Saturday, August 21, 2004

Manchurian Candidate

From Jim Hightower:

Those who command the empire don't possess great clarity or intellect. Rather, they tend to not ask themselves or anyone else about right or wrong, attributes of sensitive, self-critical people. The Washington imperialists do great harm as naturally and routinely as most people breathe or sleep. Power, getting it and exercising it, sustains them. It is their drug, nay their oxygen. They will say, and do, almost anything to keep it.

So, if 'Fahrenheit 9/11' didn't convince you to vote against the power-crazed gang of George W. Bush, see 'The Manchurian Candidate,' a remake of the 1962 film. The screening of this frightening, fictional Hollywood attack on the influence of a Halliburton-like entity coincides with a shareholder class-action lawsuit charging this mega oil and war-related conglomerate's chief executives with intentionally engaging in 'serial accounting fraud' from 1998 to 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney headed the company from 1995-2000.

Just as Republicans tried to stop the exhibition of Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit,' so too did right wing elements back in 1962 try to stop the original 'Manchurian Candidate' from hitting the big screen. Thanks to President Kennedy's friendship with Frank Sinatra, the lead in the original film, and his appreciation of novelist Richard Condon, who wrote the novel in 1959, the film slipped through the mostly locked gates of Hollywood's political censors. I doubt that the Bushies would give even a one thumb up to a film in which the villain, Manchurian Global, resembles a Halliburton/Bechtel/Enron/Carlyle Group collage of corrupt corporate executives manipulating U.S. policy. 'The Manchurian Candidate's' combined proximity to the November election and to recent legal actions against Halliburton makes for a clear political message - for those who will listen.

[. . .]


If Bush is reelected, we deserve whatever we get.

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