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THE_BUSH_LEAGUE

                                              November 14, 2006


Conservatives years hence will still be trying
to live down their association with Bush the Second.

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.

In some ways 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 Andrew Cockburn had claimed
                                  in his book "The Threat").
                                                          
                                                       Another person 
                                                       who had seen   
                                                       through it-- to
                                                       some extent--    
                                                       was Heinlein:       
                                                       see his remarks  
                                                       in "Expanded   
                                                       Universe".     
                                                                 
   Of late, it's seemed to me that
   there's a lot of new wine going
   about in old bottles, and a hell
   of a lot of people haven't noticed
   the change in flavor.

      The Right we have
      is a New Right.

      And the Left is (yet
      another) New Left.



                                  
                   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" 

                   http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article330873.ece 


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