War is a peace process?

The Death of Language: War is a Peace Process?
Euphemism, Dysphemism, Polysemy, Sophistry, and Sheer Lies in the Political Rhetoric
June 25, 2006

Author’s note:
Euphemism: the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt.
Dysphemism: the substitution of a harsh, disparaging, or unpleasant expression for a more neutral one.
Polysemy: diversity of meanings, a word or phrase with multiple or related meanings.
Sophistry: a subtle, tricky but generally fallacious method of reasoning. A false argument.

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election." Otto von Bismarck
“The reason to start a war is to fight a war, win a war, thereby causing no more war!” GW Bush

Since language is the most central human attribute, the wrongful application of language can profoundly affect negatively on what we think of others and also ourselves in the course of human life.
In his essay, “Politics and English Language”, George Orwell said that the recent political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
As one said that propaganda is to democracy as tyranny is to totalitarianism, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to tell the truth from lie, when the mainstream media, through the massive corporatization, behave as the mouthpieces of the government propaganda just parroting what their masters want them to say, such as “war is a peace process.”

In human history, it is an undeniable and sheer fact: 1. All politicians from Caesar and Machiavelli to the contemporaries like GW Bush, Ariel Sharon and DJ Kim are the masters of polemics. 2. A majority of their audiences are a bunch of gaping primates that suffer from the intensive memory loss and become the lifetime ditto heads. 3. Our media plays a major role to keep this process alive for centuries by way of obsessive commemoration, for example, in the human tragedies like 9/11 attack in the New York City, in the distorted coverage on the Middle East conflict, and in the peace process like 6/15 summit between North/South Korea.

In the American culture of obsessive commemoration, 9/11 became a tragedy of both remembering and forgetting…Americans only show compassion for the victims without showing concern for the structure of their foreign policies that made the victims the object of compassion. In other words, they want to commemorate forever the event but to forget about the historical causality that brought about such tragedy on them.
In this process, the media constantly drum up the discourse of “bringing democracy to others” in order to obfuscate the audiences that the rest of the world wants to emulate the American system.

During the Gulf War in early 1990s, the Allied Forces have indiscriminately bombed the Iraqi civilian properties and killed thousands of people, one of which air raids killed over 300 men, women, and children who were hiding in a bunker.
When the press corps asked then Joint Chief of Staff and later the Secretary of State, Colin Powell about the massacre, the Orwellian General blandly commented it as one of the "Collateral Damage”, an exemplary dysphemism of harsh word “civilian slaughter” and he nonchalantly blurted out; “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
For him, civilian victims of war are secondary and accompanying damage that is not overtly to be concerned about and brushed aside as enjoyable as a turkey shoot…that is, he wants to provide his audiences with more neutral and amiable feeling about the war.

However, the linguistic obfuscation did not start from the 9/11 catastrophe…it has a long history.
Changing the name of “War Department” in early 20th century to “Department of Defense” in the US Government was one of the linguistic obfuscation that the generals wanted to change their image from the uniformed and licensed killers to the decorated and self-defense patriots.
These obfuscation of language goes beyond a mere word to encompass entire phrases…in the Middle East conflict, where the Israeli Government is a world-class liar, one can count on almost anything what they say as being all false, partly true or false, or true but out of context.
In a world such as the Jewish hypocrisy, where words have lost all meaning, people do not need any dictionary.
Then how had Jews manipulated the world opinion that they are not so much oppressors, even in the occupied territories of Gaza Strips and the West Bank, as the oppressed ones?
The mainstream media do the superb job as it has been controlled by the Jewish financiers, publishers, writers, editors, and correspondents.

For example, when the Jews shoot you in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, you are by definition a militant no matter whether you are a 6 months old baby, 15 years old kid, or 80 years old grandpa, and when the Palestinian kids throw stones to the Israeli tanks and want to end the Israeli occupation, they are becoming instantly a bunch of vicious terrorists.
One of the worst semantic games is a popular usage of an euphemistic word, “transfer”, that the Jews often but discreetly used in the past and now openly and publicly dare to use, in place of “ethnic cleansing”, describing the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip or Jordan, and the mainstream media willingly accept and parrot it without any compunction. (Contrarily, the West, during the Kosovo War, used the word of “ethnic cleansing” feverishly to dehumanize Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.)

The Israeli Broadcasting Authority even has banned its editorial departments from using the term “Settlers, or Settlements” on Radio and TV, and favored the term “neighborhood” in order to depict the Jewish colony, the housing community built on land illegally seized by Israel after the 1967 War, as a legitimate suburban region adjacent to the major Jewish residential area.
And the CNN and New York Times sheepishly buckled under the Jewish pressure beginning to refer Gilo, one of the Jewish Settlements near Jerusalem, to “Neighborhood”…a language of polysemy, a Neighborhood to Jews and a Settlement (colony) to Arabs and the media are in favor of the Jews pick.

Another sophistry and sheer lie in the rhetorical shenanigans are to elevate the State of Israel up to the status of “One and Only” democracy in the Middle East that GW Bush called the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “a Man of Peace”. (Miserably our “Man of Peace” is living in a coma since last January while peeing and pooping in his pants and enjoying (?) to taste how bad and miserable his life can be.)
The Webster’s New World dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, “the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle”, and none of the words in the description applies to the practices of the Israeli government in toto, and world laughed at GW Bush whose words surprised no one, because it is a simpleton’s word only fools swallow it.

After a successful installation of a puppet regime in Afghanistan with an ex-oil salesman of the Unocal, who dons a Giorgio Armani mantle, it’s time for another campaign of war, “regime change” in Iraq, another dysphemistic term to describe “overthrowing a sovereign government in any means”.
The casus belli is weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly possesses to harm the Americans…it was as flimsy pretext as the North Korea possesses one or two atomic bombs to harm the Americans, surely “a Samson Option” that no North Koreans would remain alive, if Kim Jong-il ever initiates an Atomic war, under the massive thermo-nuclear attack by the one and only superman in the world USA.

The American audiences are constantly fed to believe by their politicians and media that the long-range missile test by the North Korea poised to harm their national security while, in breath-taking double standard, the US itself performed an exactly similar test last Wednesday when it fired a minuteman missile from Vandenberg Air force Base to Kwajelien Atoll in the Pacific.
The US Government said their test was routine and the US conducted such tests on a continuing basis as if it has a prerogative to test anytime when it wishes.

Going in cahoots with his overlord, USA, DJ Kim, ex-president of the South Korea, demanded in the speech at the 6th cerebration festival of the 6/15 Joint Declaration that the North must abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for the US guarantee on the North security…it’s like demanding a drowning man floating in the stormy ocean to abandon his lifejacket and wait until Uncle Sam sends a rescue helicopter to be plucked him out from the shark-infested sea.

Withered by age and disease at late septuagenary, DJ Kim was reputed as everlasting and another corrupt political hack in the South Korea where an old Machiavellian-par-excellence casts a long shadow over the political life of the nation. (He barely escaped from prosecution after his three sons were convicted and jailed of bribery, fraud, and influence-peddling during his Presidency.)
His skullduggery procuring the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 deserves to be highlighted in the Korean history…he commodified the peace process in the inter-Korean talks.

DJ Kim began his solicitation for talks with his northern brother by way of bribing his partner with cold cash, billions of US dollars from the national treasury…replenishing it occasionally with sacks of rice, corn, fertilizer, etc (his confidant is still rotting in jail for the deal.)
His northern brother frequently up the ante whenever he needs extra cash or bags of goodies, and DJ happily accommodated his brother’s request whenever he needs to prop up his sagging popularity during his Presidency.
In other words, he put “peace” on the shelf in the North/South supermarket as if “peace” could be bought and sold according to the free market principle of demand and supply.

In the meantime, he is as sly as an old fox…in his keynote speech at the Summit for Nobel Peace Laureates this year, he reasoned the nuclear issue the one and only hurdle that hampers the improvement of the North/South relation.
However, all Koreans, North or South, and all world, are aware of the undeniable reality that it is a non sequitur to talk about détente, cooperation, or unification between two Koreas without raising the critical and core issue of the US Occupational Forces in South Korea.
Only compradors like DJ Kim pretend that two Koreas could be united under the hanky-panky “Federal System” that leaves behind the thorny issue of the half-century US occupation.

When you were leashed to a peg like a dog sitting by it for half a century, you do not feel you are leashed until you feel a pull when you try to move over beyond the leash.
This is the exact political reality where the South Koreans live by for over half a century…you can have your own government, president, military, money, luxury, material satisfaction, and also you can play soccer too on an equal footing against your overlord USA, beating them to pulp and feel good about it…but you can not move beyond the perimeter around the peg that your overlord demarcated...a dictionary definition of “protectorate”, not “sovereign state.”

However, few South Koreans seem to think that Americans, hegemonic and Svengali, have just replaced Japanese occupiers after the soi-disant 8/15 Liberation…and for the first time in the Korean history, they have been living under the foreign occupation for several decades with no end in sight, but still are not aware of their status quo of being “the US Protectorate” as Polynesians, Marshall Islanders, or Puerto Ricans.
That’s the beauty of political rhetoric…we the people swallow it without the second thought when the mainstream media prostitute their talents in the service of government propaganda that war is a peace process, in which we the people goosestep to toe the line wherever our politician leads us like a pack of lemmings.

The following is a Shakespearean babble delivered by the Washington Warlord, Donald Rumsfeld, who enjoys ridiculing his audience and playing his word game of disdainful charade, to a crowd of reporters in Brussels in early June years ago, who were asking about the progress of the war on terrorism.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence”…it is a masterpiece of sophistry in the word games of Washingtonian rhetoric that Shakespeare would roll over in his grave.


“The message is that there are no “knowns.”
There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns.
That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well, that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.
And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns…there is another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

George Fiddles While Earth is Burning

George fiddles while earth is burning
April 23, 2001

On Earth Day, George W Bush fiddled with the environment-friendly rhetoric: “As we celebrate Earth Day on this April 22 2001, I encourage Americans to join me in renewing our commitment to protecting the environment and leaving our children and grandchildren with a legacy of clean water, clean air, and natural beauty.”

During debate in the Presidential Election, he read off from his cue card: “I am really committed to clean water and clean air and cleaning up the new kinds of challenges, like global warming.”

Less than 100 days since his inauguration, he did more damages on environment than any other Presidents including Ronald Reagan, who believed that there was no such thing like global warming.
1. He shocked the world declaring that he would abandon his campaign pledge of regulating carbon dioxide, the principal culprit of the global warming.
2. His Administration would not abide by the international treaty on climate at Kyoto agreement that requires the US of cutting emission 7 percent from 1990 benchmark.
3. He would rescind a Clinton Administration’s decision that would have limited arsenic in drinking water to no more than 10 parts per billion.
4. He slashed in his first budget on wind, geothermal and hydrogen energy by 48 percent, on solar energy by 54 percent, and committed to more nuclear power initiative.
5. He proposes limiting on the ability of environmental groups to enforce the Endangered Species Act and authorizing the Attorney General an only source of the judicial action.
6. He wants to rip apart the Arctic National Wild Life Refuge in Alaska in order to place oilrigs and pipe lines, as he is in hock to the oil industries in terms of the campaign funds and self-interest.

George knows to celebrate the rich blessings of American natural resources, but appears to be negligent to take stock of its stewardship of nature’s gift, when one looks at what he proposed, implemented, and advocated the environmental policies of destruction and commercialization on its natural treasures.
George and his Republican corporate barons do not believe in the study that most of the global warming in the past decades has been caused by human activities, primarily the burning of oil, gasoline and coal, which produce carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

They seem to be oblivious on many strange things are happening around the globe.
According to the study by the Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University, the ice cap atop Mount Kilimanjaro, that inspired Ernest Hemingway and has floated like a cool beacon over the shimmering equatorial plain of Tanzania, is retreating at such a pace that it will disappear in less than 15 years.
Another study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Geneva showed that the global warming is widespread from Montana, Europe, Peru, Tibet, Africa to Arctic, melting glaciers on the top of Swiss Alps and shrinking sea ice in the Arctic, and the climate changes has brought about droughts, floods, heat waves, cyclones, tornadoes, violent storms and spread of cholera and malaria in the continents.

For George and his ilk, oil is lifeblood of “ American democracy” that they were awarded by a gang of five justices in the US Supreme Court, and George wasted no time to push through licenses for oil and gas drilling in the remote northern Alaska which is known as America’s Serengeti, a frozen sanctuary to a wealth of animals, including caribou, wolves, musk oxen, three species of bears, foxes, thousands of migratory birds, and American Indians.
Even though George insisted that the drilling area is about 8 percent (1.5 million acres) in the coastal plain of the Refuge, opponents of the plan brought the devastating effects of the air pollution in the Prudhoe Bay located to the west of the Refuge.
Three decades ago, the Bay was explored for oil and gas that has expanded like a wild fire in every direction and into the Arctic Ocean, where nitrogen oxide emissions in the air now exceeds 56,000 tones a year, twice the level of air pollution over Washington DC.

Opening the Refuge is just the first flash point. BP Exploration and Philip Alaska—two of the biggest oil firms operating in Arctic—admit that they are setting their eyes on the Beaufort Sea and in the vicinity, because the Refuge is thought to be capable of producing not enough oil to solve the energy shortage in the United States.
Americans consume about 19 million barrels of oil a day, 8 million of that as gasoline, and they use nearly 7 billion barrels a year and import slightly more than half of them from around the world. Since Alaska Refuge estimates holding 5 to 16 billion barrels total, it only covers only 5 years of import oil at the most, that is hardly long-term solution without going deep further into the more exploration with more risk of destroying the pristine environment.

When Galileo in 1600s suggested that the earth was round, he was branded a heretic and imprisoned for his scientific discovery, as in the 1990s scientists determined the burning of fossil fuels had an adverse effect on climate change, oil barons called the science flawed.
Though the damaging effects of fossil fuel today are no longer in dispute, the current political climate under the Bush Administration promotes oil exploration to help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and on the other hand protects the oil industry profits.
Everyone knows that carbon dioxide does not float away in a day or two to nowhere, but remain in the atmosphere for over 100 years, and George wants to continue to feast like a glutton at the table of the world resources, because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame as his ravenous fellow citizens drive around with gas-guzzling SUV kvetching high price of gas.

The root problem is people do not feel that the global warming is universally dangerous and harmful to everyone on earth, until flood, drought or tornado hit their own communities.
Some of evangelicals dare to attribute the natural catastrophes to the God’s will and advocate more devotional prayer rather than to persuade for moderate consumption of irreplaceable natural resources.
In the great industrial societies, like US, Canada and other western developed countries, which have benefited so long from the rapacious devouring of resources and the indiscriminate release of pollutants, people have been heavily nurtured, educated, and programmed in the capitalistic system to aspire for maximum consumption of every available resources during their life time, as they love to have “all-you-can-eat” buffet and end up getting fat, sick, and croak.

Conserving energy is a non sequitur in the corporate society where the unrestricted consumption is valued as the lifeblood in the ever-expanding economic structure.
As the spiritual values in the developed countries thrives on the eschatological concepts in Christianity, the corporate society would feed on its own body in the end when it does not have anything left to consume and take everyone on earth for cannibalism including George, his ilk, and 10-million Americans who voted for him.

In short, George W Bush is an environmental nightmare not just for American gluttons but also for all creatures living on earth.

Governor Malaprop goes to Washington

Governor Malaprop goes to the White House
November 5, 2000

Americans are about to elect an airhead and gaffe artist as their president on Tuesday.
George W Bush has a brilliant resume of Yale and Harvard Business School plus Governor of Texas, but most of the US media people know that he is a befuddled no-brainer who can not reason a very simple matter, because his gilded background entitles him not to reason, but to shoot off randomly from both ends of his mouth.

George has been spending most of his adult life fooling around, getting drunk and being caught DWI, evaded the military service during Vietnam War, and never had a real job coasting aimlessly through four decades of his life. He once failed to bid for a seat in Congress and his parents advised him to ran for a Governor of Texas, largely because he hasn’t got much thing to do with millions of dollars he was able to scoop thanks to the help of the family friends.

George W is a mirror of mediocrity that is corrupt, banal, ignorant, money-grubbing, and hypocritical in capitalist society.
The New York Times stated: Mr. Bush is almost an accidental candidate, a cocky and cheerful fellow who drifted through much of his life and who was largely unknown to the United States until he assumed his first political office five and a half years ago. Yet now he leads the polls, and will have, if elected, one of the thinnest resumes in public service of any president of the last century.

Marlin Fitzwater, his father’s presidential spokesman quoted: “George W almost never showed interest in politics or policy. I can’t remember us ever talking about policy, in fact, he was so apolitical in the way he approached the presidency and the family that I was shocked when he ran for governor. Friends say that when he himself ran unsuccessfully for congress in 1978, he was motivated not by deep-seated ideological convictions but by the thought that it would be cool to be a congressman. He is determinedly anti-intellectual, gives little evidence of having thought out a political philosophy and jokes about his fondness for reading the executive summary and skipping the long report. All this means that he is relatively illegible man.”

George W has a ridiculous habit of misusing of words, especially by the confusion of words that are similar in sound…like Mrs. Malaprop, such as using subscribe for ascribe, retort for resort, forethought for forefront, gracious for grateful, gist for grist, and so on.
He even mixes plural nouns with singular verbs like “Our priorities is our faith” or “Families is where our nation takes hope”.
In American politics, where a majority of voters is not able to find Bahrain or Iraq in the world map, the Bush name is enough to make George W a marketable commodity in the presidential election.

Here are George W Bush’s malapropism compiled by Mr. Jacob Weisberg.

"I don't want nations feeling like that they can bully ourselves and our allies. I want to have a ballistic defense system so that we can make the world more peaceful, and at the same time I want to reduce our own nuclear capacities to the level commiserate with keeping the peace."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 23, 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000
"If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room care, we're going to have gag orders."
"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it."
"It's one thing about insurance, that's a Washington term."
"I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun."
"Mr. Vice President, in all due respect, it is—I'm not sure 80 percent of the people get the death tax. I know this: 100 percent will get it if I'm the president."
"Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about."
"If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it."—St. Louis, Mo., October 18, 2000
"Our priorities is our faith."—Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000
"I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children."—Second presidential debate, Oct. 11, 2000 (Thanks to Leonard Williams.)
"It's going to require numerous IRA agents."—On Gore's tax plan, Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000
"I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question."—In response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000 (Thanks to Peter Feld.)
"I would have my secretary of treasury be in touch with the financial centers, not only here but at home."—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."—Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
"I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy."—Redwood, Calif., Sept. 27, 2000
"One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected."—Los Angeles, Sept. 27, 2000
"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."—Beaverton, Ore., Sep. 25, 2000
"Well, that's going to be up to the pundits and the people to make up their mind. I'll tell you what is a president for him, for example, talking about my record in the state of Texas. I mean, he's willing to say anything in order to convince people that I haven't had a good record in Texas."—MSNBC, Sept. 20, 2000 (Thanks to Gregory H. Monberg.)
"I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans."—Oprah, Sept. 19, 2000
"A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."—The Edge With Paula Zahn, Sept. 18, 2000
"The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her."—Orange, Calif., Sept. 15, 2000
"The best way to relieve families from time is to let them keep some of their own money."—Westminster, Calif., Sept. 13, 2000
"They have miscalculated me as a leader."—Ibid.
"I don't think we need to be subliminable about the differences between our views on prescription drugs."—Orlando, Fla., Sept. 12, 2000
"This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow citizens, I like interfacing with them."—Outside Pittsburgh, Sept. 8, 2000
"That's Washington. That's the place where you find people getting ready to jump out of the foxholes before the first shot is fired."—Westland, Mich., Sept. 8, 2000
"Listen, Al Gore is a very tough opponent. He is the incumbent. He
represents the incumbency. And a challenger is somebody who generally
comes from the pack and wins, if you're going to win. And that's where
I'm coming from."—Detroit, Sept. 7, 2000 (Thanks to Michael Butler, Houston, Texas.)
"We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Texas, Sept. 6, 2000
"We don't believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of Americans."—Scranton, Pa., Sept. 6, 2000
"I regret that a private comment I made to the vice presidential candidate made it through the public airways."—Allentown, Pa., Sept. 5, 2000.
"The point is, this is a way to help inoculate me about what has come and is coming."--on his anti-Gore ad, in an interview with the New York Times, Sept. 2, 2000
"As governor of Texas, I have set high standards for our public schools, and I have met those standards."--CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000
"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."--Ibid.
"I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes."—Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 21, 2000
''This campaign not only hears the voices of the entrepreneurs and the farmers and the entrepreneurs, we hear the voices of those struggling to get ahead."—Ibid.
"We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.''—Ibid.
"I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together."—Bartlett, Tenn., Aug. 18, 2000 (Thanks to Tarja Black.)
"I think he needs to stand up and say if he thought the president were wrong on policy and issues, he ought to say where."—Interview with the Associated Press, Aug. 11, 2000 (Thanks to Ryan Rhodes.)
"I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking."—Salinas, Calif., Aug. 10, 2000 (Thanks to Kris Sester.)
"And if he continues that, I'm going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person."—President George H.W. Bush, on the Today show, Aug. 1, 2000
"You might want to comment on that, Honorable."--To New Jersey's secretary of state, the Hon. DeForest Soaries Jr., as quoted by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, July 15, 2000
"This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death penalty cases."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 23, 2000 (Thanks to Johnny Green.)
"States should have the right to enact reasonable laws and restrictions particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live."—Cleveland, June 29, 2000 (Thanks to Douglas Basford.)
"Unfairly but truthfully, our party has been tagged as being against things. Anti-immigrant, for example. And we're not a party of anti-immigrants. Quite the opposite. We're a party that welcomes people."—Cleveland, July 1, 2000 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)
"The fundamental question is, 'Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?' I will be, but until I'm the president, it's going to be hard for me to verify that I think I'll be more effective."—In Wayne, Mich., as quoted by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times, June 28, 2000
"The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed I have been comfortable with the innocence or guilt of the person that I've looked at. I do not believe we've put a guilty ... I mean innocent person to death in the state of Texas." All Things Considered, NPR, June 16, 2000 (Thanks to Andy Nouraee.)
"I'm gonna talk about the ideal world, Chris. I've read—I understand reality. If you're asking me as the president, would I understand reality, I do."—On abortion, Hardball, MSNBC; May 31, 2000
"There's not going to be enough people in the system to take advantage of people like me."—On the coming Social Security crisis; Wilton, Conn.; June 9, 2000 (Thanks to Andy Mais.)
"I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating."—U.S. News & World Report, April 3, 2000 (Thanks to Alfred Stanley, Austin, Texas.)
Bush: "First of all, Cinco de Mayo is not the independence day. That's dieciséis de Septiembre, and ..."
Matthews: "What's that in English?"
Bush: "Fifteenth of September." (Dieciséis de Septiembre = Sept. 16)
—Hardball, MSNBC, May 31, 2000 (Thanks to numerous readers.)
"Actually, I—this may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about—when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me."—Ibid.
"This is a world that is much more uncertain than the past. In the past we were certain, we were certain it was us versus the Russians in the past. We were certain, and therefore we had huge nuclear arsenals aimed at each other to keep the peace. That's what we were certain of. ... You see, even though it's an uncertain world, we're certain of some things. We're certain that even though the 'evil empire' may have passed, evil still remains. We're certain there are people that can't stand what America stands for. ... We're certain there are madmen in this world, and there's terror, and there's missiles and I'm certain of this, too: I'm certain to maintain the peace, we better have a military of high morale, and I'm certain that under this administration, morale in the military is dangerously low."—Albuquerque, N.M., the Washington Post, May 31, 2000
"He has certainly earned a reputation as a fantastic mayor, because the results speak for themselves. I mean, New York's a safer place for him to be."—On Rudy Giuliani, The Edge With Paula Zahn, May 18, 2000 (Thanks to Peter Goldman.)
"The fact that he relies on facts—says things that are not factual—are going to undermine his campaign."—New York Times, March 4, 2000 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)
"I think we agree, the past is over."—On his meeting with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."--Reuters, May 5, 2000 (Thanks to Allison Fansler.)
GOV. BUSH: Because the picture on the newspaper. It just seems so un-American to me, the picture of the guy storming the house with a scared little boy there. I talked to my little brother, Jeb—I haven't told this to many people. But he's the governor of—I shouldn't call him my little brother--my brother, Jeb, the great governor of Texas.
JIM LEHRER: Florida.
GOV. BUSH: Florida. The state of the Florida.—The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, April 27, 2000
"I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It's what I'm interested to know."—On what happened in negotiations between the Justice Department and Elián González's Miami relatives, as quoted by the Associated Press, April 26, 2000 (Thanks to Saul Selzer.)
"Laura and I really don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis."—Meet the Press, April 15, 2000
"You subscribe politics to it. I subscribe freedom to it."—Responding to a question about whether he and Al Gore were making the Elián González case a political issue. In Palm Beach, Fla., as quoted by the Associated Press, April 6, 2000 (Thanks to Helen Kennedy.)
"I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California."—In Los Angeles as quoted by the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2000
"Reading is the basics for all learning."—Announcing his "Reading First" initiative in Reston, Va., March 28, 2000 (Thanks to Carl LaRocca.)
"We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there's not this kind of federal—federal cufflink."—At Fritsche Middle School, Milwaukee, March 30, 2000
"Other Republican candidates may retort to personal attacks and negative ads."—Fund-raising letter from George W. Bush, quoted in the Washington Post, March 24, 2000
"I've got a reason for running. I talk about a larger goal, which is to call upon the best of America. It's part of the renewal. It's reform and renewal. Part of the renewal is a set of high standards and to remind people that the greatness of America really does depend on neighbors helping neighbors and children finding mentors. I worry. I'm very worried about, you know, the kid who just wonders whether America is meant for him. I really worry about that. And uh, so, I'm running for a reason. I'm answering this question here and the answer is, you cannot lead America to a positive tomorrow with revenge on one's mind. Revenge is so incredibly negative. And so to answer your question, I'm going to win because people sense my heart, know my sense of optimism and know where I want to lead the country. And I tease people by saying, 'A leader, you can't say, follow me the world is going to be worse.' I'm an optimistic person. I'm an inherently content person. I've got a great sense of where I want to lead and I'm comfortable with why I'm running. And, you know, the call on that speech was, beware. This is going to be a tough campaign."—Interview with the Washington Post, March 23, 2000
"People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I'll give you an example; I don't read what's handed to me. People say, 'Here, here's your speech, or here's an idea for a speech.' They're changed. Trust me."—Interview with the New York Times, March 15, 2000
"It's evolutionary, going from governor to president, and this is a significant step, to be able to vote for yourself on the ballot, and I'll be able to do so next fall, I hope."—In an interview with the Associated Press, March 8, 2000 (Thanks to Joshua Micah Marshall.)
"It is not Reaganesque to support a tax plan that is Clinton in nature.''—Los Angeles, Feb. 23, 2000
"I don't have to accept their tenants. I was trying to convince those college students to accept my tenants. And I reject any labeling me because I happened to go to the university."—Today, Feb. 23, 2000
"I understand small business growth. I was one."—New York Daily News, Feb. 19, 2000
"The senator has got to understand if he's going to have—he can't have it both ways. He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."—To reporters in Florence, S.C., Feb. 17, 2000
"Really proud of it. A great campaign. And I'm really pleased with the organization and the thousands of South Carolinians that worked on my behalf. And I'm very gracious and humbled."—To Cokie Roberts, This Week, Feb. 20, 2000
"I don't want to win? If that were the case why the heck am I on the bus 16 hours a day, shaking thousands of hands, giving hundreds of speeches, getting pillared in the press and cartoons and still staying on message to win?"—Newsweek, Feb. 28, 2000
"I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists."—ibid.
"If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign."—Hilton Head, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000
"How do you know if you don't measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?"—Explaining the need for educational accountability in Beaufort, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000
"We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican Debate, Feb. 15, 2000
"I do not agree with this notion that somehow if I go to try to attract votes and to lead people toward a better tomorrow somehow I get subscribed to some—some doctrine gets subscribed to me."—Meet The Press, Feb. 13, 2000
"I've changed my style somewhat, as you know. I'm less—I pontificate less, although it may be hard to tell it from this show. And I'm more interacting with people."—ibid
"I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth."—Nashua, N.H., as quoted by Gail Collins in the New York Times, Feb. 1, 2000
"The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case."—Pella, Iowa, as quoted by the San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 30, 2000
"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?"—Concord, N.H., Jan. 29, 2000
"This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve."—Speaking during "Perseverance Month" at Fairgrounds Elementary School in Nashua, N.H. As quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 2000
"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000
"What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position.''—Quoted by Molly Ivins, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 21, 2000 (Thanks to Toni L. Gould.)
"When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were," he said. "It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there."—Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000
"The administration I'll bring is a group of men and women who are focused on what's best for America, honest men and women, decent men and women, women who will see service to our country as a great privilege and who will not stain the house."—Des Moines Register debate, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2000
"This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential losses."—At a South Carolina oyster roast, as quoted in the Financial Times, Jan. 14, 2000
"We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself."—ibid.
"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000
"Gov. Bush will not stand for the subsidation of failure."—ibid.
"There needs to be debates, like we're going through. There needs to be town-hall meetings. There needs to be travel. This is a huge country."—Larry King Live, Dec. 16, 1999
"I read the newspaper."—In answer to a question about his reading habits, New Hampshire Republican Debate, Dec. 2, 1999
"I think it's important for those of us in a position of responsibility to be firm in sharing our experiences, to understand that the babies out of wedlock is a very difficult chore for mom and baby alike. ... I believe we ought to say there is a different alternative than the culture that is proposed by people like Miss Wolf in society. ... And, you know, hopefully, condoms will work, but it hasn't worked."—Meet the Press, Nov. 21, 1999
"The students at Yale came from all different backgrounds and all parts of the country. Within months, I knew many of them."—From A Charge To Keep, by George W. Bush, published November 1999
"It is incredibly presumptive for somebody who has not yet earned his party's nomination to start speculating about vice presidents."—Keene, N.H., Oct. 22, 1999, quoted in the New Republic, Nov. 15, 1999
"The important question is, How many hands have I shaked?"—Answering a question about why he hasn't spent more time in New Hampshire, in the New York Times, Oct. 23, 1999
"I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember."—On discussions of the Vietnam War when he was an undergraduate at Yale, Washington Post, July 27, 1999
"The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas."—To a Slovak journalist as quoted by Knight Ridder News Service, June 22, 1999. Bush's meeting was with Janez Drnovsek, the prime minister of Slovenia.
"If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm sure I'll have a statement."—Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, June 16, 1999
"Keep good relations with the Grecians."—Quoted in the Economist, June 12, 1999
"Kosovians can move back in."—CNN Inside Politics, April 9, 1999
"It was just inebriating what Midland was all about then."—From a 1994 interview, as quoted in First Son, by Bill Minutaglio

Democracy, American Style (4)

Democracy, American Style (Finals)
December 18, 2000

“Democracy was neutered by a judicial coup.”

As examined and predicted through Part one to three in “Democracy, American Style”, American democracy was short-circuited and finalized by the wisdom (?) of the robed jurists who were appointed along the political party lines.
In developing countries like Pakistan, South Korea, and Sierra Leone, the power grabs were often achieved by a strong-arm tactics or military coup that Americans disparage profusely for its illegitimacy.
When a black-robed gang of Republican-appointed five justices has clinched and rendered the Presidency through a highly specious adjudication to their party candidate, Americans sing in chorus a mantra of “heal the wounds and stand behind our Chief”.

Were these Justices more legitimate, wise, civilized, unbiased, rightful, judicious, or even heavenly in determining who won the presidency than ten million voters did? Then, why bother to cast votes and spend over three billion dollars from the beginning? Why not these Justices flip the coin to choose the Chief?
Apparently, these Justices believed that a blue-blood political family is too valuable to risk irreparable harm and six millions of Florida voters are not significant enough their votes to be counted.
While the Justices acknowledged that there were irregularities in counting votes, they gulped up the violation of constitution and spit out a legalized presidency for their boy, because the time has run out for vote counting.

Only in appearance the Justices reside and cocoon in putative haven of impartiality and gracious halo of fairness…
A doyen of five gangs, William Rehnquist, has a brilliant resume in suppressing minority votes in Arizona after finishing as a clerk under the Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson who was against Brown v. Board of Education. He became controversial during the Senate confirmation hearing for his appointment as a Supreme Court Justice when he owned the house that the title prohibits the sale of the property to blacks or Jews.
Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion blocking the recounting decision by the Florida Supreme Court, blatantly told that he would resign if Al Gore becomes president, because he has no chance of becoming a Chief Justice. His son works in Bush lawyer Ted Olson’s law firm.
Sandra Day O’Conner, one of erstwhile swing voters in the Supreme Court, was a Reagan and Bush appointee and she allegedly said that she would not resign the seat in order not to give Gore chance to appoint a liberal Justice.

One of the remarkable irony in the Supreme Court hearing was there was a black face among nine Justices, Clarence Thomas who has kept mum during the entire proceeding…some suggest that he kept silent because his Caucasian wife works for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that coordinate the recruitment of new Bush team.
But his deafening silence did not bode well for the thousands of black voters in Florida who were disfranchised and harassed by the state authorities, and his blackness in skin seems to be only akin to other disfranchised niggers while his whiteness in heart appears to be more close to the white gangs.
Justice Thomas stood against almost everything that benefits the black people…he was the first Supreme Court Justice in history to criticize the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling outlawing school segregation, and he does not support the Affirmative Action. He is an epitome of Uncle Sam who dares to betray and suppress his own people.

In a nutshell, five wise men clothed Dubya a legal president with no mandate from American people.
However, who needs a mandate when you have legislature, executive branch, and the Supreme Court in your back pocket?
Anyway, people around the world should congratulate American people that they finally have a president, and George W would not disappoint the people who laugh at his tortured English syntax with his deer-in-the-headlights stare.

Here are some additional gaffes he made since November:
The great thing about America is everybody should vote. Austin Texas, December 8.
Dick and I do not want this nation to be in recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work. 60 minutes, CBS, December 5.
The Legislature’s job is to write law. It is the executive branch’s job to interpret law. Austin Texas, November 22.

Americans used to have a Republican Vice President, Dan Quayle, who can not spell potatoes, and again they have a privilege to have a fun of President redux.
God bless America.

Democracy, American Style (3)

Democracy, American Style (Part Three)
December 2, 2000

The US Supreme Court has heard the arguments, on last Friday, from lawyers representing both Republican and Democratic candidates how to read and interpret the Constitution regarding the decision by the Florida Supreme Court.
As usual, the Court was presided over by the Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, and attended by eight other Associate Justices, and Americans believe that these jurists are highly respectable, honorable, knowledgeable, unbiased, and rightful in their decision who will prevail in picking a next president of the United States.

There was an article about the Chief Justice in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by columnist Dennis Roddy, and the world should know who William Rehnquist was in 1964 when he was a Arizona Republican and what verdict Americans expect to get from this kind of jurist.

The following article was published in December 2, 2000

Just Our Bill

Lito Pena is sure of his memory. Thirty-six years ago he, then a Democratic Party poll watcher, got into a shoving match with a Republican who had spent the opening hours of the 1964 election doing his damnedest to keep people from voting in south Phoenix.

“He was holding up minority voters because he knew they were going to vote Democratic,” said Pena.

The guy called himself Bill, he knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman. He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they ‘d lived there—every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.

By the time Pena arrived at Bethune, he said, the line to vote was four abreast and a block long. People were giving up and going home.

Pena told the guy to leave. They got into an argument. Shoving followed. Arizona politics can be raw.

“I said ‘if that’s what you want, I’ll get someone to take you out of here’.”

Party leaders told him not to get physical, but this was the second straight election in which Republicans had sent out people to intellectually rough up the voters. The project even had a name. Operation Eagle Eye.

Pena had a group of 20 ironworkers holed up in a motel nearby. He dispatched one who grabbed Bill and hustled him out of the school.

“He was pushing him across a yard and backed him into the school building,” Pena remembered.

Others in Phoenix remember Operation Eagle Eye, too.

Charlie Stevens, then the head of the local Young Republicans, said he got a phone call from the same lawyer, Bill, Pena remembered throwing out of Bethune School. The guy wanted to know why Charlie hadn’t joined Operation Eagle Eye.

“I think they called them flying squads,” Stevens said. “It was perfectly legal. The law at the time was that you had to be able to read English and interpret what you read.”

But he didn’t like the idea and he told Bill this.

“My parents were immigrants,” Stevens said. They’d settled in Cleveland, Ohio, a pair of Greeks driven out of Turkey who arrived in the United States with broken English and a desire to be American. After their son went to law school and settled in Phoenix, he even Americanized the name. Charlie Tsoukalas became Charlie Stevens.

“I didn’t think it was proper to challenge my dad or my mother to interpret the Constitution,” Steven said. “Even people who are born here have trouble interpreting the Constitution. Lawyers trouble interpreting.”

The guy told Stevens that if he felt that way about it, then he could take a pass.

There was nothing illegal going on there, Stevens said.

“It just violated my principles. I had a poor family I grew up in the projects in Cleveland Ohio.”

Operation eagle Eye had a two-year run. Eventually, Arizona changed the laws that had allowed the kind of challenges that had developed into bullying.

Pena went on to serve 30 years in the Arizona State Legislature. Stevens became a prosperous and well-regarded lawyer in Phoenix and helped Sandra Day O’Connor, now one of the Associate Justice in the US Supreme Court, get her start in law.

The guy Pena remembers tossing out of Bethune School prospered, too.
Bill Rehnquist, now better known as William H. Rehnquist, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, presided yesterday over a case that centers on whether every vote for president was properly recorded in the state of Florida.

In his confirmation hearings for the court in 1971, Rehnquist denied personally intimidating voters and gave the explanation that he might have been called to polling places on Election Day to arbitrate disputes over voter qualifications. Fifteen years later, three more witnesses, including a deputy US attorney, told of being called to polling places and having angry voters point to Rehnquist as their tormentor. His defenders suggested that it was a case of mistaken identity.

Now, with the presidency in the balance, Rehnquist has been asked to read passages of the Constitution and interpret them. Once again, a reading and interpretation will determine whose vote gets to count.

Democracy, American Style (2)

Democracy, American Style (Part Two)
November 28, 2000

Hail to the Thief

On Sunday, the Florida State announced George W Bush the winner of its 25 Electoral College Votes in Presidential Election confirming his 43rd presidency in the United States.
The trouble is that few people, especially around the world, believe George has earned his presidency in fair, honest, and rightful manner, no matter politics run in Machiavellian fashion in one way or another.
There does not seem to have a façade of democracy in the US election, that majority in people’s will does not guarantee the outcome of its will manifested rightfully and surrenders to the whims of a pack of mandarins and judges who were appointed through the strict guideline of party loyalty.

There are some historical facts that this election result defies the principles of democracy:
1. Gore won more popular votes than Bush by over 330,000 margin nationwide.
2. Gore won over 50 million votes only the second US presidential candidate ever to reach that figure; Ronal Reagan won 54,455,000 votes in his re-election bid in 1984.
3. Gore won over 50 million votes the first candidate to garner it as a non-incumbent president; Ronald Reagan received 43,901,000 votes in his first run for Presidency as a California Governor, fewer than 6 million votes Gore got.
4. Gore’s tally exceeded the 1988 vote counts of 47,946,000, which elected then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to the White House, by more than 2 million votes.
5. Gore surpassed margins gained by the landslide victories of past incumbent presidents: Lyndon Johnson’s 42,825,000 votes in 1964 and Richard Nixon’s 46,740,000 in 1972.
6. Gore got more votes than his boss Bill Clinton: 44,908,000 in 1992 and 45,590,000 in 1996

Gore becomes the first popular-vote winner to have lost the Presidency since Grover Cleveland in 1888 got more votes than Benjamin Harrison but lost in the Electoral College, and Gore lost the swing votes of 25 Florida votes in a paper-thin margin of 537 votes, 0.0000895 percent of 6 million votes cast by Floridians.
Considering that every poll has the margin of error, 4 percent, winning the presidency within the error margin would surely make George a booby prize winner, being humbled, squeamish, and extremely nauseated in his muddy puddle
However, cocky George has a gall to stand in front of TV camera, reading the statement from a TelePrompTer that democracy worked perfectly by electing him a president, and he has shown his ruthlessness sending his gasping running mate Dick Cheney to the press conference for public relation, who was released from the heart surgery only couples of days ago. (Dick panted, gurgled and sweated profusely in a live broadcast, and George must have pissed his pant in fear of Dick might faint in front of cameras.)

Governor Malaprop did not have the luxury of making his notorious malapropism in live press conference and took no questions from the unruly pack of reporters hastily retreating to the backroom. (His last malapropism so far was: “They misunderestimated me” at Bentonville, Arkansas on November 6. Please refers to my article: Gov. Malaprop goes to the White House).
When the putative leader of the world democracy could not speak his own language in proper grammatical context (he even combines the plural noun with singular verb, such as our priorities is…or our families is…), the whole world judge Americans making fool of themselves electing an intellectual void to the presidency.
Americans have been lecturing the world on the greatness, fairness, and transparency of their system, sending observers and military polices around the globe to dictate a democracy of American style, a worthy of banana republic, and people begin to wonder about the fate of “free world” under an airhead leadership of the unipolar super power.

As widely predicted, Americans have to legitimize, glamorize, and revitalize their limping democracy through the “civilized” process of judicial adjudication, where nine jurists sit and decide who the tenant of the White House is, and Americans are proud of their tentative but final arbiters as a group of fair, enlightened, and judicious jurists before the Second Coming of their God.

But, Wait a minute.

Who are these nine jurists and how did they get swivel-leather-chairs on the bench? Would their judgement naturally, legally, or whatever have better, lofty, or right credentials than other jurists, scholars, or Tom, Dick and Harry?
Considering nine votes make or break the will of people, would the nine votes make better choice than 100 million votes?
Is there any margin of error in jurists’ decision, if, as usual, the judgement were done by 5 to 4 votes?
What is the difference between the military government of Haiti that was run by a self-appointed junta of several generals and colonels and the “democratic” government of USA that was awarded, legitimized, sanctioned by the nine jurists who were appointed through the scrutiny and consideration of the same system?
Could the will of people have been manifested amply, rightly, and transparently by the nine jurists?

In ancient Athens in Greece where democracy flourished, people gathered in the public square to debate, argue, and decide their fates directly by vote of majority, and this is the essence and beauty of democracy that the representative democracy can hardly attain its goal.
Some apologists may argue that the judicial adjudication is the second best after the God’s will and democracy can not be deferred indefinitely and expediency is necessary to save the Republic…a superb logic of American myopia. (In US prisons, Americans hold their compatriots of over two millions spending $30,000 per person per annum, while it costs only one-third to rehabilitate them, majority of convicts are non-violent drug addicts.)
For non-American denizens on the earth, it doesn’t matter who the winner is, because he would treat the rest of the globe as if he were an absentee landlord, exploit, destroy, and maim the atmosphere for own sake, as if he lives on the other planet.

Democracy, American Style (1)

Democracy, American Style
November 19, 2000

Voters of the United States appear to have lost a sense of distinction in duopoly between the Democrats and the Republicans and split their votes in half with 300 odd thin margin choosing between the tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber.
Two weeks after they cast vote for presidency, it seems clear that the court has to determine who the winner is and people are very much complacent about it.

However, when court becomes an ultimate determinant mechanism of democracy, there are serious infringements in the process of democratic elections, since first of all the courts are formed with various levels of judges, local, state or federal, who were appointed by the executive branches under the strict guidelines of the party loyalty.
People build and nurture the illusion of justice and equilibrium in the judicial system in daily life, when they rely on judges for any dispute with neighbors or institutions seeking the adjudication and receive the judicial decisions as the final authority to determine the right and wrong.

Americans are notorious in litigating almost everything in order to satisfy and accomplish their highly selfish life styles, believing that litigation is the most civilized and balanced form of adjudication.
They live in a society where materialism supersedes over humanity and winners take all, and the courts have a façade of all mighty before the Second Coming of their fictitious and manmade god.
Americans have a tendency to drag anything, everything, and anytime, dog, cat, dad, mom, wife, children, and sisters and brothers, neighbors, old or young, poor or rich, in front of the judges, and seek for the judgement in their favors.

In Sunshine State, Floridians are bickering over the voting chads, as dimple chads, pregnant chads, bulging chads or dangling chads are supposed to be recounted or discarded in the canvassing process.
People in the Third World where Americans used to go to teach a democracy roll their eyes over the intellectual level of American voters who confused over the butterfly voting cards and voted for wrong candidate.
It is extremely hilarious to look at the group of high-powered lawyers like an unruly pack of wild dogs, from each candidate who bitches over whether the machine or human being is best to read the chads or count the votes

When the court functions as a final and ultimate arbiter on where the will of people were, it is nothing more than a judicial coup detat, that only Americans love to entertain and propagate as a true democracy.
Of course one should not expect some enlightened choice between two almost identical candidates from American voters who hold higher illiteracy rate than Vietnamese, and the judicial adjudication could be seen, for apologetic revisionists, a lesser evil than a military coup detat or civilian uprising.
Whoever the winner is, shame on you, Americans.

Does Jesus Play the Soccer Game too?

Does Jesus play the Soccer Game too?
June 12, 2006

As the pandemic fever for the World Cup 2006 reaches every nook and corner on the planet earth, God is not an exception to escape from the viral infection from His beloved believers, especially notoriously chauvinistic, unruly, rough, and Satanic South Korean soccer fans.

One of several hundreds Korean Christian churches in New Jersey State (www.kccnj.com) jumps on the World Cup bandwagon with the flyer that depicts God is on the helping path ensuring the winnings of Korean Team.
The colorful flyer swears that “Power of Jesus” is tantamount to “the Power of Korea”, urging all Korean-Americans come to their church where a wide-screen TV monitor will show the match between France and Korea at 2:30pm on Sunday June 18.
The church promises the audience that they will get free gifts of the prepaid phone cards and a ballpoint pen provided by the giant corporation in South Korea, Korean Telecommunication Co.

First of all, it is a mind-boggling thing that the church, in cahoots with the KT, engages in the commercialized soccer match in order to solicit un- or non-believers to their congregation…claiming that Jesus is on their side if all Koreans gather and root for the Korean Team at their church, as if Jesus is definitely infected with the soccer fever.

It is somewhat hilarious to see that Jesus plays an umpire in the game between his disciples of 12 on his side and other non-followers of Galileans…obviously, for the Korean Christians, the Jesus Team decisively pummeled, without any doubt, their counterpart non-believers, because Jesus blessed his disciples. (no doubt that Jesus could not possibly function as an unbiased umpire in that game.)

As a winner is required to produce at least one loser, no winner exists without losers.
And I wonder why Koreans believe that Jesus always sides with the winner and discard the loser.
Would Jesus discard all losers without any mercy, as the Korean Christians believe?
Is this kind of Jesus a savior of all mankind?

Would Jesus bless only Christians to win and non-Christians go to hell?
What if all contestants were Christians to be blessed by Jesus?
Which group would Jesus choose to bless to win?
Would Jesus pick the Koreans because they are blessed to have a wide-screen TV monitor and lots of free gifts to throw away as if the New Yorkers throw paper confetti in their parades along the Fifth Avenue?

Which prayer would Jesus take to bless among thousands, millions of prayers?
The following is an excerpt from what Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address expressed his opinion about the vanity of Christian prayer

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing his bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The prayers of both could not be answered.
That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purpose.
Amen !!