatives are very strong advocates of a close u.s.-israel alliance; this probably has more to do with the fact that many prominent neoconservatives are jewish than the fact that israel is a capitalist democracy. what this shows, more than anything, is how neoconservatives are a small, elitist group, and they have no broad-based backing by anyone. they do not have grassroots support or appeal, nor do they care about that. they care about working behind the scenes to get power, not as politicians, but as advisers to politicians. their current prominence is largely a function of their institutional backing by the corporate power structure, to which they are useful idiots that are helpful in promoting the ruling class’s interests. but, more and more signs are showing that the neoconservatives have outlived their usefulness to the ruling class, because the ruling class has realized that the neoconservative zeal for endless war is ridiculous and runs counter to their interests of having enough stability to keep making money and not turn the public against them. so, they will probably be thrown out like yesterday’s garbage, done in by their own stubbornness and refusal to acknowledge reality. thus neoconservatives are, more than anyone else, on the wrong side of history, and the current debate over iran shows how their power is dwindling. soon they will be nothing more than a footnote in history, while conservatism and liberalism will continue to flourish.

a+ certified

yup, i just got a+ certified today. passed the test, got a really high score. that was the second test, the operating system test... i already took the hardware test. now i’m officially certified to fix any computer problem! hells yeah! give me your tired, your broken, your malfunctioning circuits. i will restore all ibm-compatible desktop computers to full working order. with laptops it is a bit harder since you can’t just take out whatever part you want and replace it with a different one. with desktops, everything is pretty much standardized and easy once you understand it all. but i noticed at least one error on the test. it asked about how to change the themes in windows xp, and there were 5 different choices, each of them a step-by-step list of things to click on. and guess what? all the choices were wrong, every single one of them. the real answer, the correct answer, wasn’t even listed. i hate trick questions like that. but, i managed to get into the high scores. i hope someone else doesn’t beat my high score to knock me out of the list. that would suck. anyway, maybe i should learn how to fix apple macintosh computers next. i wonder what percentage of computers are macs. probably around 10%, right? but macs are arguably not even real computers, they are all fake. for a computer to be real and actually count, it has to run microsoft windows. that is just a fact. so anyway, i changed my mind and i think i will support hillary clinton after all. i mean what is the point of having in-party fighting between democrats? that is just silly. we need to defeat the republicans first, and then, after republicans have been eliminated, then we can go back to our silly infighting. and as for hillary’s ambitions for president, maybe the reason so many people say she can’t win is because the republicans are afraid of her and are trying to trick democrats into not nominating her because deep down inside they know she would kick ass. and i shouldn’t be mad at her just because she hangs out with people i consider to be unsavory characters like the dlc and rupert murdoch. maybe she needs the help of those evil people to be elected, but that does not actually prove that she is as evil as they are. nor is it a good reason to be mad that i disagree with her on a few issues, since we agree on probably 80 or 90 percent of issues. i mean sure i can find politicians that i agree with more of what they say, but what is the point if they are considered wacky kooky underdogs that could never get elected? supporting them would just undermine the unity of the democratic party, or what little unity may or may not exist, theoretically. well ok, there is no unity. but that is the point... there should be. because that way, it would be a helluva lot easier to beat the republicans, if we stopped fighting amongst ourselves. we can get back to fighting each other later, after we win the elections, but if we keep it up now, we might lose the elections, again, despite all the massive republican failures in governance. so, we would be left with the knowledge that republicans can win elections but can’t govern, and democrats can govern but can’t win elections. there should at least be somebody who can do both. why, my favorite senator, russ feingold, has an approval rating in his home state that is not as enormously high as i would expect it to be. maybe he is not as charismatic as i thought. but at least he knows the difference between right and wrong. it is too bad the other 99 senators have such a slow learning curve on that issue. but at least i am a+ certified. maybe someday we will be able to fix people’s brains, just like how we can fix computers nowadays. that would be a start.

fingers crossed

i had a big job interview today. i have my fingers crossed that i’ll get it. wish me luck. it was at this computer repair shop, the biggest one in town, the only one that can afford to have television commercials. i really need to start making $. i think maybe i might not get hired due to lack of experience, but my educational credentials and technical knowledge are quite good. i do admit that i also have a lack of technical certifications, but on thursday this week, i am taking the second and final part of the a+ certification test, and if all goes as planned, i will be an a+ certified computer technician, albeit one without a job. fixing computers is exactly what i want to do, because there is no way in hell anybody could outsource it, and more and more people in this country have more and more computers, yet less and less of them are able to keep their computers from crashing or getting broken or being overtaken by viruses or spyware. just yesterday, i read something quite depressing in the book i am using to study for the a+ software exam on thursday: apparently, for the last decade or so, hard drive manufacturers have been purposefully manufacturing hard drives in such a way that they will eventually stop working after a few years. you might be thinking, yes of course, isn’t everything made to be broken, but try and be more idealistic and less cynical for a change... why can’t we trust corporations to make products that last a long time? anyway, the companies that make hard disks have been designing them in such a way that they will inevitably stop working after a few years, and the only hard disks that do not have this design flaw are old hard disks that are less than 504 megabytes. any hard disk bigger than 504 megabytes has already been sabotaged by the people at the manufacturer who designed it to stop working. in their defense, the manufacturers did this for a very good reason: they knew how to design hard disks that could store more data but they would never be able to implement this design and have it be compatible with existing operating systems and bioses, unless they put in special computer chips to trick the operating systems and bioses into thinking of stuff the old way, while secretly doing things the new way. so they came up with ide (integrated drive electronics), as well as large and later lba modes of data transfer for these new drives bigger than 504 megabytes. since each manufacturer has its own special way of doing things, the hard drive controller, a little computer chip on the bottom of each hard drive, talks to the rest of the computer in a standardized way, and then it deals with the reality of where the data is really stored on the hard drive and how to access it. so anyway, each manufacturer does this differently, so you need special low-level-formatting utilities that are different for each manufacturer if you want to actually reformat the entire hard disk including the secret parts that microsoft windows and the rom bios don’t know about. but if you reformat the secret parts, although this can fix the problem that makes hard drives stop working after a few years by strengthening the magnetic fields in the secret areas, this can also totally screw things up and completely ruin hard drives. also, while you can do a high-level format as many times as you want and do no damage (you know, the kind of formatting dos, windows, or any other operating system does), a low-level format (the type special utilities from the manufacturer can do) is something you can only do a certain number of times before the drive is toast. so, what we have is sort of a paradox: if you never do a low-level format, the magnetic fields in the secret parts of your hard disk will get weaker over time until your hard drive controller loses track of where everything is. but, if you do a low-level format, you put significant wear and tear on your hard disk, you lose any and all data it holds, and you shorten its lifespan, although this is the only way to fix the problem of the weakening magnetic fields. in other words, hard drives are all doomed to destruction: they are designed to break, no matter what you do or don’t do. they are mortal and their lifespan is short, and this design flaw is 100% intentional on the part of the manufacturers. but i suppose they have to make money somehow... i just hope i will find a way to make money too, and i hope i won’t do it by ripping people off. as far as i know, the business i interviewed at does not go around ripping people off either, and they actually do a good job and don’t overcharge for it, which i know having been a past customer. that must be why they have such a good reputation and so many repeat customers. but there are plenty of other computer repair shops in town too, including at least one that i have gone to that had very unethical and nasty business practices towards its customers (including me and my mom). i am normally the type of person who would never sue anyone in a million years, but that one computer repair shop, i took a computer there a few years ago, and they kept it for a really long time before they bothered to do anything at all with it, and instead of fixing anything, they physically broke some of the electronic components off of the motherboard and the video card, and these components were rattling around loose inside the computer case... and then these clowns charged me for breaking it. silly naive me, i trusted them, and i paid them, and when i came home i was surprised to find those loose parts rattling around inside... and if you look at the better business bureau, this business has tons of complaints filed against them. anyway the place i interviewed at today is the exact opposite of that type of computer repair shop, as far as i know, which is why i would prefer to work at a shop of that caliber. i would hate to have to end up working for a bunch of crooks, but i might have no choice if i don’t get this job. i do still have some unanswered questions about hard drives, like i do not know if scsi hard drives are likewise doomed to failure the way ide hard drives are. probably. but, i suppose even the old under-504 megabyte hard drives are doomed to failure, simply because of the small size of the mechanical components and the ease of things getting out of place. even if people could solve the problem of the magnetic fields weakening, that problem would still remain, and hard drives would still be doomed to failure. but at least now i know the importance of backing up data. and maybe someday someone will invent a permanent way to securely store large amounts of digital data for many years. and maybe that person might be me.

to re-elect or not to re-elect

so, usually i have very little trouble deciding who to vote for. yet, this year i am faced with a real dilemma: whether or not to support hillary clinton’s re-election campaign for u.s. senate. hillary clinton, of course, is up for re-election this november as a senator from new york. and i am rather displeased with her (here are some of the reasons). i am a very loyal democrat, of course, and i would never betray the party, especially not at such a vital time such as this. but, her dlc shenanigans and lovefests with rupert murdoch, her endorsement of flag-burning amendments and her denunciations of grand theft auto, her support for the war in iraq... it is all shameless pandering and trying to reach across party lines and pander to her enemies. but guess what? most people do not like hillary clinton, especially not right-wingers. so why has she been trying so hard to reach out to them? people in new york state like her a lot, of course; she will easily get re-elected here if she is the democratic nominee, which looks likely. however, i simply do not agree with her power-hungry ways and her lack of any real principles. i mean, maybe she really does believe in the policies she supports... but why on earth is she cultivating a relationship with rupert murdoch? that is like selling your soul to the devil, except even worse. at this point, after much thought, i have decided i simply can’t support her in the democratic primary, although of course she would be better than a republican. yet, if her senate victory is by a slimmer margin, that might help the democrats choose a better candidate for president in 2008. so if hillary clinton is the democratic nominee, i hope she wins by a margin of victory of about 1%. as for who i want to win? jonathan tasini. he is the only progressive candidate who is running for senate in the democratic primary. he is awesome! i can feel much better about voting for him, than about voting for ms. clinton, who is probably going to just be a part-time senator, have a lousy voting record, and then ditch the senate entirely after another 2 years. i would definitely vote for hillary if she were willing to promise that she is not running for president in 2008. that would be a good deal. then the dems can get a real candidate like russ feingold, and if we somehow lose in ’08, her senate term ends in 2012, which is another presidential election year. so, for now, i am supporting jonathan tasini, and hoping to see less of hillary clinton. but, come november, i will vote straight party-line democrat, no matter who the candidates are. because if we don’t vote out the republican congress, the lobbyists win. and i am certainly not anti-woman; that has nothing to do with my opposition to hillary clinton. i am quite a fan of nancy pelosi and i look forward to her being speaker of the house of representatives, and maybe someday she could be president. stranger things have happened. of course, nancy pelosi might take some flak for representing san francisco, but who needs the homophobic vote? the democrats aren’t going to get the homophobic vote anyway, and we should stand up for what is right, not for what is wrong. of course racists and homophobes and bigots vote republican, because it is the democrats who always oppose them; we should never compromise our values, because then we would be no better than republicans. and as an ardent supporter of free speech who hates all forms of censorship, i vehemently oppose hillary clinton’s efforts to ban flag burning and the game grand theft auto. people should be free to play whatever video games they want. period. and we should be able to burn any flag we want, whether it is an american flag, a venezuelan flag, a british flag, an iraqi flag, or a united nations flag... everybody should be able to think of at least one place they don’t like, that they might want to burn a flag of. for me, i think i would choose to burn a chinese flag. goddamn chinese! the people’s republic of china really pisses me off. check out the epoch times for a fair and balanced view of that country. taiwan, on the other hand, is ok... i got no problem with them, in fact i think taiwan is a pretty awesome country. well, technically, it isn’t officially a country... but that is because of the goddamn chinese bastards! hey china guess what? stop massacring your own people, you sick fucks! executions should be limited to people who committed murder, and don’t harvest people’s internal organs while they are still alive! weirdos. anyway, what the hell is up with russia? dick cheney criticized them, and then vladimir putin criticized the united states, and now u.s.-russian relations are at the lowest point since ronald reagan signed legislation banning russia forever. you know what, dick cheney? you need to shut the fuck up, that’s what you need to do. russia is a democracy now and we need them as an ally so we can put pressure on iran and help keep them from getting nukes. good job, asshole. and you know russia has, like, more natural resources than anyone? good luck trying to get access to any of those. and what is up with normalizing relations with libya and taking them off the state sponsors of terror list, while we ban arms sales to venezuela and put them on a list of countries that are sort of kinda state sponsors of terror but not really? since when is muammar qaddhafi our friend despite being an evil dictator, and how come the democratically elected president of venezuela, hugo chavez, has to be our enemy? hint hint: hugo chavez has oil but he is a leftist and he won’t respect our authoritah. why not be nice to him for a change? i mean, he is a pretty awesome dude, in case you saw that documentary about him, the revolution will not be televised. if we stopped being so evil, he might be nicer to us. and that starts by electing a congress which is less evil, this november. you know what to do. vote for that party that jack abramoff wasn’t in, the one that actually sometimes tries to help out regular people instead of just the elites who don’t need the help.

a new low

bush’s approval rating is now down to 29%, the first time it has ever hit the 20s. finally some sanity in this country! i have hated president bush all along, even when his approval rating was close to 90% i still thought he was terrible. so, i have a message to all of the republicans and the people who voted for bush in 2004: i told you so! you were wrong and i was right! and now we have found out that the national security agency really is spying on us, and is trying to collect records on every single phone call made in this country, not just ones involving terrorists. and you right-wingers said this was just being used against terrorists and not ordinary americans. wrong again! hmm, i wonder what else you right-wingers were wrong about: lying to get blowjobs is impeachment-worthy for a president, but lying the nation into war isn’t? segregation is good? women should not have the right to vote? slavery is good? white males who are not wealthy land owners should not have the right to vote? nobody should have the right to vote and instead we should have an absolute monarch that we support unconditionally? if you look back at history, right-wingers tend to have always been the people who were wrong about everything. conservative philosophy is based entirely on the idea of preserving “tradition”, even when that tradition is immoral or unjust, even when it is obvious how immoral and unjust it is. you want to know how they justified slavery, how they justified absolute monarchy, how they justified all the immoral traditions of the past? religion. the bible. they said, anyone who wants to get rid of their precious traditions is evil, hates god, is a heathen who should be killed. for almost 2 thousand years christian conservatives have had this same tactic, and conservatives of other religions have been around for even more thousands of years than that. so, i don’t think we can get rid of conservatives (unfortunately), since they have been around since forever, and we are probably doomed to always have some of them lurking around plotting our demise. but, when you read about things like roy moore and the christian reconstructionist/dominionist movement, it really makes you wonder, are we humans really “sentient beings”, or are we just a bunch of dumbasses? they talk about our founding fathers being christians and this being a christian nation, as if any of that is even relevant today. just because the majority of people in this nation believe something doesn’t mean it is correct (unless what they believe in is that bush is a bad president). but in all other cases of beliefs, aside from when they say bush is bad, united states majority public opinion is not really infallible. i mean hell, iraq is a muslim nation, right? india is a hindu nation, isn’t it? and china is a communist nation, right (let’s just pretend for a moment that communism qualifies as a “religion”)? so, how can we pretend that public opinion in those countries does not matter? if public opinion in the united states proves christianity to be correct, than public opinion in foreign countries also proves islam, hinduism, and communism to be correct. so, we should really govern our nation in a christian, islamic, hindu, communist style of governance, by that line of logic... but no... that is not their point at all. their point is, the majority in this country is christian, so they ought to be able to run everything. even though christian reconstructionists/dominionists don’t believe in democracy or freedom, and just want to oppress everybody under a theocracy like the taliban or saudi arabia. yay! it’s good president bush is not quite as radical a christian right-winger as they come. but these christian reconstructionists have just taken conservatism to its logical conclusion, putting the value of “tradition” above all else. but, you know what? i place zero value in “tradition” whatsoever. and zero value in conservatism whatsoever. i sort of see some value in liberalism, which is usually defined as being all about open-mindedness or some type of wonderful high-minded thing about making the world a better place or something like that. but i am not really open minded; i have already made up my mind on most things and nobody can convince me to change it on many of them. so, while i am a liberal democrat, i am of the closed-minded variety; nobody could possibly say anything at all to me that would make me change my mind about being a liberal democrat. i make up my own mind, by observing the world around me, reading the news, seeing what different people say about things. if anyone were to change my mind, it would be me. or, perhaps somebody else would brainwash me, but that would only work if i don’t suspect a thing. but anyway, i think bush is a horrible president, i have thought he was a horrible president ever since the day he took office (which i considered to be a national tragedy at the time), and prior to him taking office, when he was governor of texas, i hated his guts since it was obvious to me the guy was pretty much a psycho. i mean, the shit he said back during the campaign about all the people he had executed in texas, and whether he ever worried any of them were innocent... it was absolutely ridiculous, it made my blood boil. he just had such an arrogant notion that it would be completely impossible for an innocent man to ever get the death penalty, even when it had been proven otherwise, by all the innocent men on death row freed because of dna evidence proving their innocence, all around the country. but this jackass had no clue about any of that shit, even though he was running for president! during the recount stuff in florida in late november of 2000, i saw bush appear on tv, with this arrogant demeanor, as if the presidency was this thing that he was entitled to have, that belonged to him, and as if other people were trying to take from him something which everybody knew belonged to him... ridiculous! only thanks to katherine harris taking minority voters off the voter rolls by putting them on a list that was only supposed to have actual convicted felons on it but ended up being mostly innocent people that were now denied their right to vote. and forget about who won the popular vote in 2000, that was al gore, and bush didn’t care at all about the will of the people, he only cared about his own will! so, i am glad to see that finally everybody else is waking up and starting to understand reality for a change! just don’t change your minds back to supporting bush again... don’t be flip-floppers. changing your mind once is enough. once you see the truth, don’t go off looking in other directions for lies again. bush is spying on all of our telephone conversations; we are all “terrorists” according to him, every man, woman and child in this country who has ever made a telephone call is considered to be a terrorist by the national security agency. so general mike hayden can go fuck himself... who does he think he is, spying on my booty calls? whatever goes on between consenting adults over a telephone... well... let’s not get into that. suffice it to say, i feel violated. the government has had phone sex with me, except i did not approve of it, so it was phone rape. what i am saying is, i was raped by a telephone. well actually this happened in jail, and there was another inmate involved... ok ok i sort of made that part up, but my point is, don’t have sex with a telephone, because they have many sorts of nasty diseases that the phone company doesn’t want you to know about. and if you have to have sex with a telephone, use a condom, and make sure the phone company doesn’t add any unusual charges to the next month’s bill, or it might turn up on your credit report, resulting in higher interest rates you would have to pay if you ever take out any loans. it would also go on your permanent record, which lasts not just through elementary school, middle school, and high school, but on into college, and now your boss at your job is probably adding to it comments like “does not work well with others” and faxing it to the head office. and what does president bush have to do with this? well, he authorized the secret government program to keep a permanent record on every citizen, starting in elementary school, that program that your elementary school-teachers only hinted at threateningly. actually, this program had been in place since the 1800’s, as part of the new world order’s so-called “dewey decimal system” for total information awareness and full spectrum dominance, but president bush re-authorized it when it came up for renewal, so it is sort of his fault. now, the conspiracy might tell you the dewey decimal system is just used to sort books in libraries, but you know better than that. you know it exists to sort thoughts in your mind! and it is working. just remember, bush and kerry were both in the secret order of the illuminati’s local chapter at yale called “skull and crossbones”, and they have sworn to uphold the power of the great lidless eye atop the pyramid on the dollar, the dark lord sauron. the only people who can save us from bush now are the tricksy hobbitses that took the precious, and they are arguably not even people, but some odd sort of fur-footed small primate that can talk. ironically enough, bush is also some odd sort of sub-human chimpanzee monkey, but the liberal media has agreed to keep quiet about it because bush is such a liberal and they love him so.