Daily Archives: October 15, 2004

Rock harder. Vote or Die.

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Not only does Dumbya insist that we aren’t going to need the draft because the volunteer army is working, he doesn’t want young people even bringing up their worries about it. He certainly doesn’t want them making it an issue worth discussing. So, as reported here:
……Now, the youth voter participation group Rock The Vote has been pushing this issue recently, calling for an election-year debate on the topic in ways you can see if you do a quick google search with their name in it.
And what has the response been from the president?
This week RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie sent the group a ‘cease and desist’ letter threatening legal action against the group and raising the possibility of seeking the revocation of the group’s status as a tax-exempt 501c3 organization if the group did not cease discussing the draft issue…..
Oh yeah! Big Brother Bush is riding hard over those pesky young ‘uns, trying to put leashes on them like he’d like to on his daughters. Muzzles and leashes. Sound familiar???
Yes. Yes. Rock the Boat. Rock the Vote. Vote or Die fighting Big Brother Bush’s terrorizing war. If he wins, we all lose, even to the Seventh Generation.

Anarchist goes undercover as GOP volunteer.

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And Rolling Stone publishes his story.
I particularly like the quote below because it clarifies for me the indefatigability of the righteous wingers in the comments on this post of b!X’s.
One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: “It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”
These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That’s why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people — and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.
But here’s the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn’t matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn’t a policy imposed from above; it’s an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You’re arguing the particulars, where you’re right, while they’re arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you’re a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.