Home > Buggergate
It’s rare when a scandal hits Washington that’s actually enjoyable to follow, but Mark Foley has really put the punch back in politics. Who would have guessed that after 6 years of slaughtering and torturing people in their own countries, the American people could be so incensed by one rogue congressman bumping boys in his off-hours. It just shows what trivial people we’ve become.
Congress is a moral cesspool. It didn’t take Foley to prove that. It is the epicenter of American corruption, the very heart of the beast. If we had any sense we’d send in the fire-trucks and hose out the whole place and then take a wrecking ball to the rotunda. The system is so far gone and so polluted with corporate money it’s no longer salvageable. Just bring in the dozers and we’ll start fresh.
Foley is what is commonly called "the canary in the coalmine". The metaphor implies that the canary will die before a man if there’s carbon monoxide in the mineshaft. The same rule applies to Washington. The sanction-wielding, torture-approving, war-mongering congress has poisoned a "once-great" institution and left it in a shambles. By the time Bush’s term is over, the only thing left will be the rubber-stamp they used to endorse his dictatorial powers and a scattering of Krispy Kremes outside Hastert’s office.
The Foley scandal is a charade which leads nowhere. Everyone knows that Washington is little better than a Vegas "knocking shop" where wealthy patrons plop down their money and get whatever they want. It’s a wonder that we have to go through the whole drill over and over again like reruns of Survivor.
Is there someone in America who didn’t already know that the party of sanctimony and self-righteousness is really a cover for horny hypocrites who are on the take?
Or that the only thing the Democrats are good for is "feigning indignation" when the Republican crimes bubble to the surface?
Or that the forth estate has no role in "informing the public" but is simply a sounding board for corporate-sponsored propaganda or a red herring for cheesy sex scandals and macabre murder investigations?
There’s nothing to learn here for anyone who has already been paying attention. Foley is just a branch on the mighty oak of corruption. Congress is like a cracked sewer-pipe from which the fetid effluent of our political life continues to surge.
We ought to buy every congressman a bus ticket back home and then board up the place for good.
Forum posts
5 October 2006, 03:48
This sounds like a plan to me! How about we start the cleanup tomorrow Oct. 5th!
5 October 2006, 07:40
Unfortunately, the guilty parties are comfortably enconsed, the political parties thoroughly corrupted, the media steeped in lethargy and incompetence, and the general public is generally Buffaloed. How’s it going to change, really?
On this site and others you constantly see comments about boycotting the NY Times, or Wal-Mart, or big corporations. And that might not be a bad idea if it was orchestrated by a formal movement so the parties involved would know exactly what’s going on. But who’s going to lead such a movement? Moveon? Jesse Jackson? Rachael Ray? The answer: No one. The fire ain’t in the belly, except for a few thousand bloggers typing feverishly, mainly preaching to the choir.
There’s one answer and it perfectly suits an apathetic electorate with little passion to do much more than grumble. On election day, contrary to all the civic lessons you’ve ever gotten, stay home. Don’t vote. Boycott the political system by not participating.
What good would that do, the do-gooders will ask? The wrong candidates will win and get into office. Really? At this point, as this piece points out, they’re virtually all bad, real bad. And indistinguishable from each other, regardless of what party they belong to. Do you really believe the Democrats offer a viable alternative? Joe Lieberman? Hillary? Edwards? If you do, then please, put the pipe down and step away from the herbs.
What advantage would there be for adding to the aggregate number of apathetic? At some point, perhaps 40%, 30%, certainly by 20% of registered voters who actually vote, the elected lose their legitimacy. Sure, candidates will win elections with those rates but not based upon a true democratic participation, and thus the democracy itself becomes corrupted by voter apathy - the final step required to reform the whole Goddamn system.
Forget this pressure people face when asked, Did you vote? First ask, Is there any one worth voting for? As it stands now, according to the polls, the answer is clearly no for president. What, are you going to say, McCain? Ha! Sorry, the system’s become so pervasively spoiled that it’s going to take more than just one candidate, or even one party to fix. It’s going to take the nation, democratically involved in reshaping the entire arena. And as it stands now, it ain’t in the cards for ’08. But a widespread boycott would change that.
Suddenly, the politicians, the media, academia, think-tank strategists, foreign nations, allies and enemies would sit up and take notice. Why, the headlines would scream, aren’t people voting? Is the system that bad? Yes, a thousand times yes. Let it echo through the valleys, over the hills, far and yonder, across big city streets and rural dirt roads: We’re sick of this garbage, the lies, the incompetence, the fraud, the corruption, sick up to here and we want it changed. Yesterday if possible. And until it is, we’re not voting ever again. For anybody.
Think about it.
6 October 2006, 01:09
I DO boycott the "Whole Freaking System" more and more, not because I am trying to "get back at it" in some way or even to try and make "political change" but simply because I find more and more The Beast damages my life in many ways more than it aids it. IMO change must first start LOCALLY especially in one’s heart and mind and then work outwards rather than from the top down. One needs NO big movement or leader for that matter to make EVERY choice a CONSCIENCE one and to radiate that out to everyone and everything. Though it is not easy to wean oneself and family off of the Beast System, and I’m still connected much more than I would like, everyday I say a little more goodbye to the Beast and hello to more life without the corruption, materialism, trash media (NO TV) and things that really just make us all miserable in the Grand scheme of things. If one plans to boycott I might suggest do it FIRST for you and yours and then later perhaps one can start thinking how it might help in some small way "change the World".
8 October 2006, 14:20
65.50: Indeed, compatriot, the Beast damages us far more than it aids us. The Beast is far more wily than Orwell’s Big Brother, far more invidious and it grows faster than our own economy. Like you, I abandoned the big US mass media years ago, and my critical thinking has improved over 1000%, & my empowerment over my own life and destiny has improved by over 1000%.
The US Federal Government along with its favorite arm, the US mainstream media [which has become a high-tech Propaganda Ministry] has done a great job in confusing and dividing our nation into fragments, making diversions into serious issues and totally marginalizing to the point of non-existence the real issues that confront us. And with their obfuscations, half-truths and out and out lies, our mass media have significantly lowered the intellectual standards of our population as a whole. The latest worldwide surveys on national IQs has the US, the world’s mightiest military power, in 19th place, listing the average American IQ at 98, two points lower than norm.
How long will our country maintain scientific and technological leadership in the world with such a pitiful intellectual performance by its average Joe Six-Pack? The answer is: our country already has lost its leadership. The US is no longer the world’s no.1 manufacturer of high-tech or digital equipment, China is. Go to:
http://www.pacificvillage.org/villagevoices/derryfield/archives/000314.html
If you bother to research the latest techonological and scientific breakthroughs, you will find that China, India, Japan, Russia and the EU are at the forefront of the latest innovations, not the US. You get what you pay for, and our country’s Central Government [Federal Government is a huge misnomer. The States of the US are nothing but large administrative units of one enormous, gluttonous centralized and controlled ’democracy’, run by Diebold machines, the most hackable pieces of shit in history] has been funding the Military Industrial Complex, the Oil Industry and the Pharmaceutical Industry to the exclusion of education. Yet what passes for contemporary ’Public Education’ is horse manure, our children don’t learn anything of real worth from their schools, another a misnomer, since they often are no better than free day care centers. Our smartest chlidren learn more from the net and their parents, if they are lucky to have enlightened parents, than from our schools.
I don’t understand this nation that once was the Land of the Free, but now is the Land of the Frightened, a lost nation whose citizens believe in every bogeyman the US Feds have spawned and nurtured in secret, all for the purpose of keeping us pacified and apathetic. We have become a retarded nation, whose citizens don’t even understand the importance of habeas corpus and the Rule of Law; a sad, pathetic nation whose citizens cannot, if their lives depended on it, recite even one of the First Ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights. Most of us take after their demented, lawless President, who believes that our Constitution is ’a piece of goddamned paper’. If there is anyone on this planet that deserves to be ’goddamned’ it is this failure of a man, who has torn to shreds our Constitution and has placed our economy in a highly vulnerable position all due to a bogus ’War on Terror’. Another misnomer, I must add, for it really is a WAR FOR TERROR, a war totally financed by deficit spending.
Get a grip people, the US Mass Media is nothing but a whorehouse for the Federal Government. Not only that, they are practically obsolete, and they know it. Who needs them when we have the Net? We should all flush them down the toilet.
ABANDON THE US MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND LEARN TO THINK AGAIN. ABANDON THE US MASS MEDIA AND LEARN TO LIVE AGAIN.