A Little "Good News"

This is an excellent article by Noam Chomsky. But I chuckled aloud as I read the following.

Z Magazine - "Good News," Iraq & Beyond, Part II

Recent polls in Pakistan also provide "good news" for Washington. Fully 5 percent favor allowing U.S. or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan "to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters." Nine percent favor allowing U.S. forces "to pursue and capture Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan." Almost half favor allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little over 80 percent regard the U.S. military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the U.S. is trying to harm the Islamic world.

The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that "Eighty- three percent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taliban, with a mere 3 percent expressing support for the United States," while over 80 percent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and 6 percent a terrorist.

Events elsewhere in early 2008 might also turn out to be "good news" for Washington. In January, in a remarkable act of courageous civil disobedience, tens of thousands of the tortured people of Gaza broke out of the prison to which they had been confined by the U.S.-Israel alliance (with the usual timid European support) as punishment for the crime of voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. It was instructive to see the front pages with stories reporting the brutal U.S. response to a genuinely free election alongside others lauding the Bush administration for its noble dedication to "democracy promotion" or sometimes gently chiding it because it was going too far in its idealism, failing to recognize that the unpeople of the Middle East are too backward to appreciate democracy—another principle that traces back to "Wilsonian idealism."

This glaring illustration of elite hatred and contempt for democracy is routinely reported, apparently with no awareness of what it signifies. To pick an illustration at random, Cam Simpson reports in the Wall Street Journal (February 8) that despite the harsh U.S.-Israeli punishment of Gaza and "flooding the West Bank's Western- backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support [to] persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas," the opposite is happening: Hamas's popularity is increasing in the West Bank. As Simpson casually explains, "Hamas won Palestinian elections in January 2006, prompting the Israeli government and the Bush administration to lead a world-wide boycott of the Palestinian Authority," along with much more severe measures. The goal, unconcealed, is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp the essential principle of democracy: "Do what we say, or else."

(Italics and bold added by the Heartland Heretic for emphasis.)

The wonderful world of the Neo-con! And such a legacy, too! We should all be very proud of those in whom we have placed our collective trust. But, what can we do? They stifle and oppress us here just as they do third-worlders. They just have an advantage here... years of media and mind manipulation for the masses, along with fluoridation of the water, mandatory psychological treatment (forced medication), and a pretty decent police militia armed to the teeth for any of those other malcontents.

Oh, and apparently they have engineered a 'stupid' gene and spliced it into the genetics of the "Average American". Because it is way past obvious that the American public cannot think for themselves any more.