The bad guys won.
Yes they have pog.
Yes they have.
Well, there is this:[url]
http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/ar...228976.asp[/url]
...Yet, even so, I am unsure anyone has outright "won" in any of this; it all seems more a "lose/lose" scenario than a "win/lose" no matter how the chits are tabulated.
The patriots/terrorists (which, is all a matter of perspective: revering a martyr who is so noble as to give his or her life for the cause/nation/people or reviling the heinous deluded monster who committed crimes against the noble cause/nation/people all depends on which side of the stick one stands. We give Congressional Medals of Honor to individuals who would be executed as terrorists by the other side, and visa versa) -the various parties involved, none of them, have completely accomplished their goals whether the goals were to -sting awake a sense of conscience and historical awareness regarding corporate imperialism using the American military as a tool,
-to sabotage the American economy,
-to kill Osama Bin Ladin and control foreign oil deposits,
-to utterly dispense with the Bill of Rights and become a completely Orwellian police state,
-to employ so many otherwise unemployable Right-wingers as TSA agents, Rapiscan employees, Securitas employees, and other such do-nothing make-work positions funded with US tax money all throughout the nation--including right here in Hilo--that they constitute a fiercely loyal corps of boots on the ground serving to condition an obedient response in their neighbors through intimidation and fear at the airports, vote for Right-wing candidates and issues, tithe some percentage of that tax money back to Right-wing candidates and issues, and like Mussolini's goons and thugs in fascist Italy or Hitlers brownshirts in fascist Germany be ready to form mobs to demonstrate and bash heads when useful.
So, the Department of Homeland Security was created (double-plus good, that!) and the TSA "employs" over 60,000 on the taxpayer's tab, and Rapiscan made somewhere between $160 and $250 million on the backscatter devices alone (how many dollars big was Michael Chertoff's personal slice of that pie, I wonder) yet Americans can still cross state borders without needing anything more than government-issued photo IDs, being tracked in a database, physically searched, and taxed. So the military-industrial interests inching toward an Orwellian police state have not completely won.
The pathetic peasants in the Middle East are still mired in poverty, a resentful victim mentality, and religious delusion such that they are biddable and naive enough to comply with the manipulations of those who pose as leaders of their cause, paragons of their faith, and their hope for the future. So, no complete win there.
The pathetic peasants in the American lower-middle class are still mired in mortgage and credit-card-debt poverty, a resentful victim mentality, and religious delusion such that they are biddable and naive enough to comply with the manipulations of those who pose as leaders of their cause, paragons of their faith, and their hope for the future. So, no complete win there -though some progress. Indeed, we can ask ourselves a good question-
"What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be thekind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent? Oops! That’s already us. The top 1% of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/opinio....html?_r=1
So, some partial short-terms gains in wealth and control by those in charge of the military-industrial establishment whether in America or the Middle East, and some welfare jobs for Right-wingers at the airports and in the "defense" industry (at the expense of everyone else) yet overall, have they won? I think not. Have the "terrorists" won (regardless of whose photos are inserted into the terrorist-labeled picture frames)? Certainly not. Have the common people anywhere won out of all of this? No. Has democracy or Islamists or Christianists or any other -ists? Not really, no. Cartoonists and morticians might have won to some extent, but I get the feeling they'd rather not have, so even that is not a total win. No, I must disagree that the bad guys won. As long as our collective head remains stuck up in our collective butt with regard to all this then nobody wins, not really, not long term.
Imho the good news, such as it is, comes from Gandhi:
"Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always."
This, too, shall pass -and the TSA with it.
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Baby Hummingbird
http://wimp.com/babyhummingbird
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