Generally one to look on the positive side of things, lately I've felt a bit discouraged.
Always in search of objective truth, I've recently found that there may be too many people out there who for whatever reason can't see truth even if it slaps them in the face. I suppose they are too invested in what seems to be an almost religious fervor to believe their heroes, even when those heroes tell them it's raining on a bright and sunny day.
Name me an issue and I'll point out the lies you've been fed:
Illegal immigration: First of all, you're not even being told that all these people here from foreign countries are here illegally. The euphemism I keep hearing is "undocumented workers". The US Senate passed a bill that completely ignored all of their constituents in an outrageous pander to corporate interests, future voters, and Mexico. But they completely ignored a super-majority of their actual tax paying constituency, who they must think of as ignorant fools.
Iraq: I'll let you in on a big secret: Iraq has a government now, they are standing up their own military and police force, and American casualty rates have been decreasing steadily over the last several months. But somehow talking heads continue to suggest we're losing? And get off the "Bush lied" stupidity. Disagreement with the war for actual geopolitical reasons or general pacifistic philosophies is one thing, but the whole "Bush lied" line is tired and just plain false. Not to mention moot.
Iran: We should be very worried about Iran. Because they have openly thumbed their nose at the world and are working feverishly to build nuclear weapons. The UN won't do anything about it, and it looks like the US won't either because of all the Iraq angst and general war weariness. What's Iran going to do when they get the weapons? At minimum, they will use them to hold the world hostage. Most likely they will give small portable nuclear bombs to their many terrorists to sneak into our country and set them to explode in our cities. And right now it seems most of our population has chosen to pretend there is no risk.
Energy: So all of a sudden the oil companies just decided arbitrarily to ratchet up oil prices just so they could stick it to all of us and make obscene profits? And somehow Bush is involved in the conspiracy to enrich his friends in the oil business. So now we demand price controls or windfall profits taxes on those nasty oil companies. Anybody remember Nixon, who established price controls back in the 70's? It failed miserably, and just made things worse. What about Carter, who got a Democrat congress to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies in the late 70's. Again a miserable failure that economists agree just made things worse. The secret? Iran's a destabilizing force in the middle east, China's buying up more oil than ever to support their exploding economy as they now make everything we buy at WalMart. Venezuela's gone Communist, Russia is creeping back toward Communism. And we in the US aren't allowed to drill for more oil anywhere or build new refineries. All put tremendous pressure toward limiting supplies, therefore higher prices. Oh yeah, alternative fuels. Sure, we could start producing cars that run on ethanol, and the farmers love the idea. Guess what ethanol costs to produce? And how long it takes to build the capacity and roll out new vehicles engineered to burn it? And hydrogen fuel cells? Way down the road, if at all. Yeah, the whole conspiracy theory stuff saying somebody already has invented 70 mpg engines but it's being suppressed by the mighty oil companies is the same stupid idea that was running around in the 70's.
Health Care: OK, we can all agree it's a mess. So what should we do about it? Canada-style socialized medicine? Tax money collected to pay for everyone's health care sounds great to people who don't pay taxes. To the rest of us who already see between 40 and 50 percent of our earnings confiscated by the government, it's a frightening idea. But even those who don't get that much taken away, just wait until you find out what socialized medicine really means. Think you wait a long time at the doctor's office today? As they say, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
There are plenty more issues, but I don't feel like writing any more.
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