Reply #11: Be very afraid

[bogey18]

I have become more and more agitated as the Republican lie machine has shifted into second gear. At the end of the convention, it will be in third heading strongly toward full speed, and there is nothing we can or will do to stop it. They have created the perfect cosmology - if we protest, we are anti American. If the newspapers expose them, it is the liberal media. And if brave intelligent people stand up and call them on their bull shit, they are godless elitists.

Don't look now, but we lost this war and this election about 2 years ago. I am sorry, but the junk I am getting in my e-mail is all Kerry hating drivel, and even if we in DU know the truth about the Swift Boat veterans, their bilge is now accepted as having some kind of truth by the majority of Americans. The majority of people are not getting their insight from Jon Stewart. Karl Rove is an evil genius, and what is the matter with Kansas is the matter with all of America.

We watch the Republicans, we see the stupidity of Bush, the mendacity of Cheney, the vacuousness of Laura, the outright buffoonery of an Arnold - but the majority of Americans do not see it the way we see it. They see non threatening "normal" people who echo what they have been hearing from Fox and all of the rest of the Republican noise machine, and it is soothing to them to hear that crap repeated over and over again. We are fighting the "enemies of freedom" and "evil empires" - we are good good good, and anyone who disagrees with us is bad bad bad, and if the leaders of this country would just ban abortion and declare this a Christian nation and get rid of public displays of homosexuality, much less gay marriage, we would be all right.

I have had to give up eating with my co-workers because whenever the conversation turns to politics they say the dumbest crap - stuff that is so embarassingly wrong that to point it out is almost cruel. These are good people whose grandchildren are going to be manufacturing hamburgers and paying off trillions of dollars of rich men's debts, who have just survived the reduction of our company's national work force from 40,000 to 24,000, who have just been told that medical insurance will no longer be available as part of their retirement anymore, and yet who overwhelmingly support Bush because he is "moral and decisive". They actually say things like Kerry is a flip flopper - they haven't a clue. And I am the ONLY one who has ever actually listened to Bush give a news conference. This guy could eat a rat on prime time TV and still get elected by the time the Republicans have gotten through spitting and barbecuing Kerry.

God, I hope I am wrong, but I am in one of the swing states (Arizona) and this is what I see and hear all around me.