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Propaganda
The War Prayer
“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken.
January 2013
Demagogue Days
This is the story of my descent into a modern sort of inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood; I’m in Oregon, schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free Internet access.
January 2008
Sunbeams
May 2007What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
Mission Accomplished
I’ve become obsessed with George W. Bush. I spend hours Googling “George W. Bush low IQ” (500,000 hits), “George W. Bush stubborn asshole” (67,000 hits), and “George W. Bush deranged maniac” (43,000 hits). I loathe this man with an intensity that makes my stomach hurt. Why he wasn’t thrown out of office long ago baffles me.
May 2007
Forget What They Told You
The Truth According To Greg Palast
The idea that America’s a democracy is a fucking lie. We’ve had one fixed election after another. By my calculations, Hubert Humphrey beat Richard Nixon in 1968. Of course, Humphrey was a jackal as well. But what is not widely understood is that we’ve always had a system in America of not counting certain votes. My good friends on the Left are afraid that the Republicans are going to steal the next election by computer — that the software is going to allow Karl Rove to change the vote. Well, most people who worry about that are white. Black people know they’ve stolen the vote the old-fashioned way for centuries.
May 2007
An American In Syria
That night I sat on my couch, trying to work through what had happened. I realized that Mohammed had been telling me that he was secret police, and I should never forget it. We could talk about language, or food, or the World Cup, but whatever I told him, he had to report it. He had given me this warning as a friend.
March 2007
Why I Am Not President
On January 19, 2004, the day of the Iowa caucus, I decided to run for president. Perhaps, in my tiny way, I reasoned, I can prevent America from becoming a Jesus-flavored neofascist empire. So I announced to the world (or, at least, to the portion of it that is on my e-mail address list) my candidacy for the Republican nomination. My campaign had begun.
January 2006
August 2005
After 9/11, I promised to stop demonizing our leaders. That’s what al-Qaeda does, and it’s just a matter of degree.
August 2005Hidden Power
Noam Chomsky On Resurrecting The Revolutionary Spirit Of America
The big popular movements in this country did not all come about in the sixties. The women’s and environmental movements both began in the seventies. The antinuclear and solidarity movements arose in the eighties. The big global-justice movements started in the nineties. The elites have to keep trying to beat freedom down, because it won’t go back into its shell.
April 2005
Sunbeams
March 2004[The philosopher] Wittgenstein writes about a man who, not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys one hundred copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth.
