Bush's Amerika

Required reading.

As I read Suskind's incisive article, I was newly impressed with our American democracy. Even if George Bush is re-elected, I'm just glad this kind of journalism is on the record for posterity so 50 years from now Americans will look back and see that some of us recognized how scary the Bush Administration was.

See yesterday, Olga, a woman who came to Chicago from the Soviet Union 30 years ago, cut my hair. We were talking about what life was like under Communist rule and she actually said it wasn't much different for her. But when I asked about freedom of speech, she said "oh, the bad things you see on t.v. about the President, that would never happen in Russia." She said that didn't really matter much to her, though, because she never really has much to say about politics anyway. But I keep returning to the thought of a country where I couldn't criticize the President and where the media existed only to support him.

Damn, I love this country.

In other news, the Bush Administration recently threatened to sue Rock the Vote for suggesting that a military draft may be necessary in the future, and Sinclair Broadcasting plans to channel political propaganda over the public airwaves into 24% of American households.