A Truly Sad Day

[Botafogo]

Verne, I hate all politicians, period. I have been around a lot of them of all stripes when they were scheming and stealing from you and I and their contributors as well and acted as if I did not exist while discussing it because I was wearing black and white and refilling their wine glass and changing their stinking ash trays.

I was just reporting on what was going on here as there ARE a huge number of people who feel differently than all the love fests we are seeing on TV (and here). An outside observer would scarcely know this was, in fact, one of the most controversial politicians ever.

What grinds me is that when people say matter of factly, "All Americans love Ronald Reagan" or "Everyone supports the President" they are actually saying, "If you do not love Reagan you are un American" and "Anyone who does not support Bush is not anyone anyway (kind of like those guys in Guantanamo maybe?)".

I would love to see what would happen if Clinton got hit by a bus tommorow. I seriously doubt if Trent and Newt and Co would be finding wonderful things to say about him the way all the Dems are today...

I would just like to see a balanced lood at the history of the thing, that is all.

As to "winning the cold war": Akio Morita (founder and chaiman of Sony and inventor of transistor radios and televisons) won the Cold War. Once people living in caves in Albania and being told they were in a worker's paradise could see reruns of the Honeymooners on Italian TV it was all over. Jackie Gleason was supposed to be "poor" and he had a good job, an apartment he did not have to share with four other families and his wife just kept house and changed her clothes all the time instead of standing in breadlines.

There is a report that someone dropped off a suitcase full of 56K modem cards at the IT department of the University of Prague and three weeks later the govenment fell. Remember how the dissidents and students had that live radio and TV feed on the net back then, WAY ahead of their time and it worked.

Once the government is no longer the sole source of information, people will not put up with the sort of shit those guys were peddling....and they did not. Star Wars had nothing to do with what happened in Romania.