Congratulations, America!
Please note that this isn't directed at DU. I intend it for America at large - just the audience that will never read it, of course.
Congratulations, America! As our nation continues to bleed jobs - 7,600 PER DAY during the month of October 2002 - you've shown yourselves willing to walk into a financial abyss of vanishing jobs, a dwindling middle class and an deficit whose end is nowhere in sight. I hope the $300 bribe extended to you during those golden days of mid-2001 lasts long enough to pay for the cost of health care you won't get from your new jobs as Wal-Mart greeters and Merry Maids housecleaners. Of course, to many of you it doesn't appear to matter, since you seem convinced that that lucky lottery ticket or winning night at the casino is just around the corner. And, since the clue bus just pulled in, here's a bulletin - your lucky number is not coming up, and your ship is never coming in.
Congratulations, America! With national security on everyone's mind, in Georgia's Senate race, you gladly voted in a man who avoided serving in Vietnam over a man who lost three limbs fighting for this country. Why? Because Max Cleland wasn't willing to bust labor unions in exchange for the illusion that an unwieldy Bush-led bureaucracy will protect you from terrorism. Of course, since you were willing to take the word of one draft-dodger for the sake of another, why not? Why not impugn patriots for the sake of demagogues? True, Bush may not have, uh, done the BEST possible job of responding to threat warnings in 2001, but he sure looks tough in an Air Force jacket, slouching over a podium. Why wouldn't you feel more secure?
Congratulations, America! You've removed the last impediment to Permawar. Granted, the Democrats didn't present much of an impediment in Congress when the resolution allowing Bush to levy war for oil, uh, I mean spread American values of democracy and freedom around the world came up for debate. Still, with those last pesky remnants of congressional opposition removed, the sky's the limit! Spin a globe and take a jab - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Ecuador, Burma - there's just no telling where the fight for American values will take us! You see, everything changed on 11 September 2001 - especially the ever-changing hot new options on the shiny SUV's God has ordained us to drive.
Congratulations, America! The War On Drugs has been such a ringing success that you've endorsed an administration that handcuffs handicapped terminal patients to their hospice beds - after all they WERE using marijuana! It's been so overwhelmingly successful that we're now prepared to go into Colombia as a permanent military presence for the sake of suppressing cocaine cultivation. Of course, when the daughter of a sitting Republican governor gets busted for crack cocaine, that's different - it's a cry for help and it calls for therapy, not jail time.
Congratulations, America! You've shown your prediliction for pretty pictures and blow-dried fools, as "appealing" candidates like Mitt Romney, Norm Coleman, Rick Perry and Jim "Ashcroft Lite" Talent parade onto the national stage, courtesy of your shallowness and insipidity. But that doesn't really matter, does it - after all, American Idol is on in a few minutes, and Springer's on after that, and they're much more fun than (yuck) politics!
Congratulations, America! With fisheries collapsing, forests burning, reefs bleaching, climate destabilizing and state-sized chunks of the Antarctic ice shelves falling into the oceans, what better time than to issue a robust confirmation of this nation's faith-based environmental policies? These include torpedoing the Kyoto Protocol, hamstringing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, scuttling improvements in CAFE standards, withdrawing support for womens' health initiatives around the globe, seconding every little move the WTO and World Bank make no matter what the environmental consequences and replacing career scientists with ideological hacks at every level of the federal science apparatus. But not to worry - you can relax with soothing messages from the Global Climate Coalition about how climate change is not only not happening, but is also far too big a problem for us to change our behavior to deal with it.
Congratulations, America - venality, willful blindness, wishful thinking, knee-jerk jingoism, abrogation of international treaties and alliances, and the further degradation of the tottering fragments of political discourse - all of these are now emphatically yours, and you've earned every bit of what you voted for!
EDIT - Sorry for the multiples, but I'm not writing very well. I haven't pulled an all-nighter in quite a while!
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So! Who wants to play "Count the Fallacies?"
What an utter load of garbage and I'm more than delighted that that poster is in such pain. Maybe X42 can "feel" it for him/her/it.