a dream is a wish your heart makesFour years ago, when I started blogging, John Kerry had just conceded George Bush's "re-election" after a campaign which Kerry never seriously tried to win. Millions of Americans had been illegally disenfranchised by one dirty trick or another. Who knows how many votes had been flipped. Partisan corruption and vicious hacking were rife and visible in Ohio, and Florida, and many other places. Connecting the dots revealed a nation-wide campaign of targeted electoral sabotage. It was Bush's accountability moment, in which he gained a mandate and earned vast political capital. And it was entirely bogus.
when you're fast asleep
Most Democratic-leaning websites moved on, got over it, turned the corner swiftly, and urged their readers to do the same. Only one site was dominated on the day after the election by a debate over who should run for the Democrats in 2008 -- Ronald Reagan Jr. or Hillary Clinton. But they all seemed like shams to me, obvious psy-ops -- and I quit visiting sites such as Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, Democrats dot com, and Alternet, to name just a few. I started hanging, and volunteering, at one of the few blogs which seemed to take the theft or giveaway of the election seriously.
watching the defectivesFor the past two or three weeks I've restrained my impulse to rip into the multitudes of fast-asleep Obama supporters. No matter how many times their man has betrayed their interests, they have never wavered in support of the dream their hearts made. Today they are still celebrating. Personally I have been asking myself questions like:
it's so cute
watching the defectives
they shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot
When Bush ran in 2000, he described himself as a uniter, not a divider, and he promised a humble foreign policy. Look what he's done since then.
As a Senator, Obama has supported Bush's agenda in many ways over the years, and has been steadfast in his refusal to have anything to do with holding Bush or even his minions accountable for their gross crimes against humanity and their obvious, gloating treason against the USA.
As a candidate, Obama has pledged allegiance to Israel, promised to escalate the war crime in Afghanistan, threatened to attack Pakistan, and issued thinly veiled threats of a nuclear attack against Iran if the Iranians keep trying to develop civilian nuclear power. If Obama exceeds his campaign rhetoric by an extent comparable to the precedent set by Bush ... or even if Obama manages to keep his promises ... well ... nobody wants to finish that statement, do they? And yet the world celebrates. [Read more about Obama and his actual policies here; thanks to Grimblebee (who reads Counterpunch so I won't have to).]
As a frequent guest-blogger at a strongly pro-election-integrity site, I saw my role as a provider of context. So while the other bloggers were writing about illegal caging lists and interchangeable memory cards, I was talking about Pakistan and propaganda and torture, China and death squads and the history of American intervention in foreign countries, political assassinations, 9/11, and so on...
In my view, the mechanics of the electoral system could be perfect: every eligible voter could be allowed to vote, and all the votes could be counted and tabulated accurately -- but it wouldn't matter a bit if the voting public didn't know whom to vote for, or against, or why.
As I see it, the only possible "salvation" for our "democracy" would involve at least three things: a reform of the electoral system; a re-construction of the educational system, including an insistence on reality-based news media; and a popular understanding of the nature and uses of state-sponsored, false-flag, and/or bogus terrorism.
And I tried to promote an awareness of these needs, especially the latter one, until eventually my work there was greeted with a fervor midway between disdain and contempt.
One of my fellow guest-bloggers at said electoral-integrity site was an attorney from the state of Washington named Paul Lehto. Paul occasionally writes something and sends his mailing list links to it. And I happen to be on Paul's mailing list. So sometimes I read what he writes.
And sometimes I respond to Paul's writings. And sometimes I have sent him links to writing of my own. I have never had any indication that he has ever clicked on any of my links, or that he gives a dried fig about anything I might think or say, yet I remain on his mailing list.
And today (or perhaps yesterday -- or maybe even tomorrow, depending on where you happen to live) Paul sent me a link to a new post at Democratic Undergound in which he quotes a piece from the French paper, Le Monde.
The French writer, Robert Solé, writes:
Sorry. No column today. The keyboard is not responding. History is a page being turned. Three words on the screen: "Yes we can." While it is impossible to joke with genocide or disaster, it is equally impossible to joke with an event that makes you weep for joy. The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 needs more than a pirouette or an amused wink. At this moment - but for how long? - we can say with far more conviction than on 11 September 2001: we are all Americans.Forget that 9/11 has led America and the world to genocide and disaster. Forget everything that makes this worldwide good news slightly less than pure joy.
The French editorial sums up all the emotion of the day for Paul Lehto, apparently. Lehto writes:
I too might write things. I stop. This strong voice is heard most clearly in silence, though it's also in the roar of crowds and the hugs of Americans. [...]The subsequent comments at DU amplify the points I would have liked to make, but in an unintentional, ironic way.
You'll never know the full extent of the tears of joy in this house, or the celebration around the world, unless and until we let it all in...
But when we do, we know it's a worldwide explosion of joy, hope and tears.
mmonk adds:
And there isn't anything false about hope.tilsammans remarks:
I am teary-eyed with joy again ... knowing that BHO is so well thought of in the world -- and the U.S., by association, is no longer being viewed as an object of disdain and derision.here_is_to_hope writes:
I have gone through three boxes of tissues since Tuesday too, here I am a grown man of 47 and....aw, not again...understandinglife adds:
I've cried, uncontrollable sobbing, three times since my childhood.denese wrote:
Tuesday 4 Nov 2008, ~ 725pm PST, was one of those three times ... and it lasted for quite a long while.
Feeling hopeful is fantastic. I nearly forgot how. I believe.bleever had the best angle:
It's as though Obama's election is a bookend to 9/11.All of this proves what I was saying four years ago better than anything I could have written since. It helps to explain why my services are no longer deemed valuable in certain places, and why they are no longer available there either. It hints at an explanation of why my readership, and the chatter on my comment threads, fell through a hole in the floor shortly after I started writing about Barack Obama -- and applying the same BS-detector to him that I use on all the other political figures I write about.
Again, "We are all Americans", but this time the world joins in our joy.
It's an event momentous enough that we can turn the page on our post-9/11 trauma, including the horror of the Bush/Cheney regime.
And it shows the same willful ignorance I was trying to alleviate, especially about 9/11.
More than anything else, the "terrorist attacks" of September 11, 2001, gave America carte blanche to wage endless war against defenseless people anywhere in the world, anytime at all, for reasons false or true -- exactly as they were intended to do!
Take it from a French writer who fell for both that dirty tick and the obvious lies of the Obama campaign; from DU posters who still weep with joy; from a seer of bookends who thinks Obama's election will provide a magical escape from the post-9/11 trauma ... the world is once again uniting behind a fork-tongued snake, but this time it's a rich white nigger who claims racism is not endemic in America, mostly because his brand of lying politics demands it, but also because his gilt-edged career path just happened to bypass it.
I won't link to any of the blogs where my former readers are dancing with joy. But I do congratulate them on their success. They now own a multitude of ongoing crimes against humanity, not one of which their champion wishes to end (although Obama says he wants to move the Iraq war crime to Afghanistan). They can now sing and dance and cry their tears of joy, on the highway to hell.
Will the election of Barack Obama prove to be another 9/11-like event? Will it unite the world behind the United States just long enough for the US to launch another endless series of attacks against another tiny defenseless country?
One wouldn't even want to suggest such a thing -- especially around the defectives!
The world weeps with joy as it unites behind a willing and eager war criminal.
It's so cute.
To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.