I half remember the election of 1984. My family was living in San Antonio at the time.

My dad held me up after he voted for Mondale and had me pull the lever on one of those old school voting machines.  It must have been 7am, because I remember walking with him from the voting booth to my classroom down the hall.  I had my handmade "Vote for Mondale" sign in tow.

(my boys Eli, left, and Truman)

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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John Edwards isn't the first guy to have hair controversy.  In 1984 Gary Hart had a bit of a hair problem too.  He had beautiful hair and he was very good at keeping it looking just right.  Some people, in a sort of whispered, wondered if Gary was just too vain to be a true Man of the People.

I have been working hard behind the scenes over the weekend, trying to figure it all out, and am ready to lay it all out there for your minds to churn over this spring Monday morning.

First, you'll recall, on February 23rd, Tom Vilsack dropped out of the Presidential contest. Vilsack, you'll recall, was also the first candidate to enter the Presidential contest-- an omen if I've ever seen one. This is an image captured off of channel 4 in Iowa at the news conference where Vilsack dropped out of the race:

Now, I don't know what strikes you about the scene, but for me, it's that big flaming V, and that got me thinking, cause as I documented on the irretrievable BB archives, I re-watched the movie "1984" again at the beginning of March. That's right-- I'd seen this movie before.

Right. Next thing you know, Vote Different launched on YouTube, is going viral on the political blogs, unraveling a slew of events that would happen in later weeks. Arriving at... today.

Today is Monday, March 26th, and Hillary Clinton will be in Iowa today, where Tom Vilsack will endorse Hillary Clinton for President.

Now, you might all have not figured this out yet, but let me give you a clue: Gary Hart. That's right, you'll recall March 1984, after Hart upset (ok, "beat expectations against") Mondale in Iowa... but you'd be wrong... I think.  And anyway, in the next post of this mini-series, I'll reveal the possible source of hope-- as they say abroad of the symbol:

"Obama 08' emblazoned with a symbol resembling a rising sun."

Apparantly they do have the capabilities to create such and ad.  I think it's ridiculous that he was fired.  Thoughts?

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar

Things are getting serious. Things have taken a turn for the worse. We may need a kind of Rosetta Stone that can translate current English into Orwell's Newspeak and then maybe we can infer the original meaning of the long forgotten Oldspeak (Olde English) that was used in 20th century government documents. Perhaps, we can just take Orwell's 1984, and in the best tradition of its protagonist and Ministry of Truth employee, Winston Smith, we can substitute some names, change some dates, and make some sense out of the world.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Usama bin-Laden, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. bin-Laden was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the anti-Soviet forces, almost on a level with Ronald Reagan himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from month to month, but there was none in which bin-Laden was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler. All subsequent crimes, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in the Hindu Kush.

The U.S. Government has been reclassifying publicly available documents (linked via Raw Story) in an apparent attempt not to rewrite history but to erase it.

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians. The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

...more below...

...1984 has come to pass, both chronologically and in the Orwellian sense. Americans are "liberators" in Iraq. Opponents of this "peace initiative" are "doubleplusungood". Unchecked by the judiciary, the NSA electronically trolls for perpetrators of "crimethink". Pundits and the "liberal media" (owned by a handful of monolithic corporations despised by people with the values which many define as liberal) have become the Ministry of Truth for the Party...