{"id":5488,"date":"2008-11-04T13:41:01","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T18:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=5488"},"modified":"2008-11-04T15:31:25","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T20:31:25","slug":"bush-gods-gift-to-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/campaign-08\/bush-gods-gift-to-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush: God’s gift to Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello from Dominick’s Cafe in Kingston,<\/p>\n

…where I am going to try to write a couple of weekly horoscopes. Or maybe I better just try one. Anyway, it’s not working…all these people in the cafe want their charts done. They are calling in their favors…they have fed me every day for six months. And Rachel and Genevieve are doing all the work today while I sit here with my laptop and teenagers and their parents crowded around. I got back from voting in New Paltz at 6:45 am, came back, did a little of this and that…and passed the fuck out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Eric<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

But here is what I’ve been thinking.<\/p>\n

I’ve never, ever seen such interest in an election. And this is the direct result of Mssrs Bush, Rove and Cheney and their shenanigans the past eight years.<\/p>\n

It is true, we’ve paid a high cost for this level of participation…and the soldiers and families in Iraq who continue to be the last people to die for a lie — in the immortal words of John Kerry — have really paid that price. We have sacrificed civil liberties, $6 trillion in debt, and a government structure that is basically gutted, pillaged and ravaged; a banking structure that remains on the brink of collapse; we have a lot of ideologue judges injected throughout the federal courts, and John Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court for the next decade or so…whose decisions will affect countless millions of lives.<\/p>\n

But suddenly we care. Suddenly it matters. When the votes are counted, we will see that there was unprecedented turnout today, and there are many thousands of people going to the polls with cameras, video cameras and with the ability to report their experiences on the Internet when they get home. The denial factor is starting to finally give way to awareness. It has taken a lot.<\/p>\n

We have a moment when a presidential candidate will walk up to the poll in his home city, surrounded by reporters as he slides his ballot into the machine, and say, “I hope this works. I’ll be really embarrassed if it doesn’t,” something that everyone has felt today.<\/p>\n

We are using the power that’s in our hands…and we cannot stop.<\/p>\n

No matter who is elected or installed into office today, we need this measure of vigilance. The First Amendment had and has a purpose, and it has new life with the Internet being so widely used. This is keeping people aware and personally involved, and it’s keeping the media honest because there cannot be too big of a gap between what we hear on CNN and what we read on so many different blogs and alternative news sites.<\/p>\n

This is actual progress.<\/p>\n

\"Eric<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is true, we’ve paid a high cost for this level of participation…and the soldiers and families in Iraq who continue to be the last people to die for a lie — in the immortal words of John Kerry — have really paid that price. We have sacrificed civil liberties, $6 trillion in debt, and a government structure that is basically gutted, pillaged and ravaged; a banking structure that remains on the brink of collapse; we have a lot of ideologue judges injected throughout the federal courts, and John Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court for the next decade or so…whose decisions will affect countless millions of lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[36,122,52,35],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}