Bad, Worse, Worst and Beyond

Bad, Worse, Worst and Beyond
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Monday 26 November 2007

Fear is just another word for ignorance.

- Hunter S. Thompson

Once upon a time there was Bad, and there was Worse, and there was Worst, and that used to be it. Those were the only parameters necessary when the time came to assess the severity of a given situation and decide if the thing was merely wrong, actually dangerous, or just plan ridiculous. Bad, for example, was Gerald Ford's full pardon of Richard Nixon, which came in tandem with his decision to let Nixon keep the tapes. That's pretty straightforward, and the provided example should be clear enough: Bad means something is pretty damned bad.

Worse, by comparison, was Oliver North's sale of missiles to the same Iranian government that killed more than two hundred Marines in Beirut back in '83, followed by his illegal funneling of that sale's proceeds to fund a pack of kill-crazy fascists in Central America who shot some nuns and other non-combatants down like dogs using the good bullets they bought with thrice-laundered American tax dollars.

All of which was taking place as Reagan slid further into the senility that eventually left him capable only of pretending to be the president. Rather than deal with the reality of the situation, however, the decision was made to hand the entire hyper-weaponized machinery of the federal government over to a bunch of wild boys nobody ever voted for, whose abuse of that power rapidly devolved into a mind-bending crime spree that almost got their uncomprehending boss impeached.

As for Worst, well ... that's simple enough. Worst was a box in the cargo hold of Air Force One that left Dallas with John Kennedy inside of it, and was the blood pooling beneath Robert Kennedy's head as he lay dying on a dirty kitchen floor in California, and was Martin Luther King Jr. shot dead through the throat on some inconsequential Memphis hotel balcony, and was Medgar Evars shot dead in his driveway while his wife and children watched and wailed, and was Malcom Little who became Malcolm X who became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz before a dozen gunshots put him down like Evars to die before the eyes of his wife and children.

That is a fair sampling of Worst, but only for openers, because this file is the biggest of the three by orders of magnitude, fairly bursting with names and events that sound in the reading of them like a roll-call of doom and nightmare, for that is precisely what they are.

Worst was as terrible as it could get, or so it was believed, until now, until the creation of a new fourth category became unavoidably necessary. The bewildering and terrifying fact of the matter is Worst has been fully and completely trumped by the times, relegated to silver-medal status and the lower podium. The grim reality of this brave new deranged world is the nation is now swarming with so many new and different horrors, which were upon us in one brief and ravaging eyeblink of time. It went beyond Worst just that fast.

As such, the new category is titled Beyond...

Read the rest here: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607J.shtml

poignant and thought-provoking.

Fucked up beyond all recognition.

"Well, it will all be OK as long as we elect a Democratic President and extend our Congressional Majority to Veto-proof levels."

Thank you for your constant authenticity. Your articulate and unblinking telling of the truth gives me much hope


INVESTIGATE IMPEACH INDICT IMPRECATE INCARCERATE :patriot:

:kick:

:kick:

(edited for clarity)

You would like to curse or invoke evil upon the administration? They really need that?

enough of that on their own heads by their actions.. no I merely meant to ban, banish, cast out, censure, complain of, confound, convict, condemn, criticize, denounce, denunciate, inveigle against, object to, penalize, punish, or sentence

:hi:


INVESTIGATE IMPEACH INDICT IMPRECATE INCARCERATE :patriot:

:)

:banghead:

who would have thought we would be in this predicament?

And that a solution seems almost nonexistent?

He wrote "Me and Bobby McGee". I heard an interview where he said he took a lot of heat for that line.

:P

That was like reading America's tombstone. All I can do is sit here and nod. Nothing to say. You've said it.

And it may have been you who also said that there should be no place in politics for politicians who want to eliminate government. Who didn't see this coming! It's only twice as bad as most of us expected. But we saw it coming.

And then there is peak oil. And global warmi... Never mind. It's time for survival. Maybe later we can get back on our feet.

It will take the next president their whole first term to even start to catch up with all the shit that Team Bush has shoveled these past seven years, and another full term to hopefully start to catch up...

But, it will take even longer to actually start to make a positive impact on the country and remove the stain of the Bush legacy.

With the exclamation point, by the way.

I'm just worried about how long we are going to live in a state of "beyond!"

the true nature of the beast.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why not.

I talked to several people at the restaurant this morning about what is happening to our government(has happened) and they all just seem to cast their eyes downward and shrug a little bit while mumbling, "well that's the way things are". BULL SHIT! I say to them. You have to get off your ass, do some reading and research and educate yourself as to what is going on.

Your freedoms are being eroded at a faster and faster rate and you sit there and do nothing. Shame on you!

I don't think I will be welcome back unless some of them do get off their asses and educate themselves.

Has anyone else had the same problem?

We are being set up for crises mode which is the only way for them to push through their Chicago School economics. Slash and burn the middle class and poor so as to "hoover the wealth to the top". They are very good at it. The USA is just another frontier of state owned assets. These guys aren't "Americans"— they are global corporatist vultures. The distinction is that if they have to wait too long for carrion, they make sure they can control when the killing gets done. One way or another.

Best 3 this quarter:
Naomi Klein - Shock Doctrine the rise of disaster capitalism
Naomi Wolf - The End of America letter to a young patriot
Al Gore - The Assault on Reason

...thank you because I'm getting my "old lady" credentials as we speak (and *not* feeling secure that SS & Medicare will be there for me), have a daughter your age, and fear I will not live long enough to even *begin* to see a turnaround in this desperate picture you've so eloquently painted. I thought my father and his fellows had taken care of this kind of shit lo, those many years ago, at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

I'm spending a lot of time on the treadmill, trying to keep my blood pressure down, when I realize that even here at DU, people are posting rosy messages about how our Democratic values are gonna carry us through. There's a new day a'comin' and all we have to do is keep the faith. Vote for the Dem and it will all go away. Would that it were so!

Even you, Will Pitt, blasted me for making some Nazi comparisons, but you're forgiven. You're a stellar voice crying in the wilderness, and I know that those with eyes to see are those who suffer more than the rest of humanity.

Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf have issued their warnings. You have issued yours. The trappings of tyranny are all around us, and we have as much a clue what to do as the Germans did in the 1930's. We're living in a slow motion horror movie, and not even the wisest of us knows how to end it. Vote for the Dem, yes, if we actually get to vote. But many have made the excellent point that *they* didn't put in all this effort to bring down the country with an eye to walking quietly into the sunset in 2009.

How we are ever going to get beyond Beyond is occupying most of my waking thoughts, and invades my dreams. I consider running, but the long arm of the lawless is reaching *everywhere*.

I'd love to read a fluff piece from you that would anesthesize me for a few hours, but don't bother. Truth is better. Thanks for your courage!

the copy's getting too much attention.

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Sorry. I couldn't resist. Seriously though, really great insights. Thanks for a great post.

:thumbsup:

Those words, of course, would describe your writing. This editorial is Beyond. Wish that I could recommend more than once. :thumbsup:

I was think about writing an editorial this week along these lines.

Maybe I'll do it next week when I get back in town. One thing is clear.

George Bush is NOT a miserable failure. He's doing exactly what he set out to do. Destroy every working aspect of the government. They're not incompetent. They're very successful. When we look at them as incompetent, we miss the point. They are, as Grover Norquist said, shrinking gov't down to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.

Another right-wing extremist in the family, his brother Jeb, said in his inauguration speech that he dreamed of the day when all of these buildings (Government buildings) were empty. He then started to privatize everything in sight.

I used to deal with people like this in my previous life, as a railroad union negotiator, on a steel mill railroad owned by LTV (Lyin' Texas Varmints, or Liquidate, Terminate, and Vacate. Take your pick). These people took over and started making decisions that astounded everyone involved. I finally said in a meeting, that their decisions only made sense in the context that they were trying to run the company into the ground. They went from having $800 million cash on hand, to bankrupt and shuttered in about 18 months. And they would have destroyed the blast furnaces in the end, had Dennis Kucinich not intervened. They wound up selling the assets for a song, and fucked everybody involved.

This is the mentality that's running our government.

"The Odium from Beyond"
www.ilovepoetry.com/viewpoem.asp?id=93943
The Day the Earth Stood Still - well, sorta?

Would that they spend many years suffering the guilt and shame for the horror they have inflicted.

I hope they are haunted for eternity. They are terrorists!

The insanity by which "our" DC Dem "leaders" act as the firewall against the only substantive action available to even slow the continuing collapse.

It is the only one being visited upon us by friends.

--

"Almost nobody understands or recognizes the cocked and loaded gun pressed against their collective head, even as the trigger is slowly yet steadily squeezed and there are live rounds sitting in the chamber waiting for the hammer to drop."

Good work.

K&R

(not to be too nit-picky, but wasn't King shot in the cheek? I don't know why I rmember that detail)

I didn't see your journal and I could not recommend it. I truly wish it would be published every where. Beautiful writing.