AND THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE - Democratic Underground

NanceGreggs

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Fri Sep-29-06 08:29 PM
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AND THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE

Edited on Fri Sep-29-06 08:45 PM by NanceGreggs

And The Rocket’s Red Glare
By Nancy Greggs

Oh, what a difference a day makes. Had I written this just twenty-four hours ago, it would have been entitled “Twilight’s Last Gleaming”.

Last night, along with millions of my fellow citizens, I was toasting the demise of my country. Well into our cups, we sat around and prepared the obligatory obituary, too numb with grief to be truly coherent; too blinded by tears to accept any consolation.

In my despair, I had almost given up hope that after the tears, the anger necessary to keep fighting the good fight would ever surface again – that things, as we are all wont to say, would look better in the morning.

But the sun rose, the alarm clock blared, and the same bus that runs late every day was – you guessed it – wholly-predictable in being late again.

And then something else happened: the news. The news that GOP family-values poster boy Foley, amidst undeniable proof of his own immorality, had resigned. The news that the tentacles of the Abramoff gang-of-thieves was more widespread – and higher-reaching – than had previously been reported. The news that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor (re ACLU v. NSA ) who had recently ruled that the President's warrantless eavesdropping violated both criminal law and the U.S. Constitution, refused the administration's request for a stay and instead gave them only seven days to comply with her Order.

Witness ABC-TV, after being pummelled for “Path to 9-11”, leading with anti-administration, anti-GOP stories in prime time tonight. After kow-towing to the right wing a few weeks ago, they now have no choice but to manipulate that pendulum to swing widely in the other direction, lest their revenue-generating sponsors demand lower air-time rates, or choose to sell their wares in less controversial marketplaces.

Witness Bob Woodward hawking his latest book, shedding a less-than-favorable light on the White House and its machinations in an attempt to regain his all-but-lost credibility with the public as a journalist of integrity.

Witness the now-publicly disclosed reports on the escalation of violent terrorism as a direct result of the occupation of Iraq, the fruitlessness of the ‘Stay the Course” strategy, and the disclosure of how much money this fiasco is costing the American taxpayer.

Call it the hand of God, Buddha, Allah, or natural karma – call it whatever you will – but the fact is that the truth is out there, and in the past few days, it’s been more out there than this administration and its supporters want to admit. And it ain’t over, not by a long shot.

While most of us realize that the hard-core BS (Bush supporters) all suffer from a short attention span, coupled with an inherent unwillingness to accept even the most obvious truths, at this point those are the very factors that are weighing in our favor. What they see, in the few moments per day they pay attention to the news, is: “Foley = Pedophile = GOP”, “My tax dollars = War in Iraq = Increase in Terrorism”, “Bribe money = crime = White House”.

Let’s not allow our present anger to obfuscate the impact those thoughts, no matter how subliminal, affect the minds of Republicans across the country. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that those messages are being broadcast within mere weeks of a mid-term election.

As for the present fiasco, let’s concentrate on how many elected officials, on both sides of the aisle, have been flooded with phone calls, faxes, letters and emails in the last twenty-four hours that have led them to believe – and rightly so – that their pro-torture vote in the past two days have bought them not the ‘strong stance on terrorism’ image they’d hoped for, but instead the label of being too weak to stand up to the president, along with the sign ‘pro-torture’ being hung around their necks for the rest of their political careers. How many “presidential hopefuls” abandoned all hope of such an ambition in the wee hours of this morning will never be known, but can surely be surmised.

We will NOT forget the names of those who were willing to sell out everything this country has traditionally stood for in a bid to gain some ill-perceived political advantage, some slap-on-the-back support from the powers-that-be – powers that, in the Dawn’s Early Light, are not on as solid a footing as previously advertised.

I do not discount in any way the darkness of the past few days, nor the implications of what has happened. But I do take heart in what I am seeing, hearing, and absorbing in the aftermath of what may indeed be not the end of democracy, but simply the darkness that precedes the Perfect Storm.

The Fat Lady has yet to sing, my fellow Americans. And when she rises to deliver her greatest performance, even this evil administration, its neo-con pretenders, its money-grubbing supporters – cowering in the blackest corner of the upper balcony – will have no choice but to hear the loudest, most passionate rendition of the “Start Spangled Banner” that has ever been heard in the course of our nation’s illustrious history.

So in place of the, "That's it, the show’s over" cry I would have indulged in a scant few hours ago, I say this instead:

“Strike up the band!!!"