1984

It's eerie how prescient Orwell was.

It seems to me that a sinister cabal of rich, powerful men secretly plotting to insulate their aristocratic positions could not have asked for more than the Bush Administration.

First we have the rise to power in 2000 after an ugly, divisive campaign consisting of demonizing minorities, attacking rivals with oh-so-carefully-deniable smear campaigns, the blatant manipulation of the election which nobody quite believed was possible and which they consequently got away with (after a little help from daddy's friends, of course), and then the moment when all was forgotten.

That was the tipping point, of course.

With the support of a stunned nation, we began sending the unwashed masses over seas to kill and die, then redirected to Iraq with a bullshit story about YOURE ALL GOING TO DIE ZOMG so that we can hand no-bid contracts to our friends and ensure the corporate oil structure remains intact for the next 20 years while the best and brightest of the lower class toil in Iraq and the beltway insiders sip mint juleps at their summer homes.

Meanwhile lets gut and destroy the Constitution, the Justice Department, FEMA, and anywhere else we can stick our cronies. Everybody cover everyone else's ass, and if there's anybody who don't wanna play ball SACK EM. Oh and while we're at it remind me to create an education policy that will keep the plebes dumbed down so they don't cotton to what we're doing, p.s. keep shoveling the jesus shit at them they're eating it up like popcorn.

And if that wasn't enough? Let's seed some cancer in our military by opening the torture box. Sure we'll get some bad intel, but they'll be so busy running around chasing false threats they won't have time to stop our complete mortgaging of this country to china while we make sure everybody is dependent on the dole (and totally helpless to stop us while we rape the planet and steal everything we can get our hands on). Besides, have you seen 24's numbers? The truth is most of the "American Sheeple" are already pro-torture. It makes them feel better. And they like to ignore the possibility that anyone is innocent, so they do.

It's astonishing, really. A huge part of my formative years, when I stopped being a student and started being an adult, was this constant state of disbelief, as if the country I loved was disappearing before my eyes and nobody was stopping it.

When you take it all in in one sitting, it makes it hard to refute the conspiracy theorists. My worst fear is that the nutjobs are right. That Cheney will get a man to get a man to get a man to nuke one of our citys. That they will blame Iran and start another war, declare a state of emergency and suspend elections. That cheney will be dictator for life with bush as his puppet, and america's dream will splutter and die, and I will be living in a totalitarian state.

That could never happen, could it?