Crazy Curt and PA's 7th
Because my family originally settled in this country in Pennsylvania in the 1600's, I have a natural affinity for the state. I wasn't born there, nor have I ever lived there, but I've visited many times, and the amount of rural space in the state tends to warm the cockles of this old shitkicker's heart. Hell, one of my favorite
bands is from York, PA. It's the quintesential American state; a thing of enormous beauty. And if you've never visited Gettysburg and the national park there, then you'll have to answer this question: Why do you hate America?
That said, the modern elected Republican politicians from PA. are fucking nuts. Rubber room, certifiable, man-humps-dog, crazy people. The 7th Congressional district is represented by Curt Weldon, whom I've
written about before. Thankfully, just in time for the electoral mid-term shenanigans for '06, The American Prospect has published this
little ditty from Laura Rosen:
Probably Weldon’s most notorious venture into the dark side is something known to insiders as “Able Danger,” an obscure and now defunct Pentagon data-mining program. Weldon claims the program identified the chief September 11 hijacker months before the attacks. The villains in his theory are civil-liberties-minded Pentagon lawyers who supposedly blocked analysts from sharing their findings with the FBI. He has even alleged that the 9-11 Commission conspired in a cover-up of the Able Danger findings. (Both the Pentagon and the 9-11 Commission vigorously dispute his accusations.) [Update: The Pentagon, in a report released today, told Curt he was full of shit.]
Iran is another area in which Weldon has consistently pushed a black-helicopter narrative. He published a tabloidish book on Iran, titled Countdown to Terror, and went on Meet the Press to denounce the CIA for failing to hire his secret Iranian intelligence source. The source turned out to be a business associate of a discredited former Iran-Contra arms dealer and intelligence peddler Manucher Ghorbanifar, who has been deemed a fabricator by the CIA and was looking to get on the U.S. payroll once again.
In his latest headline-grabbing tirade, Weldon has insisted that the Bush administration actually suppressed evidence of weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq. At one point he even planned to fly to Iraq secretly and commandeer Army equipment to go dig the hidden arsenal up himself, according to Dave Gaubatz, who had planned to accompany him. (The trip was called off when Gaubatz backed out, alarmed that Weldon was trying to politicize the project.)
Curt wanted to dig up some 500 '80's-era mustard gas shells burried in the desert, keep the military in the dark about his little find, and then invite the media out so he could proclaim, "we've found the weapons of mass destruction!".
Here's a few choice quotes from Republican staffers (keep in mind, they're GOP toady suck-ups):
- “Weldon is erratic,”
- “The intelligence community does not take him seriously,”
- “Anything connected to him has the same treatment. The opinion of Weldon is that he is on a crusade.”
Laura provides a nice roundup. Go check it out.
Don't let the hypnotic hand motions fool you, the crazy shit's between his ears.
Okay, This Isn't Good
Or, more accurately, it's a
really bad sign:
The Pentagon has created a new desk to work on Iran policy. That worries some at the CIA, who point out that many of the new Iran-desk staffers are the same people who staffed the now-notorious Office of Special Plans in the run-up to the Iraq war.
They mislead America into a useless war once. Why wouldn't it work again?
If you'd like to learn more, go
here and check out Laura Rosen's amazing reporting. She's truly one of the best.
How Low Can We Go?
In an e-mail to a friend the other day, I wrote: "I never thought I would see, in my lifetime, an American president pushing Congress to enact a law that would explicitly allow the torture of detainees in U.S. custody." It's a testiment to just how far we've fallen as a nation.
One way I haven't seen this framed in the media would go something like this: "Bush Defies Military on Torture Policies." That's exactly what's going on here, but no one will come right out and say it. Opposing Bush in Congress
there's a former Air Force JAG lawyer, a former Secretary of the Navy and WWII vet, and a former Vietnam POW and torture victim. Outside of the government, two former Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Powell and Vessey, have come out against Bush's proposal. The military's top uniformed lawyers
have questioned the legality of the administration's bill. Even The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
oppose Bush and Cheney. In a very poigniant statement, one of their leaders wrote, "Mr. President, If You Had Fought, You Would Understand."
Bush and Cheney have used up America's military in Iraq, downgraded its readiness, and appear to view it only as a tool for their foreign imperial ambitions.
Here, Eric Alterman breaks down a detailed study conducted by the New Republic:
There are a lot of reasons why pro-military types and their families vote Republican and while they exist for understandable historical reasons as a reaction to particular historical and cultural phenomena, fewer and fewer of them can be considered rational in light of contemporary developments. The long and the short of it, as Lawrence Korb, Max Bergmann & Peter Ogden demonstrate in this week’s TNR, is that Bush has declared a de facto war on the U.S. Army. Consider:- Fully two-thirds of the active U.S. Army is officially classified as "not ready for combat."
- The National Guard is "in an even more dire situation than the active Army but both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever."
- The Army has almost no nondeployed combat-ready brigades at its disposal.
- The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions.
- The total Army--active and reserve--now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall.
- After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June.
- The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.
- Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.
- Thousands of white supremacists may have been able to infiltrate the military due to pressure from recruitment shortfalls.
Only people that would choose to avoid combat would know what kind of gall it would take to lead our nation into the myriad of foreign policy and military failures that we have endured in the past five years. For them to admit that a few mistakes were made along the way is to excuse the fact that they were wrong from the outset about everything. Completely and utterly wrong. I'd challenge anyone who would assert they were right about anything.
Anything.
We need to hear from some other voices.
Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios):
Since 9/11 our rulers have elevated American Exceptionalism to absurd heights, arguing anything we (meaning, actually, George Bush) does is by definition Right and True and Correct. Torture is fine when we do it, bad when others do it. They see no advantage in trying to achieve the moral high ground because whatever we do is moral.
American might in the world always depended in large part on its moral authority. No one thought the country was perfect or that it ever came close to living up to its ideals, but the ideals were still there.
Aside from disgusting me, losing that perception of moral authority makes everything we do more costly and more dangerous.
From PA., the respected
Billmon:
[As] Marty Lederman asks over at Balkinization, if Article 3 is so "vague," and our organs of state security never use torture (as President Cheney and his underlings tell us repeatedly) then why are the administration's mouthpieces fighting so hard to get Congress to bar the courts from reviewing methods such as hypothermia, near drowning, standing in place with hands shackled over head for 40 hours or more, etc.? And why are the Rovian clone clowns on Capitol Hill trying to amend the War Crimes Act? And why are CIA operatives suddenly taking out torture insurance (including the "accidental" death or dismemberment rider)?
The answers are pretty obvious: They're all exposed. Their great big flabby asses are hanging out in the legal breeze, and they know it. They actually are scared it could come to this.
[...]
We're not there yet, but that is the direction we're heading, and a unilateral decision to redefine the Geneva Conventions (without actually admitting that we're doing it) would take us another few hundred miles down the road.
What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.
To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it. Even Shrub seems to understand this somewhere in the dimly lit attic that is his mind -- thus his recent remark that an America that doesn't advance the cause of freedom is an America that has lost its soul. It's easy to paint this as delusional, or an updated version of the old Orwellian slogan that slavery = freedom, but Shrub at least seems to understands that America will have to convince the world it stands for more than just power, privilege and profit if it's going to attract the support of the 80% of the human race that lacks all three. How, exactly, would ditching the Geneva Conventions further this goal?
Then again, maybe it's best if the myth gets permanently busted. Maybe America should take public responsibility for torturing prisoners -- instead of just pawning the job off to the Jordanian or Egyptian or Saudi intelligence services, who could and would hook car batteries to testicles with gusto while we piously pronounced our hands (and hearts) clean. A U.S. torture statute would at least bring a certain degree of clarity to the "vague" and "open to interpretation" policies that have long allowed the United States to enjoy the fruits of torture (and other crimes) without actually committing them ourselves. I know that's not exactly the kind of clarity Shrub was asking for today, but it would still be a refreshing oubreak of honesty.
That said, though, nobody should have any illusions about what that kind of "clarity" would reveal and which side of the moral line the United States would be seen to be standing on.
We give the
final word to DK, guest posting at Talking Points Memo:
The torture debate in Congress--I never expected to write such words--is as surreal to me as watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. If the Democrats are able to take control of at least one chamber in November, then surely the President's pro-torture bill will be viewed in hindsight as the nadir of the Bush presidency. If not, how much lower can things go?
I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation. Of course passage of a pro-torture bill will diminish U.S. standing internationally and jeopardize the safety and well-being of U.S. servicemen in future engagements. But merely having this debate has already accomplished that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Congress rebuffs the President in every respect that the rule of law and the inviolability of human rights will have been vindicated? Of course not.
The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist.
[...]
Only the weak, scared, and evil torture. Those who order and sanction torture, but leave the dirty work to others, are an order of magnitude more culpable morally. (A special place is reserved for the lawyers who give legal cover for such orders.) In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line. So which is it? They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.
The "Other" Iraq?
Oh yes indeed:
Kurdistan - The Other IraqWhile the Sunni-controlled province of Anbar burns, and Bahgdad is being ripped apart by civil war, it sure looks a lot sunnier up there in the Kurdish north. After looking at that website, you might even guess it was a completely seperate country! By the way, that's exactly what the Kurds want, and it seems they're well on their way.
After the Gulf War, nestled under the northern no-fly zone, they were left pretty much to their own devices, and they formed a government, an army, and many of the other institutions a people would need to function autonomously.
I've read a bit about how things were going much better in Kurdistan than they were in the south, but I never dreamed I could find that out by
watching a commercial!
In all seriousness, now that Iraq has been effectively
broken into three parts, I hope the Kurds make their piece a great nation.
Cheney's Woodshed
That's the place where Republican Senators go when they disagree with the Vice President. That goes for virtually
everything. That's where, lest we forget, that Arlen Spector was taken, and
summarily beaten, before he was allowed to take the high Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was told, tow the line, or have the chairmanship yanked and we'll hand to someone who will. As Glenn Greenwald helpfully
points out, Old Arlen is standing at full attention and telling us Cheney can ignore the 1978 FISA law altogether, and spy on anyone he wants. So much for Arlen's "legacy", but Glenn's post highlights the fact that it necessary to have a good lawyer around (Um, that would be Glenn, not Arlen).
There are many other examples as well, such as Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, and his sham
Phase I investigation,
and his
stalling of Phase II on the dissembling and lies the administration told to lead us to war in Iraq. Pat knows his place very well.
Now, as Bush makes his electoral push to shred some more of the tenants of American democracy, namely HabeusaCorpus and Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, there are three Republican Senators standing in his way: John McCain (R-AZ), John Warner (R-VA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Cheney is saying, basically, that evidence obtained under extreme duress (read: torture) , can be used against accused terrorists, and that the "defendants" cannot see the evidence against them if it's classified.
As the New York Times has reported, Senator Graham appears
unwilling to play ball:
“It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. “ ‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.”
From the same piece, the Marines don't seem to back the bill either:
Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.”
As this bill percolates up through committee, and to the full Senate before the recess, it'll be interesting to see whether these three "moderate" Senators hold their ground, or become just another trio of folders that we can toss away into the heap known as the
The Fraud Caucus.
One thing you can be sure of is that when you're summoned to the Woodshed, it's not Old Hickory you'll be struck with; Cheney prefers a lead pipe.
More Intolerable Ignorance
From a recent
CNN poll:
"Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks, or not?" Half sample, MoE ± 4.5
Yes - 43%
No - 52%
Unsure - 6%
8/30 - 9/2/06
This completely unacceptable. Every newspaper, newscast, and legitimate news website in the country needs to blare the fact that Iraq nothing to do with 9/11. And, apparently this needs to re-run every single day until we get the number of people who do believe this falsehood down into the safety zone of only 10%, the makeup of which would consist of only complete whackjobs. This American boobheaded ignorance is really driving me nuts of late, and I'm starting to think it's not just ignorance but stupidity on a massive scale. Perhaps Billmon
said it best today:
"How much longer can this corrupt, idiotic excuse for a republic keep stumbling along on sheer inertia?"
Good question. If these types of things don't straightened out soon, my guess would be not much longer. In addition, if this continues, I'll be convinced that most Americans are Functional Political Retards.
"Path to 9/11": The Storyboards
ABC will air a "docudrama", whatever that is, on the anniversary of the attacks, and that sure has caused a
bloggy firestorm. The Editors at The Poor Man Institute have got the storyboards.
Go...
Sometimes We Write Letters
In response to
this post by Rich Lowry over at the National Review, I wrote him this e-mail:
A "Better War in Iraq"?
Dear Mr. Lowry,
It might be instructive to take a close look at the titles of not only your post on the NR blog, but the article itself as well.
A "Better War" suggests that America has fought the wrong one since its inception. You were one of the people pushing for this war from the beginning. What happened to "We're Winning"? Now we need better war?
As for "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife", there are two year old children that know that doesn't work. Is that a policy recommendation? Seriously, that's the most stupid excrement I've heard in years. Maybe Americans can get their head's around the "oil spot" theory, but knives with soup? What do you take us for, fucking retards?
Let's have a look at this:
"The most important lesson of the past is the critical role of national patience and persistence in defeating an insurgency. We are three years into a counterinsurgency campaign that history suggests will take at least a decade to win. This lesson cannot be repeated too often, sobering though it is for a democracy accustomed to quick victories or speedy withdrawals from intractable conflicts: Insurgencies are long wars."
Why won't the president come forward and declare that this war will take decades to win? The one in Iraq that is. If, as you suggest, we as a country should be prepared to support a foreign campaign that grinds up Iraqi civilians and the American military at steady rates for the next ten to twelve years, where's the sales job?
I look forward to your defense of all of these policies as they appear in, what, 2016? 2018?
Good Luck with all that.
*********************
I'm sure he'll ever so pleased with that. I did screw up that second-to-last sentence, so he probably thinks I'm an idiot, but oh well (I'm sort of an idiot, but not a complete one). The sentiment, however, I believe shines clearly.
Another Bit of Propaganda?
Apparently, all the headlines we saw last month, claiming that the violence in Iraq was way down, was complete shit. Where do we learn this? From an
ABC news blog:
What Dropoff? August Death Total in Baghdad Morgue Triples
We took an interesting phone call today from an official at the Baghdad morgue. We get these calls every day – a daily tally of the violence. But this one was particularly sobering.
It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. Now, we’re depressingly used to hearing about deaths here, so much so that the numbers can be numbing. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August – heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working -- apparently didn’t exist.
Operation Together Forward, the main thrust of the new strategy, involves establishing pockets of security in select neighborhoods and then slowly adding more. These latest numbers add substance to fears Together Forward creates a whack-a-mole effect: that is, secure one area and the violence will pop up somewhere else. Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June. Officials at the Baghdad morgue have no good explanation for the dramatically revised number. We’ll see what the U.S. military has to say.
This stinks to the high heavans. It should be the kind of stuff that makes the front page of every major newspaper. Who ordered them to doctor the figures? The only thing that baffles me is why this particular dung nugget wasn't rolled out in the next couple of months, and then discovered
after the mid-terms.
Update: The good folks at Think Progress have picked up
the story. Let's see where it goes from there...
TPM Cafe
Over at Josh Marshall's joint, he
asked the following:
I guess it's right to stay true to form. In a report out today, the Bush administration is saying that on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 "America is safer but we are not yet safe."
I take this to mean that just in time for the November elections we have arrived at the administration's sweet spot of terror preparedness: a lot safer thanks to all the good things the president has done to foil the terrorists but also not so safe that people should feel safe enough to vote for the traitorous Democrats.
Truly the sweet spot.
In response to that, I wrote the following:
I would argue the average American isn't stupid, but he/she is certainly woefully ignorant about politics in general. It took forever for the American public to come around on the Cheney administration's incompetance. Cynically, I think Rove and Bush know this and figure the only items most of the American public will be exposed to is the sound bites that come from these three speeches. Hence, all the repetition of the same trite rhetoric.
After the president was re-elected, it's clear that the American public is nothing more than a mirror of George W. Bush.
Time will tell if ignorance and fear will win Bush and Rove another election.
As for the sweet spot, it struck me the same way; Republicans are the ones that can protect you, but always remain ever fearful of your future.
They sure have brought us low.
Just wanted to share this with the millions of readers I attract here every day. Indeed.
Great Reads
I highly recommend these two books:
Consrvatives Without Conscience by John Dean, and
Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman.
Not exactly light summer reading, but lots of food for thought. Give them a look.
It's the Ignorance You Dummy
I came across a fascinating study a week or two ago that deals with political ignorance in America (I'm not sure if it was Stephen Brenan over at
The Carpetbagger Report, or Digby at
Hullabaloo that tipped me off to it, but I try and give credit where it is due. Either way, they both have amazing websites, so go visit them both often).
The American National Election Study, carried out by the University of Michigan, is broken down by the Political Opinion Pros,
here, and it paints a pretty sad picture. So let's have a look at some of their findings.
Some of the
data regarding the differences in political parties, and voters' identification of political figures is less than encouraging, and the "Pros" find the public "out to lunch". Color me unsurprised. In addition, the study asked the public a couple of questions, and I found the
results shocking:
[From 2004]
- Which political party held the most seats in the House of Representatives before the elections?
Republicans: 56% (correct)
Don't know: 30%
Democrats: 14% (incorrect)
- Which political party held the most seats in the Senate before the elections?
Republicans: 51% (correct)
Don't know: 38%
Democrats: 11% (incorrect)
Put another way, 44% of average Americans had no idea that Republicans control the House, and have done so since 1994. That's not just ignorance and apathy, it borders on willful blindness. Maybe the only reason that the Senate figures are slightly worse is because the D's
did control the Senate between 2000 and 2002. That's thanks to Vermont Senator James Jeffords telling Bush to go pound sand and switiching from Republican to Independant, and thereby throwing control of the Senate to the Democrats. Even given that, 49% of the public had no idea which party controlled the Senate.
Why is this important? Just for an example, let's take the House of Representatives. Under Republican rule, we get
the following:
Extreme Centralization. The power to write legislation has been centralized in the House Republican leadership. Concretely, that means DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, working with the House Committee on Rules. (Hastert is seen in some quarters as a figurehead, but his man Palmer is as powerful as DeLay.) Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening. Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be "emergency" measures, allowing then to be considered with as little as 30 minutes notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.
Sorry, No Amendments. DeLay has used the rules process both to write new legislation that circumvents the hearing process and to all but eliminate floor amendments for Republicans and Democrats alike. The Rules Committee, controlled by the Republican leadership, writes a rule specifying the terms of debate for every bill that reaches the House floor. When Democrats controlled the House, Republicans complained bitterly when the occasional bill did not allow for open floor amendments. In 1995, Republicans pledged reform. Gerald Solomon, the new Republican chairman of the committee, explicitly promised that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments. Instead, the proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased, from 56 percent during the 104th Congress (1995-97) to 76 percent in 2003. This comparison actually understates the shift, because virtually all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.
DeLay has elevated votes on these rules into rigid tests of party loyalty, on a par with election of the speaker. A Republican House member who votes against a rule structuring floor debate will lose committee assignments and campaign funds, and can expect DeLay to sponsor a primary opponent.
How does this undermine democracy? As the recent Medicare bill was coming to a vote, a majority of House members were sympathetic to amendments allowing drug imports from Canada and empowering the federal government to negotiate wholesale drug prices. But by prohibiting floor amendments, DeLay made sure that the bill passed as written by the leadership, and that members were spared the embarrassment (or accountability) of voting against amendments popular with constituents.
One-Party Conferences. The Senate still allows floor amendments, but Senate-passed bills must go to conference with the House. Democratic House and Senate conferees are increasingly barred from attending conference committees, unless they are known turncoats. On the Medicare bill, liberal Democratic Senate conferees Tom Daschle and Jay Rockefeller were excluded. The more malleable Democrats John Breaux and Max Baucus, however, were allowed in. [See Matthew Yglesias, "Bad Max," page 11.] All four House Democratic conferees were excluded. Republican House and Senate conferees work out their intraparty differences, work their respective caucuses and send the (nonamendable) bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote. On the Medicare bill, members had one day to study a measure of more than 1,000 pages, much of it written from scratch in conference.
Legislation Without Hearings. Before the DeLay revolution, drafting new legislation in conference committee was almost unknown. But under DeLay, major provisions of the Medicare bill sprang fully grown from a conference committee. Republicans got a conference to include a weakened media-concentration standard that had been explicitly voted down by each house separately. Though both chambers had voted to block an administration measure watering down overtime-pay protections for workers, the provision was tacked onto a must-pass bill in conference. The official summary of House procedures, written by the (Republican-appointed) House parliamentarian and updated in June 2003, notes: "The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses." Like the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution, these rules are routinely waived.
Appropriations Abuses. Appropriations bills are must-pass affairs, otherwise the government eventually shuts down. Traditionally, substantive legislation is enacted in the usual way, then the appropriations process approves all or part of the funding. There has long been modest abuse in the form of earmarked money for pet pork-barrel projects and substantive riders being tacked onto appropriations bills. But since Gingrich, a lot of substantive bill drafting has been centralized in House leadership task forces appointed by the majority leader. And under DeLay, Appropriations subcommittee chairs must now be approved by the leadership, as well as by the Appropriations chairman.
The figures presented above are absolutely inexcusable. Democracy is a sport, and one that needs everyone to participate for it to work properly. Based on these figures, it's barely functioning at all. I'd call it Democracy on Auto-Pilot (catchy, huh?). Sure, I understand people have their day-to-day worries about their jobs, children, and making ends meet, but what they don't realize is that the system that allows them to concentrate on such selfish things is literally crumbling under their feet.
The "Pros" point out:
Why focus on young people? Actuarial tables tell us that Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” or Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s “long civic generation”—that is, people born around 1920 who tend to be among America’s most politically engaged and knowledgeable today—won’t be with us much longer. Today’s young will, and their apathy and political ignorance do not bode well for the future of democracy.
Dude, you're such a bummer. Well, yes I am, but here are some solutions: (from the study, and some of mine)
- The taboo about talking politics among family must be broken. Even if disagreements can't be bridged, raising awareness is the key.
- Engage your friends. Where do they stand?
- We should encourage more civics classes in school curriculums, all the way through twelfth grade.
- Disagree with someone? Finish the conversation by encouraging them to vote.
Encourage them to vote.
Linky
If you ever need a good laugh, head on over to
tbogg's site. He wades through the deep excrement that makes up Right's web presence so we don't have to. For that, we're very thankful.
You can start here and work your way down:
I will crush my enemies and hear the lamentations of their wome--oooo pretty shells! And tiny fish!
