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We must never forget that they FAILED to sell this war--because that fact is critically important to strategies for recovering our democracy.
Let me remind you: FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq, in Feb. '03--despite relentless, 24/7 war propaganda. 56%! That would be a landslide in a presidential election (and many of us believe that it was). That number only dipped below 50% for a brief period, when U.S. troops were at max risk during and just after the invasion, then climbed right back up to a majority, where it stayed throughout the 2004 election, and it is 70% today. In addition, all other poll numbers--over a wide range of polls, over a long period of time, have shown amazing disagreement between the American people and the Bush Junta on everything from torture to Social Security.
What we have suffered is a fascist coup--brought to us mainly by Bushite corporations and their electronic voting machines, run on "trade secret," proprietary programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls--fast-tracked across the country in the 2002 to 2004 period, by $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding from the Anthrax Congress. These crapass, insider hackable voting machines should never have been put in place. The idea of secret vote counting--let alone secret vote counting by partisans of the Bush regime--is anathema to democracy. The chief engineers of this assault on our democracy were major crooks Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by corporatist 'Democrats' like Christopher Dodd and Terry McAuliffe).
And so, the function of fascist assholes like Murdoch has not been to convince us of anything. It has been to create the FALSE IMPRESSION of a rightwing majority, so that the sensible, progressive, peace-minded majority in this country would become demoralized and disempowered. They have us arguing with wingers and nutballs, and throwing things at our TVs--as if these stupid rightwing views MATTER--when we SHOULD be paying attention to WHO is counting our votes and HOW!
This is very important to know: that the majority of the American people IGNORED them, and didn't buy the arguments for war, and some of them didn't buy the arguments for war EVEN WHEN they got pieces of disinformation stuck in their heads. When you cite the 50% belief that Saddamn had WMDs and/or had something to do with 9/11, you have to put that statistic NEXT to 56% opposed to the war--because a significant portion of the people who were sucked in by the propaganda, still didn't trust Bush, and still made their own assessment of the facts they had at hand, and didn't think it was worth a war. I myself love this evidence of the American people struggling through the biggest load of shit propaganda ever laid on them, trying to think for themselves.
But my main point is that the function of the war profiteering corporate news monopolies was not to sell the war but to create the mass delusion that the war HAD BEEN SOLD.
So Murdoch is actually wrong--and deceitful--when he says "We tried" to sell Bush's war. They KNEW it didn't have majority support, and, furthermore, they knew that a war with so little justification--zero justification--a heinous, unjust, illegal war was not sellable in the U.S. A. What they had to do, therefore, was to disempower the majority with a much deeper lie, that OTHER Americans had gone nuts and were out there flag-waving and hopping aboard a crusade to the Middle East led by the stupidest, most ill intentioned president and vice president in American history.
I have been heartened as I have seen one DUer after another emerge from this delusion--starting way back in 11/04, just after the election, with the riproaring debates here about election fraud--when only a few people perceived the truth. America hadn't gone nuts. America had been disenfranchised!
It was very hard to climb out of that hole--that depressing, disempowered hole that Murdoch and the entire U.S. corporate news monopoly establishment cast us into. WE are the majority. WE always have been the majority. We are a good country, with good people, who were NOT spoiling for war, and who have good basic progressive instincts that have held strong throughout this ordeal, despite our utter frustration at trying to change the direction of the country--and our mystification at being unable to do so.
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Strategy for recovering our democracy:
First of all, wipe all rightwing talking points out of your head. Banish those thoughts. Excise them. They are the vile blather of a minority that has been given a Big Trumpet, way of proportion to their numbers--to create a completely false impression of "what people are talking about," or "what people are really concerned about." We don't have to argue with these scumbags. We have the votes!
You will sometimes here this crap from others. Know that in most cases they are just brainwashed--literally--and haven't been able to formulate their own thoughts because of all this Bushite noise on TV/radio. They think this is "current" talk or "smart talk"--parroting what they hear on TV/radio, or read in corporate rags. Don't bother to argue with them on fascist talking points. Try to help them think for themselves. And, believe me, it is more important to talk to progressives--they need bolstering up, re-empowerment and re-enfranchisement.
And here is the program:
1. Transparent elections.
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.
They're doing it in South America. We can do it here, too.
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