Sunday, July 02, 2006

Tell Me How You *Really* Feel

Sean has tentatively hinted at his disappointment in his mother country.

I can't disagree with most of what he says. But I strongly disagree with his lumping of all Americans into one bucket, because that's simply not the truth.

Without getting into the argument of who actually won the last presidential election, it's clear that the popular vote (especially if you factor in the shenanigans in Ohio) was split damned close to 50/50 -- which, during a "popular war," is pretty amazing. It's clear that Americans, in increasing numbers, want Democrats in power in Congress -- presumably to put the brakes on the abuses of power Sean is justifiably angry about.

Read Sean's post in a vacuum and you'd think that we're all either pleased with the way things are going, or unwilling to do anything about it.

Well, I suppose if "doing something about it" means armed revolution, then yeah, maybe we're all wusses. But we're living in a society where two companies (ES&S and Diebold) count three-fourths of the votes cast, and control of the mass media is concentrated in a very few, very rich hands. Now there's an effort to put control of distribution of content on the Internet into those same few, rich hands. Maybe armed insurrection really is the only way to go. Of course, it'd be irresponsible to say such a thing (unless you're Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, in which case advocacy of violence gets you frequent appearances on news programs controlled by those very few, very rich hands).

But short of that, there are plenty of Americans who are angry at what "our" government has done in our name, both domestically and abroad, and who are making enormous efforts to effect a change. So please, Sean, don't paint us with quite so broad a brush.