Extremism normalized
How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/extremism_normalized/
Regular reader(s) will no doubt be well aware of my thoughts on our police state. I haven’t had a lot to say on it recently not because there was nothing to say (quite the contrary!) but because I get tired of typing the same thing over and over and over again. Glenn’s article, though, does a fine job of summarizing how far down the path to Nazism we have traveled already. This quote is particularly interesting:
After Dick Cheney criticized John McCain this weekend for having chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, this was McCain’s retort:
Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have.
Of course Cheney’s book is nothing but an admission of guilt in engaging in unconstitutional (hence illegal) activities, yet he goes on book tours and makes millions going on about the laws he broke. Isn’t America great? It allows rich and powerful people to do whatever they please and to hell with the rest of the population! Unlike in Germany, there has been no beer hall putsch created out of an economic depression, instead, all of this has been done by and for elected officials in their expected capacity (though we are in an economic depression, it has had nothing to do with the re-purposing of our government against its people). Oh, and the Jews are not being persecuted this time, it is the Muslims instead. The number of parallels are quite eery as is the path our government is taking.
I will note, however, that at the time I was surprised (and gratified) that Bush/Cheney didn’t invoke some sort of scandal or terrorist action as excuse to declare marshal law to keep Obama out of office, but now I see that Obama is just a darker-skinned version of Bush/Cheney so continuity was assured. It is quite clear to me that Romney is no different from Obama (or Bush/Cheney), so our idiotic path following Nazism will be unperturbed no matter who wins in November.
Please read the rest of Glenn’s article, it has several other quite eye opening passages. Eye opening in the sense that today they barely qualify as news at all, which is really terrifying.
