alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

September 25, 2006

Killing Them With Empathy

by AltHippo @ 10:22 am. Filed under propaganda

Currently we’re debating which aspects of the dark ages we’d like to bring to life in 21st century America. How we can reform our tax system to reward the plutocrats. Rendering unto the serfs what is the surf’s, and unto the landlords what is the landlord’s. Will we see a Debtor’s Prison Bill in the lame duck session of congress, I wonder?

I’d like to suggest that it’s not a coincidence that we’re having a torture debate in an Arbusto/Cheney/Rove administration.

The ability to torture another human being, and to do so lawfully, is the ultimate expression of baronial excess. It is what Arbusto/Cheney/Rove have been aiming for their whole lives. In Arbusto’s case it may have been half-conscious, a part of his contempt for those who lack wealth and power.

They may have swapped bullet-proof SUVs for the royal carriage, still Arbusto is King Henry the 8th in a 2-piece-suit.

And while we build a fence to keep the Turks, that is the Mexicans, from invading us (Karl Rove didn’t invent xenophobia, you know), Peter Baker asks the important question: “Is our president empathising?”

He’s the decider, he makes the decisions, not you or I, but is he also the empathizer? We know he’s William Wallace. We know he’s twelve feet tall and balls of fire come out of his ass, but has he shed a tear? We find out:

“But Hildi Halley, a self-described liberal antiwar activist who met with President Bush in Maine last month, said she believes he felt her grief. ‘It wasn’t just a crocodile tear,’ she said in an interview at her home.”

I wonder. If Hildi Halley had said that she believed Bush to be a dangerous sociopath, who masks his inner nullity in staged publicity events, would Baker have printed that?

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95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
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