The Decade When Americans Lost Their Country

Well, I thought I'd put one more top ten for the decade here. It's a pretty good one. Robert Freeman has come out with The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade on Common Dreams.

They're all important stories, but I would hazard to guess that this particular one was the precursor to all the others. Had this not happened, the country would be in much better shape, and the other nine stories would not be as serious (or even nonexistent) as they are now:

The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election. This isn't even a historical controversy anymore. Al Gore won the national popular vote by 570,000. And we now know he would have won the Florida vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme Court. This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat, so it's understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right" kind of circles.

We will never know what state we would be in now with Gore at the helm, but I believe it certainly would not have been bad as we currently are. Sadly, after listing the stories, Mr. Freeman's summation is bleak, but so true,

History paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country. It was the decade when all the institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

What might have been...

Had I But Known...

Dave Sirota over at Common Dreams has posted his A Decade's Top Ten Quotations. They are great ones. My favorite is number 6:

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they're some things we do not know. But there're also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

It is very disheartening, to say the least, how egregious these quotes are. Mr. Sirota sums it all up with,

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad -- but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade's folly or learning from it.

I'm guessing that the majority of Americans have absolutely no clue that these were actually stated. Perhaps the key to the whole thing is to make quotes like these as ubiquitous as possible, so that the majority of Americans can see how much contempt there is for them from the powerful and elite.