The New Yorker: Online Only We're beginning what could be a hundred-years war if we don't change our policy. I don't think a lot of people, particularly in Washington, particularly in places in the White House, fully understand the dangers of going to a full-scale war. The fact of the matter is that there's no reason for a fundamentalist Muslim to have anything but contempt for Osama bin Laden, because he stands for nothing that has to do with their religion. And we just don't give those fundamentalists a chance to breathe. Our policies push them into his camp too much. I'm not saying anything new—I think Jimmy Carter was trying to say the same thing last week when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Unless we deal with the real issues, the underlying issues around the world that lead to the kind of madness that we saw on September 11th; unless we can deal with some of those underlying problems—the lack of any trickle-down economy in the Gulf world, the complete corruption of the leadership of most of the oil sheikhdoms that we tolerate; until we try to apply pressure to make life better there, we'll have problems in the Middle East. We also have problems with Israel and Palestine that we're not dealing with.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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