Despite the questionable results of the 2004 election, millions of Americans did certainly vote to reelect him. So why did these people vote for Bush after such a record of incompetence and abuse? A variety of reasons exist such as poor self-esteem, addictive personalities and other behavioral dysfunctions, people gullible enough to believe everything they hear from the media, over-loyalty regardless of the facts, fear created by the abuser, and loyalty for religious morals. Nevertheless, there are deep psychological reasons why so many people voted for Bush this time around. Our dysfunctional relationships have now affected us as a whole. Like abused women and men in personal relationships, the collective nation as a whole has been engaged in an abusive relationship with this dangerous president. Only until we open our intellectual awareness will we be free.
There is no doubt though that our social dysfunctions help define us a culture. For thousands of years, literature has been written on the social ills of society, from Homer to Dan Brown. Our records of these ills are usually what helps societies improve and grow. Books like 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley made people aware of political misuse of power. Of course these books didn’t save the world— new problems are always born and not everyone read the books or believed them to be feasible realities. It also doesn’t help us now that the number of people who read is down. Perhaps this is the key problem: Intellectual awareness is sparse among the general public. Books are less meaningful to the majority who now prefer movies and television dramas as their source of information. It also doesn’t help that teenagers are growing up in a world of videogames, cell phones, and the internet. These new habits of the 21st century may be the real culprits in the abusive relationship we have been engaged in.
What if the abuser or the people around him studied the social ills in the literature of the past and are now using it as a strategy to keep their power? It just so happens, Lynn Cheney published a book in 1996 titled “Telling the Truth.” Talk about irony! Cheney’s book is about the abuse of political power and uses George Orwell quotes to preface each chapter. I wonder who else in the Bush circle has studied the works of writers who wrote about political abuse and power? It's not difficult to see the administration’s use of mass manipulation through repetition of key words that induce fear such as “evil” or “terrorist” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” It is also not difficult to see the metaphors of authoritative paternal images they sell to the public such as “permission slip,” e.g. “We don’t need a permission slip.”— George W. Bush
As ignorance is one of the elements that contributed to the reelection of George W. Bush, manipulation of the media is another attribute. Take the color-coded terrorist alerts the administration used on various occasions to distract the public while an anti-environmental or pro-war bill was being pushed through Congress. Many are now skeptical of the terrorist alerts and their authenticity. For example, in late 2005 as Bush’s job approval ratings hit an all time low and fear circled the White House in the wake of “Scooter” Libby’s indictment, a terrorist alert was issued for New York City. Guess what? The threat was later dismissed as “not credible.”
U.S. News and World Report did a story on the anatomy of a terrorism alert in their August 16, 2004 issue. Their “anatomy” back-tracked the origins of a terrorism alert starting with the capture of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan on July 13 in Pakistan. This capture and information obtained from Khan, lead to the arrest of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. This next suspect provided new information in regards to a plan of attack. By the time the information of this attack plan made it through the president and came out of the lips of Tom Ridge as an elevated threat alert on 2pm of August 1, nineteen days had passed.[i] But wait! I thought the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to speed up the process of closing down these types of terrorist schemes? The truth is that the Department of Homeland Security is just another wall of bureaucracy the Bush administration built to protect themselves. -BROKEN NATION
