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October 20, 2005
– During an
appearance some weeks back on WRKO radio host
Jay
Diamond's Saturday evening
show, I started out with a challenge to the listening audience.
WRKO Boston - except for Jay's show - carries nothing but Bush/Limbaughian
propagandists. And so the listeners tend to be of that ilk.
Never have I felt so fortunate because,
as luck would have it, I really needed help with something no one
other than a Bush/Limbaugh bimbo could help with.
As the editor-in-chief of The Moderate
Independent, we give everybody of every party and persuasion a fair
shake. And so, I decided that having pointed out so many
things George W. Bush and the GOP had been provably wrong about, I
set out to write an article about the things they had been right
about.
Problem was, I couldn't come up with a
single thing.
I started with the economy. Went
into education, the environment. I tore apart all decisions
and statements regarding foreign policy.
Not one thing.
And honestly, the list was long.
On foreign policy alone, we looked at how Bush and the GOP were sure
we could ignore the Israeli/Palestinian situation, how we didn't
have to talk with North Korea, how there were WMD's in Iraq, how we
had a coalition of some sort - some 50 or so nations supposedly, how
electing Bush would lower oil prices from the $25-a-barell highs
they had risen to, how Iraq would take weeks.
Then there was the claim that tax cuts
that wouldn't cause deficits, the claim that we had to let people
die from lung cancer because energy companies would go broke if they
had to upgrade, that No Child Left Behind testing would fix schools,
that Social Security would be broke in a week or so, that his plan
for Medicare would actually fix something, that the Iraq War would
pay for itself with the oil over there, that, that, that...
It's pretty hard to miss what the GOP
has been wrong about since it got behind George W. Bush. The
tough thing - and the more I tried, the more it seemed the
impossible thing - was to come up with anything - a single thing -
that these Bush/Limbaughians had been right about.
And so we asked the people who would
know, the Bush/Limbaughians. But the damndest thing happened.
Yes, even ardent Bush supporters - over
the course of 3 hours - could not come up with a single thing George
W. Bush or the GOP had been right about this millennium. One
caller even accused me of asking a trick question.
A trick question?! I simply asked
- and gave as much time as the caller wished for a response - for
the person to state a single thing Bush or the GOP has been right
about.
Not one person could name a single
thing.
We ran an article in our inaugural issue
back in April 2003 titled,
Carter Ecstatic, Finally Freed Of "Worst President Ever" Label.
We knew Bush was bad - in fact, we knew he was the worst, purely
incompetent, and wrong and wrong and wrong.
But we didn't actually think there
wouldn't be a single thing he would be right about. I mean,
even a monkey can pick a horse on occasion.
The record of wrongness is so profound
it is quite impressive. It goes beyond policy. Every
person the President trusted to either not break the law or to be
able to get away with it is finding out he was wrong about that as
well. All his top people are going down. Can he be far
behind? Of course he can't, because he is absolutely wrong
about absolutely everything.
Now, I gladly open the same challenge to
all of our readers. And I welcome you to post this question on
right-wing boards all over the blogosphere and call in to right-wing
talk shows and ask your right-wing friends. Because, honestly,
I'd like to be able to write about at least a single thing this
administration - or the GOP at all - have been right about since
this Bush-led millennium began.
Having said that, there is something
even more astounding that is entirely unspoken up to this point.
Bush's inaccuracy and ineptitude have been fairly well chronicled.
But someone has to say it - because God
knows the non-Moderate Independent media won't. While George
W. Bush and the GOP have been provably wrong on every issue, the
Democrats have been - yes, it is real - provably right on many
issues.
They said the tax cuts would cause
deficits, They were right. They said electing Bush
wouldn't fix oil prices. They were right. They said Iraq
wouldn't take weeks, would be a quagmire. They were right.
That said No Child Left Behind wouldn't fix schools. They were
right. They said we should talk to North Korea, be involved in
Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, focus on Osama. Right,
right, right.
It's astounding, though. If you
listen to "Progressive" talk or read progressive news and opinion
sources, all you get is Bush, Bush, Bush. They gloat and gloat
about how wrong Bush and the GOP are being shown. They point
it out again and again. But they don't ever get around to
pointing out how they have been so right. How nice would Al
Gore's often-mocked "lock box" of cash be right about now? The
knowledge that we are doing something about Global Warming?
Not having deficits?
But an even more astounding fact has not
been given its due: can anyone name a single thing we at The
Moderate Independent have been wrong about? Questionable
election results aside. We could still run the same articles
about the economy, foreign policy, domestic policy, that we ran in
our very first issues and nothing has changed except the rest of the
nation's perspective to fall in line with ours.
When we were writing that the entire
media was nothing but Bush/Limbaughian puppet, even the left and
Democrats were telling us we were crazy, When we ran my
opening editorial almost three years ago -
The Idea of a “Moderate Independent” News Source -
you should have seen the e-mails we
received from both sides of the aisle. Sure, Limbaugh was a
right-wing liar, but the entire media - even the "mainstream" media
- was nothing but Bush-promoting puppet? Even the newspapers?
The "liberal" media?
It was over two years ago that we first
ran the article titled,
Point: Is There Anything We Weren't Right About?.
Notice how in this article we point out how we were the outsiders,
the minority that was being attacked by most Americans. How
far from there has the nation come - come to where we have been all
along.
I mean, crap, we were even right about
the Atkins Diet being nonsense when, at the height of the craze, we
ran
You Sickened Yourself By Following The 'Low-Fat' Craze, Will You
Really All Now Poison Yourselves With This 'Low-Carb' Nonsense?
We predicted the abuse in Iraq before it happened in this article:
Exactly As We Told You: We Said If Negroponte Was Being Appointed To
Iraq, There Must Be Human Rights Abuses They Want Covered Up.
We stood alone on the economy, pointing
out that the "recovery" both sides was talking about was nonsense.
And even today,
CBS points out - entirely ignored by the nation in general,
which still doesn't get that what we have been saying all along
about the economy is no joke - that yet another record has been set
this year for the number of personal bankruptcies filed.
I mean, remember when the Bushies were
trying to blame Clinton for the economy going south? M/I had
to actually take a stand, if you can imagine, to ask the question,
Could Bush Really Be To Blame For Ruining The Economy?
And then both parties were talking about a recovery - even the
Democratic Presidential wannabes, when we were running this article
two years ago saying there was no such thing -
This Quarter's Economic Disaster Touted As "Record Growth".
The reality is, all of this has been
over a decade in the making. America has been digging its own
grave ever since the early nineties. The obesity epidemic -
which still no one wants to admit is an all out epidemic disaster -
the absolute bankrupting of the people of our nation, the
destruction of the basic fundamentals that led America to be what it
has been. America is still watching TV, shopping at
Blockbuster and Taco Bell, playing with IPODs. America is
still getting more and more obese - latest numbers, 90% of Americans
go on to be very overweight - bankruptcies are still increasing -
and this is even before the new, tougher bankruptcy legislation
makes things even worse - we have been reduced to third-world-level
functionality in response to emergencies, we continue toward being
the least educated of the developed world - with pride.
And still no one really, really gets
that there is a problem, never mind what it really is. No one,
except us here at The Moderate Independent.
My 10th grade history teacher said
history doesn't repeat itself; if we don't study history, and learn
from its mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them.
Look at this quote about the fall of
Rome from a book titled, Medieval People, written back in
1924 by a woman named Eileen Power:
"No observer should have failed to
notice that the Roman Empire... was no longer the Roman Empire of
the great... that it had lost its hold over its territories and its
economic cohesion and was menaced by the barbarians who were in the
end to overwhelm it... to its very last days the Empire endeavored
to defend its frontiers against converging barbarians. Not
only did the Barbarian Conquests... threaten destruction and ruin,
but the way of life the barbarians stood for was the very denial of
what Roman civilization had been, though alas, was ceasing to be.
"Above all Roman civilization was a
civilization of the mind. It had a long tradition of thought
and intellectual achievement... The Roman world was a world of
schools and universities, writers, builders. The barbarian
world was a world in which the mind was in its infancy and its
infancy was long...
Power gets to the question of why it is
that, in the end, such an incredible civilization completely was
wiped out while barbarism claimed the victory. She says that,
in essence, the barbarians scored their victory from within.
There was a "peaceful infiltration of barbarians" that she says
never could have happened if a "disease" had not befallen Rome.
But by disease, she doesn't mean a
plague or flu or any such physical ailment.
"(The disease) shows itself in the great
inflationary crisis... in the taxation which gradually crushed out
the smaller bourgeoisie while the fortunes of the rich escaped its
net... it shows itself in the decline of farming and in the workless
city population kept quiet by their dole of bread and circuses,
whose life contrasted so dramatically, so terribly with that of the
haughty senatorial families and the great landowners in their
palatial villas and town houses... One religion in particular grew
mighty... but although it was able to bring comfort to individuals
it could do nothing... to give new strength... to the embattled
civilization."
This is just the introductory chapter to
this book by the way.
In the conclusion to the chapter, she
sums up:
"...one is, I think, impelled to ask
oneself the question why they were apparently so blind to what was
happening. The big country houses go on having their luncheon
and tennis parties, the little professors in the universities go on
giving their lectures and writing their books; games are
increasingly popular and the theatres are always full... They
suffered from the fatal myopia of contemporaries. It was the
affairs of the moment that occupied them... they did not recognize
that each compromise... was a link chain dragging them over the
abyss... people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome
(the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with
a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they
breathed... The things they learned... bred in them the fatal
illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was
the same, whereas everything was different."
You might just want to read this book -
as well as perhaps other history books - at some point, maybe
instead of watching TV one night. Maybe even two nights.
So you can go back to the rest of the
media, left-wing or right-wing or whatever they claim to be, and get
caught up in Harriet Miers or Hurricane Katrina or Tom Delay or
whatever nonsense of the day. Meanwhile, every purchase you
make and every time you turn on your TV you are putting another nail
in your society's coffin.
America has not begun to get it yet.
It doesn't get that America is suffering from a fatal disease, a
national epidemic that has been spreading for more than a decade
now, regardless of what party has been in power.
You can keep enjoying your circuses, or
sitcoms, or IPODs, or whatever it is you are busy doing. But
just maybe you might want to get off of your butt - before you are
physically incapable of doing so - and begin to take actual action
to combat the lethal bug that is in control of America at the
moment.
And you might want to spread the word
about The Moderate Independent, America's True Voice.
We at M/I have been right about many
things. You might just want to consider that we might be right
when we tell you about
THE REAL PROBLEM IN AMERICA - THE BIGGEST DRUG
ADDICTION KNOWN TO MAN.
And you might want to start taking
the situation seriously, and getting the word out to your fellow
citizens.
And just in case you take comfort in the
fact that it took some centuries for Rome to go from height to
collapse, Powers points out, "...the whole tempo of life was slow
(in Rome) and what might take decades in our own time took centuries
then."
Or, put another way, what took centuries
then... In fact, an American decline might move more on the
speed of a more contemporary example, like the former Soviet Union.
Oh yeah, we made that comparison years
ago: Republicans Launch Campaign To Change Nation's Name To USSR (Union
of Sarcastic, Soviet-Like Republicans).
Hmm... maybe we're wrong. I don't
know if I'd play the odds against The Moderate Independent though.
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