You never got the sense that the Democrats could win a congressional election. Now that they have, you don't get any sense of the tremendous change taking place, even in the last two years of the Bush administration. Nor did you get a full report on the impact of having all your branches of government lined up in a row and how ugly that is. The President, the Supreme Court, both the Senate and the House, there was no checks and balances. It was all the same party, which was all set in motion by a vote of the Supreme Court against the vote total — don't count the votes -- against Al Gore. We're not going to count the votes. So for six years they had this power, especially after the 2002 congressional election. We had four years of, I call it fascism. I read some books about history and they said when all the forces in the media are all lined up together, that's what the definition of fascism is.
Anyway, you have this false veneer of news. It's not really news; it's propaganda. Roger Ailes was the guy who was Ronald Reagan's ad man. Roger Ailes is now the head of Fox News, the same guy who had the doves released when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; he's the same guy who told the Iranians to hold the hostages until the inauguration ceremony. This is the guy who runs Fox News. And then you don't have any continuity and you don't have any history anymore. Now we're reaping the effects of these kinds of policies. People don't have idea what's going on or what happened, not only in the past but not even now. My favorite is 18 months after 9/11, 72% of Americans believed Ṣaddam Ḥussein was responsible for the attack. Three out of four Americans believed that. This guy was nowhere in the picture. They all watched it on television and this guy was nowhere in the picture. The guys who did this hated him. He wasn't their boy at all.
Do you think the fear from 9/11 was a catalyst that caused people to allow new measures to restrict personal freedoms like the Patriot Act?
There're all these conspiracy theories, you know. I don't know enough about it, but you hear it's the CIA. They've done all kinds of rotten things all over the world, they could have done this. I don't know. Is it possible Al Qaeda or the guys in Al Qaeda were contracted by the CIA? I don't know, or the Russians were in Afghanistan, and the Taliban, and the Islamic Freedom Fighters. Saddam Hussein was our ally for ten years against Iran. Even today you don't see this. It isn't part of the story.
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