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THE_BUSH_LEAGUE

                                              November 14, 2006


Conservatives years hence will
still be trying to live down            (A political prediction that
their association with Bush the          was right, for once, during
Second.                                  the 2012 election at least.)

I'm beginning to think he's
going to become a figure on    Which is not to suggest
the Right much like Stalin     that Bush has killed as
is on the left --              many people as Stalin
                               (though give him time).

                                                 He's long since
                                                 passed the
                                                 "worse than
                                                 Nixon" mark.
Soviet Russia was initially the
great hope of the left --

Freud referred to it as "that
great experiment to the East".

The fact that this experiment went
so disastrously astray did a lot
to discredit left-wing ideas.

Much worse though, was the
sheer length of time it took
for it to sink-in how far
astray it had all gone.

As late as the mid-1970s, I
was still hearing apologies
for communist dictatorships
from the left -- they would
go off to the Soviet Union,       After Gorbachev, after the Berlin
do the show tour of Moscow,       Wall came down, it became apparent
and come back telling us all      that the Soviets had been running
how it wasn't as bad as the       a bluff all these years.
propaganda made it out to
be ("and the subways are          And it appears that the Western
so clean!").                      "military industrial complex"
                                  had been playing along with them
                                  to justify it's own funding --

                                  As, for example, Andrew
                                  Cockburn had claimed in his
                                  book "The Threat" (1983).

                                                       Another person who
                                                       had seen through it
                                                       in some fashion, was
   Of late, there's been a lot of                      Heinlein: see his
   new wine going about into the                       remarks in "Expanded
   old bottles, and a hell of a                        Universe".
   lot of people haven't noticed
   the change in flavor.

      The Right we have
      is a New Right.               "It's not your father's
                                    Republican party any
      And the Left is (yet          more." -- Tom Whisker,
      another) New Left.            "Weaponry", WBAI ~2005




                   Robert Fisk writes about the film
                   "Good Night, and Good Luck":

                      "Murrow is played by an actor, but
                      McCarthy appears only in real archive
                      footage. Incredibly, a test audience
                      in New York complained that the man
                      'playing' McCarthy was 'overacting.'
                      Will we say this about Bush in years
                      to come?  I suspect so."

                   From the article "America slowly confronts the truth"

                   [ref]


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