Bush Plays Masses Like Cheap Fiddle

Bush said at a campaign event in battleground Wisconsin. "And Senator Kerry held a press conference and questioned Mr. Allawi's credibility. You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility."

--http://tinyurl.com/6byl5 Yahoo News link

This from an administration that questions the credibility of anyone in the world who disagrees with it. Having unilaterally and pointlessly tarnished our relations with dozens of former allies, Bush impugns Kerry for questioning Bush's puppet in an unstable war zone. The bad part is not that Bush acts like a tyrant, but that the masses are either happy to be tyrannized or too ignorant to know.

It's time to declare war on ignorance and the ignorant. It's time to end the tolerance and understanding of suicidal intellectual irresponsibility. The freedom we have in this country to believe as we will operates on the presumption of sanity and rationality, and does not give the imprimatur of correctness to any and every thought anyone might hold. To allow you the right to hold a different belief, the right to dissent and to speak against the mainstream of ideas is NOT to allow you to pretend that the moon is made of cheese, or that you are Napoleon, or that astrology has something to it, or that we may yet find WMD in Iraq. We need to call falsehoods falsehoods, and to increase the importance of rational thought in our lives. The current administration is using our national will to be ignorant--and proud of it--to eliminate transparent government, to demonize discussion and dissent, and to poison and throttle mass education and economic security.

Our baseball-cap wearing, reality-TV watching, spitting, scuffing, yo-yo-ing, car-mad masses are only too happy to embrace this chance at nationalistic pride, and to abdicate their intellectual responsibility in favor of smug conceit and cheap foodstuffs. Ladies and Gentlemen, we now have it all: bread and circuses, double plus correct newspeak, and permanent war in the provinces. Big Brother is here, and television and the creature comforts of the high-tech boom have removed the will of the masses even to detect their new bondage, let alone to fight it off. Orwell and Huxley were both right.