Life after Congress, Heil Bush!
I read the Spectrum Tuesday to find, what I found to be the most unfounded, unintelligent, and scariest opinion article I have ever read, Andrew Post’s article on Congress. His article was filled with gross inaccuracies, and some pretty scary ideas on how we should let the president run our country. First let’s look at the inaccuracies in his article.
It’s hard to take anyone seriously about politics, if in their article, they show a lack of understanding of some of the most basic of our political processes, like the legislature. Post says that Congress keeps vetoing everything Bush does in trying to run our country. According to Post, Bush makes the bills and laws and the evil Congress keeps foiling the poor man by vetoing him. Other way around Post. Our elected body of representatives are trying to do what the majority of American’s want and it is the President who keeps VETOING them. Even immigrants can’t be a citizen if they don’t know that.
Post claims that Congress is hindering Bush and the American people. Yet only 36% of American’s agree with Bush and 60% want us to pull out of Iraq, and want SCHIP passed, and everything else that Bush has vetoed and stopped in its tracks. So who is sabotaging who? Get your facts straight first!
Even more frustrating are those journalists from a certain “fair and balanced” news agency who spread lies and propaganda to further their own agenda. They echo the sentiment of Joseph Goebbel, Hitler’s propaganda architect:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Also it is always scary when someone writes in the press that they are for authoritarianism. Journalists and free speech are always the first to go when democracy fails, so it is always very scary and a little sad when it is the journalists who cry for that democracy to fail. Already, America’s presses are not free, since anyone who dissents is labeled as a traitor for emboldening the enemy or weakening national security, and journalists who have criticized the Bush Administration have faced reprisal’s like Valerie Plame being outed when her husband criticized Bush. Or when Rumsfeld leaked the Abu Ghirab informant, and how he and his family have been forced from their hometown because of reprisals.
And does no one study history anymore? Do people actually think Rome, or Germany, or France, or Russia woke up one day and said “Let’s screw over our people, take over the media, and become a dictatorship. I’m sure the people won’t mind.” It took Caesar years to gain power, several wars for Napoleon to declare himself emperor. Hitler was hated by his people and it finally took a terrorist attack for his party to start gaining power. Russia had a democracy after the Czar’s but the communists slowly eroded that over several years by buying votes and staging a coup against the democracy.
And don’t think it can’t happen here. Everyone thought it wouldn’t happen there. It did. Learn from their mistakes! Don’t give up your freedom and democracy to “cut a little red tape” as Post calls it.
Nathan Hansen
Junior
Mathematics
