An Unintended Stroll Down Memory Lane
February 17, 2014

 
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Last week, the company that hosts M.R.S. wouldn’t let me in to update the blog. at first, I thought the problem might lie on my end because my computer had recently started acting funny. As a computer-tech by trade, my first thought was that I had a virus, but several thorough scans pronounced my PC as safe & clean. The next morning when I switched on my PC, one entire hard drive (I have three) was gone. And not just any drive, my primary 1.0-Terabyebyte data drive that was nearly full, containing most of my data. All my photos (family & otherwise), all my documents, hundreds of videos, artwork, program configurations… POOF! All gone. No virus, the reason the computer was acting funny was because my hard drive was dying. Now, for the average user, this is where panic would set in. 850 GIGABYTES of unbacked up data, gone! Holy crap! But I was “reasonably” confident that I could recover most if not all my data. Long story short, one brute-force utility was able to “recover” about 60% of my data. 310-Thousand files with NO FILENAMES (assigning names like “f873625.bmp” or “f123456.doc”). So now I’ve begun the laborious task of opening nearly every file one at a time, seeing what it is, assigning a name to it, and moving it someplace safe. I figure at the rate I’m going, I should have relabled all of my recovered files by Easter… of 2020.

Among the media stored on that drive, about eleven years worth of political news video clips going back to May of 2003 (and a couple of audio clips going back to 2002) when I first started recording stories about the Iraq War and phantom WMD’s. I had been very outspoken around the people I knew in the lead-up to the war, but I didn’t start writing about politics for about another year when those “stockpiles” of “chemical & biological weapons” that President Bush so adamantly insisted were in Iraq being readied to use against us failed to materialize. Well… you know the story from there.

So, anyway, here I am, going through literally hundreds of old videos, repeatedly amazed by how much I had forgotten and just how bad things were in this country under the Bush Administration, and in the light of current GOP “outrage” over everything-Obama, how ridiculous Republicans look actually threatening impeachment of president Obama over delaying… yes, delaying… implementing the health care mandate that they so despise. Here is just an oh-so-brief list of some of the clips that caught my attention:

  • 60 Minutes did a couple of stories about “Remote Area Medical” and their globetrotting doctors, who provide free medical services to refugees in third-world countries, setting up shop in downtown LA and Michigan, where THOUSANDS of desperate Americans drove hundreds of miles for free medical/dental care.

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  • About a dozen reports on the Bush Administration changing the justification for invading Iraq after no weapons were found, trying to claim it wasn’t about the WMD’s, and two reports on the U.N. wondering if they should open a CRIMINAL (read: war crimes) investigation.

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  • The Bush Administration slashing federal worker’s salaries to pay for the soaring cost of the Iraq war without raising taxes. Then, on top of that, lowering the standards to be labeled a “manager” so that your company could deny you over-time pay.

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  • Another dozen stories about the “exploding national Debt & Deficit” (and the GOP dismissing it.)

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  • Rapidly rising unemployment being a major issue as far back as mid-2003, with every month reporting another “decade long record high increase”.

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  • Remember that major blackout in August of 2003 that left almost the entire North Eastern seaboard… including New York City… in the dark? The outage was traced back to a failure of the Power Grid in Ohio (owned by a politically well-connected family there). That’s when people started talking about the desperate need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure… which is 10 years older now.

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  • And speaking of stories that have been going on for far longer than I realized, Republicans were already calling for war with Iran (just months after invading Iraq while the Bushies were scrambling to explain the missing WMD’s) over its nuclear program, which they were CERTAIN was NOT for peaceful purposes like the Iranians were claiming, and were supposedly on track to build a nuclear bomb by 2008.

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  • Fake news reports, extolling the successes of the Bush Administration, produced by the White House with fake reporters using fake names, being broadcast in small-market TV locations as legitimate news. (also fake letters from vets appearing in newspapers across the country in support of the war, sometimes the same letter appearing in multiple cities.)

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  • The Bush Administration embracing known-terrorist Mohamar Quadaffi in exchange for oil, taking him off the terrorist watch list. (You might recall, while the Bush WH befriended Quadaffi, President Obama took him out, and which one did the GOP call a “terrorist sympathizer”?)

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  • The price of oil climbing into the stratosphere, peaking at $147.22 a barrel before the economy collapsed in on itself.

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  • The Bush White House repeatedly editing EPA reports on Climate Change (specifically, by interns with no scientific training) that said things they didn’t like.

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  • Draft-dodger George Bush giving a speech before the VFW, telling a room full of vets that our biggest mistake was leaving Vietnam too soon, that if we had just hung on a little bit longer, we would have won that war (and Vietnam wouldn’t be the hell-hole it is today?) and that he wouldn’t make that same mistake in Iraq.

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  • The discussion of “same sex marriage” was already a hot topic in 2003, and amazing ABC reporter Michelle Martin being the first to school George Will that if “procreation” were the standard for marriage, the infertile and the elderly would be banned from marrying as well.

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  • Riot police attacking peaceful protesters, including a particularly brutal take-down of “Democracy Now!” host Amy Gooodman despite her Press credentials clearly visible around her neck as she cries “Press! Press! Press!”

Yeah, it was a miserable eight years. I had almost forgotten just how miserable it was until I started rewatching all these old news clips I forgot I even had. And when I live-blogged the Sunday shows on Facebook yesterday, the sheer chutzpah of Republicans accusing President Obama of “abuse of power” even “unconstitutional criminality” because he is using the powers given to him by the Founding Fathers to raise the Minimum Wage for federal contract workers on his own, or threaten impeachment because he delays implementing a law those same Republicans openly despise, all I can do is shake my head.

If you’ve ever moved out of a home you’ve lived in for years, you may remember how amazed you were by all the old things you found that you either forgot about or thought you lost forever? That’s what sifting through these hundreds of thousands of old files was like for me this past week. Maybe everyone’s computer should crash once a decade to force us to go through and rediscover all those things we forgot about?

On second thought…
 

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February 17, 2014 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: General, Infrastructure, National Security, Politics, Right-wing Facism, Scandals, War

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