The Power of Name-Brand Recognition

While perusing reader comments about the latest NSA spying, er domestic surveillance revelations, on the ABC news Web site's The Blotter today, I came across this anachronistic gem of red-state idiocy (comment posted on May 15, 2006 11:12:28 AM).

"I hope the information they gain allows them to catch the scum that leak information, and helps them arrest the communist scum who publish it."

Comments like this reveal the intellectual capacity of those people who are supporting the NSA/CIA/White House surveillance activities.

Communists? So the whole War on Terror thing isn't enough to scare people into giving up what few remaining civil liberties they still have, now they've got to resurrect the specter of communism? When all else fails, go with the power of name-brand recognition (just ask the producers of Herbie: Fully Loaded, Poseidon, Rocky VI, and so on).

On second thought, why not fire up the old Commie scare machine. Bush-heads love to disingenuously compare the War in Iraq to WW II (instead of the more appropriate Vietnam War), so why not present the War on Terror as just an extension of the Cold War. It's Rumsfeld and Cheney's wet dream of perpetual global conflict (and wartime profiteering).

In fact, this statement is so pea-brained and uninformed, it sounds like something the Idiot-in-Chief himself might have said in one of his bumbling, tortured, rambling, nonsensical, babbling, blathering, stammering, embarassing, stupefyingly simple-minded public statements aimed at pacifying the Republican sheep and scaring anybody out there who dares apply critical thinking to this Administration's willful incompetence.

To anybody that thinks the NSA activites are acceptable, under any conditions, you need to read (not listen to a book on tape, or read the Cliff's Notes, or skim quickly so that you can be done in time to catch the next episode of "Life According to Jim") Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

Animal Farm provides the blueprint for where this society is headed, and 1984 describes the end result. Read and enjoy America, especially you unadulturated Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/NeoCon/Christian Fundamentalist supporters, this is our future if we allow this NSA crap to continue.