[...] I heard a US soldier talk about his photographs of the 12 prisoners he had shot with a machine-gun: ‘I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open. I shot this guy in the groin. He took three days to bleed to death.’ I heard him say he was a devout Christian: ‘Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up, and gunned them all down.’ [...] I heard Congresswoman Jean Schmidt say: ‘The big picture is that these Islamic insurgents want to destroy us. They don’t like us. They don’t like us because we’re black, we’re white, we’re Christian, we’re Jew, we’re educated, we’re free, we’re not Islamic. We can never be Islamic because we were not born Islamic. Now, this isn’t the Islamic citizens. These are the insurgents. And it is their desire for us to leave so they can take over the whole Middle East and then take over the world. And I didn’t learn this just in the last few weeks or the last few months. I learned this when I was at the University of Cincinnati in 1970, studying Middle Eastern history.’ [...] [This lengthy and worthy essay reads like the opening statement of the prosecution in a war crimes trial for the Bush administration. Except God's favorite President isn't on trial and I'm not holding my breath.]
"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."