Yeah, whenever Bush Party Loyalists like James Lileks spout on about how we're uh, giving Iraq FREEDOM (cue your own version of his flowery, flatuatory gusts of 'freedom' paens here replete with hyperlink nods to pro-ethnic cleansers like LGF) just remember stories like these about the US shutting down Iraqi papers. For what? For LIES? Hm, so by this standard wouldn't the New York Times itself be shut down for all it's shameless Chalabi tall-tales-passed-off-as-stories, it's Bush admin tall-tales-passed-off-as-stories, and so on? (Here Lileks trots out some photo of a protestor at some rally holding up a retarded sign--"See! See! This is the 'Peace Movement' right here! Let's just look at this, and expound upon this, and forget everything else shall we! Look, ma, verbal hula-hoos!")
"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."