What they don't tell you: United States of Hypocrisy

Part of a 2-5 minute commentary series. About Bush administration hypocrisy and how we must find a space to live in the truth.

(This is part of a 3X a week short commentary series I do for my local community station. I've posted almost all of them on radio4all.net, but some of them are dated. I decided to post some of my non-dated subject matter here.)

The United States of Hypocrisy

Hi, this is Jody Paulson from Moscow, ID with what they don't tell you. The hypocrisy in this country is getting thick enough to choke on. There's something inherently unhealthy about an environment that allows this germ to thrive. You find it in almost all burgeoning dictatorships.

It goes beyond the kind of pseudo-morallity we've come to expect from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the Tammy Fae Baker Christian right.

BTW, to me, being a Christian means following what Christ said to do, which includes turning the other cheek and loving your neighbor as yourself. I don't know what Christianity means to Mr. Bush. A Christ whose calling leads to a situation like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah sounds more like the anti-Christ to me.

Look at our 2004 election situation. Like Ukraine, the election results didn't match exit polls. However, unlike Ukraine, we didn't always have paper ballots and our exit polls weren't financed in part by the U.S. Embassy and other Western diplomatic missions. Yet those who protest the authenticity of our election are called "a small sliver of conspiracy theorists, liberal activists and alternative news junkies" (that was from the Cincinnati Enquirer)
Meanwhile, similar protests in Ukraine are lionized as "pro-democracy forces". Maybe that's because Ukraine is a major geopolitical pivot, and byway for exporting central asian oil and gas, and the pro-American guy lost the official vote.

Remember the demonization of Iraq during the first gulf war? The babies being torn from incubators and so on? That particular story was later found to be a lie. Utter propoganda. Yet several witnesses report the US military fired on ambulences in Fallujah.
Remember Bush's pre-invasion cry, "Saddam gassed his own people!" I guess Bush wanted the job for himself. There are now reports of illegal chemical weapons having been used on the people of Fallujah, including napalm.
Remember how Rumsfeld whined and cried when pictures of captured American prisoners showed up on TV during the initial invasion? "It's against the Geneva convention to show prisoners in that humiliating position!" Yet now we're facing an Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales who publically called the Geneva convention "quaint."

I want to leave you with something from Vaclav Havel's essay "the Power of the Powerless":

"Authoritarian regimes rely on people's cooperation. This is their weakness, because these people must live a lie. When some of those people found a space to live in the truth, they open up an incredible power. Those who remained in the lie could be struck at any moment by the force of the truth. Truth force will eventually draw power away from oppressors. Truth must be the basis of action."

I'm Jody Paulson, and I just thought you should know.