All Hail Freedonia!

Neil Young's Articles of Impeachment

Article I
Let's impeach the president for lyin'
Misleading our country into WAR
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

Who's the man who hired all the criminals
The white house shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new story
Of why we have to send our men to war

Article II
Let's impeach the president for spyin'
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking ev'ry law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if AL QUAEDA blew up the levees,
Would New Orleans have been safer that way?
Sheltered by the government's protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Article III
Let's impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank GOD he's crackin' down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lots of people lookin' at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God

-- Neil Young, Let's Impeach the President from Living With War

Continue reading Neil Young's Articles of Impeachment

rri (May '06)

Neil Young, Living With War

No Need No More Lies

rri (May '06)

Bush Baby-Boomers Take Care of Their Own

GEN-X BEWARE! And all you ever-ambiguous Blank Generation folk, among whom I number myself, you ought to wake up too. For once again, the post-war Baby-Boomers, arguably the most pampered, selfish and programmatically self-indulgent generation in American history, are preparing to take care of themselves at the direct expense of their younger brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. At least, that's the impression one gets reading the Bush-Cato Social Security Administration's online Frequently Asked Questions About Social Security's Future. (Also beware that under the Bush administration we live in an Orwellian world where official government websites frequently change their 'facts and figures' with political calculus, so the following quoted passages may no longer be there when you go to look.) But as it stands at this writing, the Social Security Administration's official FAQ About Social Security's Future is a powerful object lesson in the crude directness of the 'divide...

rri (Jan '05)

Bush's Social InSecurity Plan

Just keeping track of the shifting lies, misrepresentations and bait-and-switch tactics of the Bush Administration as it slithers toward that Holy Grail of Right-Wing American politics, the dismemberment and destruction of the New Deal's Covenant with America, the 1935 Social Security Act, is a dizzying, mind-numbing task. And it's meant to be. It's among the most fundamental of discoveries of the early masters of effective political propaganda in media-dominated, mass societies -- Hearst, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler -- that one's ideological opponents can be kept permanently off balance and ineffective, endlessly marshalling armies of difficult little facts and seemingly condescending appeals to reason and rationality against the easy big lie that one can tell, re-tell, not tell, offer, modify or drop at a moment's notice. To the effective political propagandist "facts" and "reasons" are just so many deployable, imaginative fictions in a world come unanchored where any hesitation, any self-restraint for...

rri (Dec '04)

A Fighting Faith

As if the Cold War nostalgia of the Bush League of Neo-Con Beltway Imperialists and God-Is-On-Our-Side Red State Evangelicals weren't bad enough, now comes the purportedly left of center editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, issuing his own retro clarion call for "a new liberalism," A Fighting Faith, as he styles it, in a black and white world of American might and right locked in another life or death, existential battle with the forces of totalitarian darkness and their fellow travelers at home and abroad.

rri (Dec '04)

What I Really Said About Iraq

Was there ever any doubt that L. Paul Bremner III yet remained a true-blue, die-on-the-sword believer, sold on the grand old neo-con cause? I think not, despite his strenuous defense of self and President in his New York Times Op-Ed piece What I Really Said About Iraq. Nor do I think anyone's especially now excited about whether in 20-20 hindsight Bremner was more right than the generals--those Rumsfeld and Company had left standing--back when this chaos was first let loose. No, I seem to recall just the other day when the point was that Bremner got caught out speaking too openly a present truth about the state of things in Iraq. He was caught recognizing, accepting the reality that things are so bad that we had better start examining and re-examining all sorts of ideas, his among them, of what might have been done better. The point remains, beyond anything...

rri (Oct '04)

Skull & Bones A or Skull & Bones C

As we begin our final election-year descent into the maelstrom of American cultural dysfunction, before we founder beneath the coming wave upon wave upon wave of proud, flag-flying, viciously oafish "Who's Preventing Me From Being A Millionaire?" mass imbecility that is the American populace "making up its mind," before we discover ourselves too much exhausted to speak in the face of all that is so unspeakable about the American people and the American media, we would do well to pause at this summit of the loftiest crag to consider the vertiginous achievement of our peculiar institutions.

rri (Sep '04)

War Crime Planning

On May 6, 2002, the Bush administration announced the withdrawal of the United States from the International Criminal Court Treaty and claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of the permanent war crimes tribunal that the International Criminal Court Treaty established on July 1, 2002. At the time, little was made of this decision outside human rights circles. But as we now know, the Bush administration's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002 was only the tip of an iceberg, the only then visible piece of an extensive internal, on-going effort to reinterpret in secret the Geneva Conventions, U.S. law, Presidential authority, and even the meaning of the word "torture" itself.

rri (Jun '04)

Good Christian Bush

Today, at the conclusion of the G-8 summit conference at Sea Island, Georgia, the world witnessed the morally disheartening spectacle of a President of The United States of America, George W. Bush, himself a professed born-again Christian, unable or unwilling to bring himself to condemn the use of torture as an interrogation technique. Three times he was asked, each time in a distinct and different way in case he misunderstood, each time with a different opportunity to frame an answer, simple or complex, for the American people. There can be no doubt he understood. Three times he denied the moral weight of the issue. Have not especially President Bush's many born-again Christian supporters the moral obligation, the Christian duty before God, to seek genuine and full clarification of his views and feelings on this issue?

rri (Jun '04)

Mission Accomplished

"There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." "Free societies do not use weapsons of mass destruction." "Life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam's regime." President George W. Bush's faith that there is no truth so unfortunate that it cannot be dispelled with barefaced denial and indifferent neglect is simply staggering. More staggering is the percentage of Americans who apparently approve this method of governance.

rri (May '04)

Every Vote Counts

As I sit down to write this, the Office of President of the United States of America seems to dangle from the fingertips of the unelected members of the Florida State Supreme Court. You, reading this presumably after their decision, know much more than I. But what, really, do you know from your future vantage that we all couldn't have known all along just by looking back, back and all around us, with a bit of common sense? Whether the Florida Supreme Court proved our electoral puppet-masters of the last instance? Which dumb block of wood and paste they marched to stage front and which dragged off to the wings? Or whether their decision, trumpeted around the world one moment was challenged the next, proved not final; and other masters assumed the strings and continued the tawdry vote-counting melodrama into a fifth act? And what is that future knowledge...

rri (Nov '00)

(De)Manifest of April Fools Day 2000

We are now living through one of those interesting, though hardly unique or remarkable periods in the history of human delusion when fundamental alterations in existing social, cultural, political and economic arrangements have become as unthinkable as they are inevitable

rri (Apr '00)

Operation Enterprise

The problem with the slogan, the problem with the notion that "democracy means everybody taking care of themselves," is obvious, though hardly ever stated publicly, even by Democrats. Disempowering Big Government accomplishes little more than clearing the field for Big Business. The notion that democracy means everybody, from poverty-level single working mothers to a Bill Gates or a Donald Trump or, more powerful still, an AT&T or a Disney, each separately talking care of themselves as best they can without regard for each other, is patently absurd. Yet it's the standard stuff of our corporate media-orchestrated political discourse.

rri (Mar '00)