Chilling Trends

Silencing dissent a growing trend. By Steve Thomma - Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON – "The ejection of two women from the U.S. Capitol for wearing message T-shirts during President Bush's State of the Union speech this week was the latest incident in a growing trend of stifling dissent."

And ….

"This trend has a chilling effect on those who disagree with people in power, analysts say."

Chilling huh. I shouldn't expect more from a political writer who actually believed " The 2004 presidential election gives Americans the most dramatic choice of leaders and directions in at least a quarter of a century."

Whoa! Of the two Yale brothers - Bush likes beer and pretzel and Kerry likes French wine and cheese? Dramatic differences indeed.

Had Kerry been installed as president, does anyone believe the US would be doing much of anything any differently? What is "chilling" is how consistently left leaning political writers seem to do nothing more than reinforce the silly idea that we somehow were once freer to "dissent." Guess he wasn't of the age of dissent during the '60s. There was quite the "growing trend" to silence folks back then; with dogs, fire hoses, assassination, jail time, trigger happy National guardsmen, dossiers, etc.

Analysts such as myself might say : Anytime you seriously dissent in the US – the powers that be will kick your butt. Dissenters today are not being gunned down or hosed down, so chill. They can't silence the masses when the masses are not making any real noise. The only "trend" is hack writing from both sides yelling fire when there's not even smoke.

As the hacksters focus on T-shirts, wiretaps, and spies, government henchmen (pols) are busy with designs to dismantle as much as they can of social safety nets, passing big money contracts to corporations who contract the jobs abroad, passing tax hikes along to the states to screw you so Big Federal Daddy isn't blamed, doing nothing about the rising costs of food, shelter, energy; nothing about corruption (tokens don't count), election fraud, and war profiteering.

Our choices, according to the analysts, seem to be freedom for T-shirts (reminiscent of '60s argument to wear the flag on ass of pants) and against eavesdropping. Then, when they tell us we have the right to wear those tees anywhere we want and announce they have ceased warrantless wiretapping – we can yell hot-damn woohoo - we won!