THE TRUTH BEHIND HOWARD'S "CONCERN" FOR ABORIGINAL WELFARE
By Ian West MLC, NSW, Australia
Mining industry bigwigs have given the Prime Minister the thumbs up over his planned intervention in Aboriginal communities. The Bennelong Society, a group headed up by a man with almost 20 years experience running a mining company, says the plan will encourage Aboriginal people to leave their land. The society, which also features prominent members of right wing organisations, such as the HR Nichols Society and the Institute of Public Affairs, has been described as an "astroturfing" operation that advocates the removal of land rights under the guise of concern for Aboriginal welfare.
Astroturfing -- named after the synthetic grass manufacturer -- is a term applied to groups that appear to reflect grassroots sentiment where none exists to give credibility to particular agendas.
To read Ian's speech to NSW Parliament on the Bennelong Society click here
Astroturfers Sway Contractor Policy
An astroturfing group linked to the Bennelong Society was a major player in bringing about change to independent contractors’ laws last year. The Independent Contractors of Australia claims to represent the interests of independent contractors, yet the group's founder, Bob Day, is on the other side of the bargaining table, as the owner of numerous building companies around Australia. The ICA lobbies for contractors to be moved outside employment law, removing the employer's obligation to provide things such as tools and insurance.
The Howard Government's Independent Contractors Act delivered many of the ICA's wishes. The ICA, similarly to the Bennelong Society, has personnel who are involved with the Institute of Public Affairs. The websites of the Bennelong society and the ICA are managed by the same company, Fergco.
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WHO IS PARIS HILTON?
By John W Whitehead
The melodrama surrounding Paris Hilton shows how perverse news reporting has become. It boggles the mind that newsworthy items of great importance are pushed to the background in order to cover someone who impacts society in no positive way and has no obvious talent other than getting in the news.
Who is Paris Hilton? And what has she done to warrant such extensive coverage? Apart from being born to opulent wealth and starring in a homemade sex video, reality TV series, minor film roles and a self-titled music album, there is little that sets this 26-year-old DUI offender apart from the mass of poseurs that haunt the pages of celebrity gossip magazines.
I’m not trying to belittle Hilton, who may be a closet humanitarian when she’s not driving drunk or cat-fighting with the likes of Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan. However, as news producers are fond of reminding us, there is only so much airtime available for breaking news (I was once bumped from a major nightly news show in order to make room for breaking news on the death of the Clintons’ dog, Buddy). This leads one to wonder what real news is getting cut so that television news programs and newspapers can devote endless hours and print space to Paris Hilton trivia. Let me count the ways.
Terrorism. According to the Department of Homeland Security, we’re running a Code Orange on our domestic and international flights right now, which means that we’re facing a “high risk of terrorist attacks.” Yet, incredibly, Hilton’s release from jail and subsequent re-imprisonment has received more coverage than the plot to blow up JFK airport.
The war in Iraq. Even with American troops and Iraqi civilians dying on a daily basis, Operation Iraqi Freedom receives minimal coverage by the media. We rarely hear the names of our fallen soldiers—they are treated as the anonymous dead—nor do we hear anything about their lives or family members. Yet we’ve been treated to an excruciating amount of minutiae about Hilton’s first few days in jail—from the dryness of her skin (because there’s no cream in jail) to her attire (an orange and brown jumpsuit) and activities (she plays ping pong when she’s not in her room alone). Hilton’s “horrible experience,” in which she didn’t eat, sleep, was severely depressed and felt like she was “in a cage,” even merited an “exclusive” interview with Barbara Walters.
Operation Enduring Freedom.The war in Afghanistan has been dragging on for close to six years, and yet we rarely hear much about it anymore. This is despite the fact that Congress has appropriated about $510 billion thus far for Iraq, Afghanistan and other security concerns.
The genocide in Darfur. It is estimated that there have been 400,000 deaths and more than two million people forced into substandard refugee camps. Is Paris Hilton more important than the starvation, rape and mass killings of innocent civilians?
AIDS in Africa. According to former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, between 1999 and 2000, more people died of AIDS in Africa than in all the wars on that continent, including Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. UNAIDS estimated that worldwide at the end of 2006, there were 39.5 million people living with HIV, 4.3 million new infections of HIV and 2.9 million deaths from AIDS. Sadly, over two-thirds of HIV cases, and over 80% of the deaths, were in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Immigration is one of the more staggering problems facing this country in terms of security and its economic future, and yet we only occasionally hear updates on possible legislation. And whatever happened to our supposed rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina? There are people living in tents and on the streets of New Orleans, but how many of us know it? And although many Americans won’t be taking a vacation this summer because they can’t afford the gas prices, there’s little analytical reporting on why we’re getting bilked at the gas pump.
These are just a smattering of the issues that should be getting better coverage but aren’t. And why is that? Largely because we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture where those writing, reporting and producing the news are more concerned with the antics of so-called celebrities such as Paris Hilton than they are with reporting on the issues that affect the lives of mainstream Americans.
But those who are consumed with such trivia are really at fault here. As a result, we no longer know what’s going on in our own country, let alone the world. And it’s a crying shame.
[Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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THANK YOU AMERICA !!
This, re-printed in a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing. America: The Good Neighbor.
Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television Commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts.
None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it. When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy,
and you find men on the moon -- not once, but several times -- and safely home again.
You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those."
Stand proud, America! Wear it proudly!!
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WOULD JESUS HAVE APPROVED OF THE INVASION OF IRAQ?
By John W. Whitehead
“Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” — Jesus.
With President Bush’s veto of the recent spending bill, fighting in the Middle East will continue indefinitely—wars not only waged by an avowed Christian president but also backed by the evangelical Christian Right. Rev. Jerry Falwell, in speaking of terrorists, epitomizes the Bush Administration’s stance: “I’m for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them away in the name of the Lord.” In this way, Christianity is joined with the state and its war machine.
However, what would Jesus think about this in light of his teachings against the use of violence—war, of course, being organized, systematic violence?
One can only imagine that he would be horrified. After all, many who strive to follow Jesus’ teachings find it impossible to do so and still participate in war. Indeed, leaders in the early church adopted Jesus’ attitude of non-violence. Tertullian (born about AD 160), one of the giants of the early church, stated very clearly that confessing “Jesus as Lord” means taking the teachings of Jesus seriously. Just as Caesar commanded men to kill their enemies, Jesus commanded them to love their enemies. Caesar made use of chains and torture, in much the same way as governments do today. Jesus, on the other hand, taught Christians to forgive and to sacrifice power for servanthood.
In fact, Tertullian had pithy advice for soldiers who converted to Christianity: quit the army or be martyred for refusing to fight. Tertullian was not alone in his thinking. “For three centuries,” writes biblical scholar Walter Wink in The Powers That Be (1998), “no Christian author to our knowledge approved of Christian participation in battle.” This, of course, changed in the third century when the church was institutionalized and became an integral part of the warring Roman Empire.
Jesus’ apostles never advocated violence. Rather, they urged their followers to suffer, forgive and trust God for the outcome rather than take matters into their own hands. And while they may have talked about warfare and fighting, it was not through the use of conventional weapons. For example, the Apostle Paul wrote: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.”
Christ’s crucifixion was a radical repudiation of the use of violent force. And the cross, which was the Roman tool of execution, was reserved especially for leaders of rebellions. “Anyone proclaiming a rival kingdom to the kingdom of Caesar would be a prime candidate for crucifixion,” writes Brian McLaren in The Secret Message of Jesus (2006). “This is exactly what Jesus proclaimed, and this is exactly what he offered.” But Jesus’ kingdom was one of peace. Among other things, he proclaimed, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.” Consequently, Jesus ordered Peter not to use the sword, even to protect him.
The so-called Roman peace (Pax Romana) was made possible by the cross. That is, people so feared crucifixion that many opted not to challenge the emperor rather than face the possibility of death on the cross. Why then would early Christians choose the cross—an instrument of torture, domination, fear, intimidation and death—as their primary symbol? What could this possibly mean?
For early Christians, “it apparently meant that the kingdom of God would triumph not by inflicting violence but by enduring it,” notes McLaren, “not by making others suffer but by willingly enduring suffering for the sake of justice—not by coercing or humiliating others but by enduring their humiliation with gentle dignity.” Jesus, they believed, had taken the empire’s instrument of torture and transformed it into God’s symbol of the repudiation of violence. The message? Love, not violence, is the most powerful force in the universe.
Not surprisingly, the early Christians were not crusaders or warriors but martyrs—men and women with the faith and courage to face the lions. Like Jesus, they chose to suffer rather than inflict violence.
When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” exhorting his followers to turn the other cheek and give freely, he was telling us that active peacemaking is the way to end war. Can you imagine what the world would be like if every church adopted that attitude and focused its energies on active peacemaking?
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who vocally opposed the Vietnam War, took to heart Jesus’ teachings about peacemaking. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, King proclaimed:
“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say “we must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.”
This is not to say that Jesus was a pacifist. The opposite is true. He spoke truth to power and engaged in active resistance to injustice. In my opinion, Jesus would have intervened to defend someone being violently mistreated, and I believe we must do the same. But he would never have engaged in violence as the means to an end.
One has to wonder what Jesus would say about war being waged in his name today. As Gary Wills writes in What Jesus Meant (2006), “If people want to do battle for God, they cannot claim Jesus has called them to this task, since he told Pilate that his ministers would not do that.” In fact, as Wills notes, Jesus “never accepted violence as justified.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available here: HERE
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BUSH, A TYRANT, WILL SEND AMERICA BANKRUPT
[Interview with Tony Jones, ABC Lateline]
TONY JONES: The foreword to Gore Vidal's latest book, Inventing a Nation, is penned by an Australian politician. The writer is none other than former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, a lifetime enthusiast for American history and longtime friend of Gore Vidal. Springing to his mate's defence, Mr Carr says that blundering neocons and ultra-nationalists have tried to impugn his patriotism. But Carr, too, has differences with the man he calls "a lonely genius". Bob Carr paints Gore Vidal as a committed isolationist who believes that projecting American power will always make a situation worse. The vehicle for Vidal's latest assault on the Bush administration is a tract devoted to examining the lives and motives of America's founding fathers. His treatise appears to be that today's America and its foreign policy would be unrecognisable to them and betrays many of their ideals. I spoke to Gore Vidal in California earlier today.
TONY JONES: Gore Vidal, thank you for joining us.
GORE VIDAL (WRITER AND HISTORIAN): Well, thank you for inviting me.
TONY JONES: Now, your inspiration for writing this book came from a question President Kennedy put to you at Hiannas back in 1961. Could you start by recalling that conversation for us?
GORE VIDAL: We were sitting out overlooking the cold Atlantic Sea in the Kennedy compound - they have about four or five white-frame houses on the beach - and we were playing backgammon, and as usual I was winning and as usual he was swearing, and then he said, "You know, your Uncle Lefty was here a day or two ago, and he said, 'Why is it that the United States, this little backward agrarian country with 3 million people, should have produced, in the 18th century, three of the great intellectual geniuses of the 18th century: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson?'"
Needless to say, I did not provide him with a satisfactory answer, because I still don't have one, other than it was a throw of the dice, as so many things are in life, and a throw of the dice it was that we had three exceptional men, and when it came to inventing a nation, I started to think about them, so I decided to put together a book in which you can actually hear the real conversations that went on, preserved in letters and diaries and so on, between the founders, James Madison in particular, the great friend of Jefferson - he is called the father of our constitution - and you hear the other voices of the very wise Benjamin Franklin, who didn't much care for the handiwork of the Constitutional Convention, which was held in 1789.
TONY JONES: Could I just pick you up there? You mentioned one of those exceptional men was Benjamin Franklin, and as you say, he seems to have been rather pessimistic about the constitution and, indeed, the future of the republic. Tell us why and what he actually said when he signed off on the constitution.
GORE VIDAL: He said, "Well, I say 'yes' to this constitution, with all its faults. We need good governance for a while, and this constitution will assure us of good governance for a number of years." Then he said, "This constitution will fail, as others have before it, and that will be due to the corruption of the people, for whom in the end only despotism will serve."
This was a famous speech in its day. I went through a dozen high school history books of the United States. Part of the speech is given; what I just quoted is never quoted. So that was the first "nay" vote to the constitution, which I think most thoughtful people - the good thing about it is the Bill of Rights, which guarantees us freedom of speech and so on. The bad things are the powers given to the President, which have now been absolutely inflated out of control, where the President is almost a permanent dictator with the power to declare pre-emptive war any time he likes. Now, George Washington would be out of his mind, and he was the first President. He didn't want powers to say, "I think terrorists might be livin' over there. I think we better hit Denmark. Denmark's a good place to hit. We'll hit 'em because there could be terrorists there." This is the rationale of the so-called Bush doctrine, and it is insane.
TONY JONES: If I could just interrupt you there again. Looking at the dark prophecy of Benjamin Franklin is where you book verges off into suggesting that America has actually already moved towards despotism. It's a pretty longbow, though, isn't it?
GORE VIDAL: Well, of course. We've visited despotism many times before - never to the extent that we have now. We've never before gone in on two countries which had done us no harm, were friendly to the United States -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- and knocked them to bits. We spent a lot of money on the armaments to do that, and now we're spending a big fortune, through the Vice President's company, Halliburton, to repair what we just knocked down.
So two sets of money have been burnt up in destroying two countries which had done us no harm and were in no position to do us any harm, despite the numerous lies told about weapons of mass destruction. There weren't any in Iraq, and presumably nobody said that about Afghanistan, and now they're starting to mutter about Iran. This is where what I call isolationism -- which Bob Carr and I did not finish talking about the other day on the radio -- this is where we come in, which is: you do not interfere in a predatory way in the affairs of sovereign nations because you think they might one day get atomic weapons and blow us up in the night. We ascribe to everybody else our own motives. Why should they do it? What would be the motivation? What's the provocation? So we, the isolationists, are the peacekeepers and, I thought, should be properly valued.
TONY JONES: Isolationism is a bit of a moveable feast, though. I mean, American power was used to defeat Hitler and imperial Japan and, more recently, for example, to force Slobodan Milosevic out of power in Serbia. Do you see a use for American power against despotism?
GORE VIDAL: I don't think arbitrarily or pre-emptively -- which is the key adverb here -- no, I don't. I think in union, as we behaved in the Balkans -- that was essentially a coalition of nations, United Nations amongst others -- yes, of course; we belong to a certain world. Listen, remember, when you hear the word "isolationist" said by an American right-wing politician, he's sneering: "And they say they believe in a flat Earth and no relations with foreign countries because we're protected by two oceans." Nonsense. That was true 200 years ago, but in today's misuse of the word, it simply means those who object to our forcing ourselves upon other countries; going into the Middle East not to bring liberty and justice to the Iraqis - we didn't even know who they were, we don't even know where the country is, most Americans; we're there for the oilfields.
TONY JONES: Let's leap forward to the latest or the last State of the Union address and President Bush, in a way, rewriting the guiding principles of foreign policy. In his recent address, he said the ultimate goal now was to end tyranny in the world. Tell us what you make of that.
GORE VIDAL: I think he believes that we can eliminate tyranny everywhere on earth if we allow it in our own country first. We will then provide a model. He is a tyrant, as much as he can be under our system, and our system in many ways is crumbling, so it's open season on the republic that Benjamin Franklin feared for.
TONY JONES: Despotism, though, and tyranny implies a suppression of dissent. I mean, there's no bar to open dissent in the United States; just simply whether you can get on to the corporate media.
GORE VIDAL: Well, isn't that -- that is how it's controlled. The great networks are owned by the great corporations. Sometimes a corporation -- why, there's a native of your country who's come to join us who's buying up all sorts of radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, in a conglomerate, which was not allowed under our laws, but somehow they've all been bent, and doing very well with it. That is how you control what the people know. It's beyond anything Orwell dreamed of.
TONY JONES: Isn't it the case, though, that fewer and fewer people in fact are actually getting their information from the corporate-owned media?
GORE VIDAL: Where do you think they're getting it?
TONY JONES: That's a very good question. I mean, partly from the Internet, but they seem to be drawing information from all sorts of areas now. Is the power of the corporate media waning, do you think?
GORE VIDAL: It's absolute. Is its credibility waning? Yes, of course it is. Prime-time television is nothing but propaganda, and almost everything said contradicts itself, because they don't bother to sound logical in what they say. They say the message very loud. That is what the people around Bush have discovered: you repeat the lie, and if people look slightly doubtful, you repeat it again more loudly, and you go on and on. Bush went on for about three years getting ready for the Iraq war, saying that Osama bin Laden, responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, was working hand in glove with Saddam Hussein, who was equally guilty; therefore, we were going to remove Saddam Hussein, because he was so vicious. Well, he would have been very vicious had he been responsible for any of the attacks on the United States, but he wasn't.
TONY JONES: Let me ask you this, though, if I can: when you see the majority of people in Iraq, particularly the Kurds and the Shi'ites, expressing their will for the first time in an election and beginning to form a government in much the same way that the founding fathers formed a government in the United States, does it not give you some pause as to whether perhaps that is the right thing?
GORE VIDAL: Well, the founding fathers did not form the government of the Republic of the United States while occupied by France. We did it on our own, having invited the British to go home, which they had done. So it's not comparable at all. We are an invading power. We have fixed an election, which I think in due course, the press will say, "Well, I guess we got that one wrong, too. It was corrupt", and so on.
I notice that today's press, Shalabi -- who has been totally discredited; he was a refugee to the United States, in various troubles around the world for banking and so on -- but he's back and he's standing up and they say he's going to be the next Prime Minister. Well, if he is, they're going to have a revolution. What are we doing interfering -- we with our disastrous elections in the last 20, 30 years, what are we doing prescribing elections in a country and a culture that we know nothing about? This is beyond hubris; this is just crazy time.
TONY JONES: It's true, though, that neoconservatives might point out that one of the principals in your book, Thomas Jefferson, observed just before his own death -- and you quote these observations at the end of your book -- talking about his Declaration of Independence, he says, "May it be to the world what I believe it will be: the signal of arousing men to burst their chains." Now, based on those kind of comments, he might well have endorsed a war to bring democratic principles to another country.
GORE VIDAL: Well, he never showed any sign of wanting to do any such thing. He was not one for foreign wars. He was rather opposed to having a standing army. Most of the founders didn't want a standing army, on the sensible ground that we would use it, and we'd use it for dark ends, like stealing other people's property, as we did in Mexico, as we did in the war against Spain, which we picked in order to grab not only Cuba and Puerto Rico but, more importantly, the Philippines, which made us a Pacific power.
TONY JONES: We were talking about dissenting voices a short time ago and the importance of dissent. Can I just ask your thoughts on the passing of one of the great dissenters of recent American history, Arthur Miller, a man brave enough in his day to stand against the despotism of Senator McCarthy.
GORE VIDAL: We always have these treacherous figures in society who are there to denounce others as traitors, heretics - all sort of false religious language they use. No, Arthur Miller had the virtue of being an honest man, not easily intimidated. It came naturally to him to write plays about those like himself or perhaps like the way he would have wanted to be. None of us is as brave as he wants to be, but some get closer to it than others.
TONY JONES: Is there the like of Arthur Miller in today's America?
GORE VIDAL: No. There are voices that speak out, writers that write out. The problem is, the media will not let them on. People ask me, "If you end up with such boring candidates as Mr Kerry and Mr Bush -- are there no Americans in public life who might be more useful, more representative of the people, the best elements of our nature?" I say, "Yes, there are, but the New York Times will not report their speeches. Television will not let them on unless they're surrounded by eight neoconservatives who all talk at once and shout and howl." It's like a menagerie. There is no political debate because it's not allowed; it's not commercial television. So the result is there are many great voices -- if I may paraphrase Grey -- that are muted across the land. They are there.
TONY JONES: Gore Vidal, finally, can I ask you to engage in prophecy just for a moment? Look down the track. Four more years of George Bush. What will America and what will the world look like, in your opinion?
GORE VIDAL: Well, an unholy mess. The dollar declines in value. There is no way that you can up it. There's nothing you can do. The wars will continue. There will be an attempt made in Iran and Syria, other places that look exciting. The United States will go broke; it's as simple as that. That's what ended the British Empire. One of the reasons we got into World War I was that in 1914, under the Asquith Government, the government fecklessly ran out of money, and here they were, supposed to be fighting the central powers, Germany and so on.
The same thing is happening to us. We don't have the money to pay the debts. Now, great nations that are rich in a sense don't go bankrupt the way individuals do, 'cause you can't put a valuation on them, but you can certainly show lack of confidence in their currency if it goes down, down, down, which it is now doing, and interest rates go up, up, up. As the interest rates go up, then we have the problem of inflation, which will give social insecurity to everybody, because the price of bread will suddenly get very high, which it has never been in the United States since the early '30s. So I would say that, in the long run, the world will be saved American despotism by the coming bankruptcy of the country. Now, that will have awful fallout for everybody. I don't even want to look into that crystal ball.
TONY JONES: Gore Vidal, I think you are living proof, however, that dissent is still living in the United States.
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