Not by the hypocrisy attendant in marketing FREEDOM as an administration brand name while simultaneously assaulting civil rights and the Constitution in a comprehensive legal program [secrecy, unlimited executive authority] exceeding even that of Nixon's darkest wishes.
Not by this underdeveloped man's asinine strutting and posturing that would shame a 13-year-old male teenager.
Not by Bush campaign tactics that divide and attack good people who have truly served and sacrificed for their country [e.g., John McCain, Max Cleland, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame and John Kerry].
What infuriates a growing number of Americans is the enmity that Bush holds for the very conception of a liberal democracy, the administration's hostility to the classical liberal freedoms upon which America was founded. These people truly hate America.
Citizens using their reason and sense of morality to determine the nature of their community and the policies of their state, with state power tightly constrained by the liberties and rights of the citizens represent to Bush dangers to be overcome.
This is not the same country it was five years ago. Americans are muffled, blinded, back-seat passengers as Bush secretly races the car over the cliff to whatever apocalyptic fantasy land that this dimwit vaguely believes is our divine destiny.
One can with justification point to the detestable Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Gonzales as figures epitomizing the Bush administration's fear of the American democracy in which Bush is a public servant answerable to the public.
But I nominate Condoleezza Rice as the pure Bushian, America-hating, anti-public servant.
Rice, former National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, may know better as she hits administration talking points with soft-sell scare mongering under her cultivated veneer of erudition and temperate integrity.
In fact, you have to believe that Rice knows better. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Gonzales do not know better; and Bush, well, he simply does not know that much.
Rice has become the go-to guy (she polls fairly well) in the administration's increasingly desperate attempts to cover up the failures of this anti-democratic regime that makes one yearn for the comparatively liberal, constitutionally checked Nixon administration.
In her own ignominious manner of communicating to the public, it is Rice's bizarre adherence to an ahistorical reality -- a nihilistic world lacking objective facts and an affirmative duty to truthfully report events to other human beings -- that will consign this opportunistic careerist to a special infamy in the annals of the American experiment.
All that matters to this woman is spinning and lying well enough to keep the administration in as good a light as possible at a given moment; not an easy task as Iraq continues its bloody civil war. If Rice says something demonstrably foolish or embarrassing, she simply qualifies it out of existence, or pretends it never happened. Sounds familiar.
I know everyone in Bush world does this to some degree. But Rice's particular spinning contrivance as befits her academic background is that of a particular brand of intellectual obfuscation, mystification-- the act of making a topic mysterious or obscure in an effort to perplex and hide from critical examination.
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