Four more years! Four more years!
Monday, Aug. 30, 2004 - 19:55

Here's another entry tonight because my parents are watching the Republican National Convention and I watched it while eating dinner and I have to say:

Capitalizing on the September 11 attacks is shameless. SHAMELESS.

Also, they're saying how wonderful George W. is, how great his response was, what a great wartime president he is, but THEY STILL HAVEN'T CAUGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN, the one who was responsible for those attacks. Iraq wasn't responsible. The war in Iraq is different from the war against terrorism. So Saddam Hussein isn't in charge anymore, so what? THEY STILL HAVEN'T CAUGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN, the one who was responsible. IRAQ HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SEPTEMBER 11, and it really really pisses me off that they're taking advantage of people's emotions, capitalizing on the fear and pain. It's shameless. SHAMELESS.

And they bring it up, bring up the fear and pain and sadness and patriotism and heroism, but they expect us to forget about how they haven't caught the main culprit, they expect us to forget that it wasn't Iraq that attacked us?

George W. Bush is a wartime president because he started a war and made himself one. The war he's fighting is not the war that came to us on September 11. That war, oops, Afghanistan, wasn't going so well. But who cares about that? We have the pretty war in Iraq to distract ourselves with!

I heard a song yesterday that said "greed is a weapon of mass destruction".

(I saw a woman holding a sign yesterday, in my hometown, by the highway, by herself, and the sign said "DU IS A WMD" and I wonder what DU is. Drunk underagers? Someone named, perhaps, Doug Underwood? Or Don Uppenheimer? Or Dorothy Ugg? Maybe she meant "dogs unleashed", because she was next to a bike/walking path that many people take their dogs on.)

I was thinking about having an emergency meeting of This Diary's Book Club because I'm reading a John Grisham book for the first time ever and I was having moral and social crises about it. But now I'm thinking that maybe I should reread Slaughterhouse-five, or: The Children's Crusade, even though I just read it in May, because because because it has a really good anti-war message written by someone who fought in the Holy War, a.k.a. World War II. Did you know that 100,000 civilians died in the Allied firebombing of Dresden? And by 1950 almost 350,000 people had died from effects of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And 23,000 Americans killed each other one September day in 1862 in Maryland? And there are 58,245 names on the Vietnam Memorial?

Hooray for war!

And while we're talking politics, I will once more say that if a woman ever runs for president I'll vote for her, regardless of which party she's from. I'd vote for Hillary Clinton, I'd vote for Elizabeth Dole, I'd vote for Teresa Heinz Kerry, and I'd vote for Laura Bush. Up with women! Men have proven themselves to be very lame! for the most part.

And tonight, Howard Zinn says: I was able to quote at length from the once secret Pentagon Papers to show how the government had deceived the American people about the nature of the war [in Vietnam]. I contrasted the public statements by government officials about how U.S. forces had been sent to Vietnam to protect "liberty" and "democracy" and "self-determination" with the secret memos of the National Security Council, in which, discussing the importance of Southeast Asia, they came back again and again to three words: tin, rubber, oil.