Nothing seems to make liberals angrier than all the lies told by the Bush administration. I’ve had more than a few sleepless nights and bellyaches myself over the past five years, but it’s worth noting how often it tells the truth, even if sometimes it sort of mixes up the names and dates and places and stuff. At times it seems that the administration’s strategy of accusing the enemy –be it John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, or a levy—of doing exactly what it itself has done is so consistent and so precise that their own statements read almost like a kind of nervous confession.
The other day I printed out the transcript of Bush’s October 6 speech on the state of the war on terror. Before I got around to reading it, however, I spilled White-Out all over it. Hmm. Still, it made for a pretty interesting read. I think Bush is really coming around.
Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted _____ and _____ and _____ and ____ for potential takeover. They achieved their goal for a time in Afghanistan. Now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. _____ has stated the whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries: It’s either victory and glory or misery and humiliation. The _____s regard Iraq as the central front in their war against _____, and we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on _____. Third, the _____s believe that controlling one country will rally the _____ masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical _____ empire that spans from _____ to _____. With greater economic and military and political power, the _____s would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy _____, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people and to blackmail our government into isolation. Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme and they should not be dismissed.
Defeating a militant network is difficult because it thrives like a parasite on the suffering and frustration of others. The _____s exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical _____ as the pawns of terror. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.
[. . .] in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, _____ radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the _____ masses. _____ says his own role is to tell _____s, “What is good for them and what is not.” And what this man, who grew up in wealth and privilege, considers good for poor _____s is that they become killers [. . .] He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride. And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the _____s are fellow _____s.
Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be in an aggrieved party [. . .] In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves. Under their rule, they have banned books and desecrated historical monuments and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form and to control every aspect of life and to rule the soul itself.
By fearing freedom, by distrusting human creativity and punishing change and limiting the contributions of half the population, this ideology undermines the very qualities that make human progress possible and human society successful. The only thing modern about the _____s’ vision is the weapons they want to use against us. The rest of their grim vision is defined by a warped image of the past, a declaration of war on the idea of progress itself.
Then there was this bit, which I guess is about America. This must just be his way of saying "Bring it on!"
by Herman Melville, Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford
This is a really great speech. But what I don't understand is why the Martians hate us so much.
I wrote in “postmodernism” for everything.
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