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12.23.2005
President Discusses Accomplishments and Future Priorities: "THE PRESIDENT: I hope you all have a happy holiday. This has been a year of strong progress toward a freer, more peaceful world, and a prosperous America. We had three sets of elections in Iraq. This is an amazing moment in the history of liberty. A new parliament has been seated in Afghanistan. Our economy is strong and getting stronger; people are working, we've added 4.5 million new jobs since April of 2003; productivity is up; small businesses are flourishing; home ownership is high. It's been a good year for the American people." With a link to a detailed "fact sheet" of Our Dear Leader's many accomplishments... But what about the chocolate rations? The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. Once upon time I came across a conservative who proclaimed that the primary reason for his support of the Republican party came from his ardent anti-communism. For many, its seemed that the "problem" with communism was not its tendency to devolve into a tyranny, it was its emergence as a competitor to our own sphere of power. For nowadays we have conservatives, who used to be rabid anti-communists, apologizing for the very same tactics once utilized by the soviet government. So what if the government spies on its own citizens and patrols the parking lots of mosques to take radiation readings? To swallow the line "we're bringing democracy to Iraq" means that we have to accept a very limited and dumbed-down version of what democracy is supposed to mean. Its an organic acceptance of self government, not an imposed election process. Inhabitants of a democracy need not only vote every so often for a small slate of handpicked candidates, they need to be active participants in government. Most importantly, members of a democracy have to believe in the process of self government. We seek a result without completely understanding the process first. Words are containers for ideas. I cannot be a "vegetarian" if I still eat meat. We cannot "love freedom" if we accept tyranny in our name. We cannot "promote democracy" if we don't respect and practice it here first. Words as symbols are empty vessels. |
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