Wow! Blogger seems to have lost my last post! I wish I had saved it, since it was about the inaugural address.

All that talk about freedom and liberty – I hope that many other people experienced the cognitive dissonance that I did when I heard it. Just compare those words, and others about no one deserving to be a slave, no one a master, with the actual policies and actions of this administration.

I turned it off when the bands started playing “Gods of our Fathers” – I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I am opposed to Bush for a lot of reasons – some of them having to do with my religious beliefs about the very things he was talking about. The outright hypocrisy was astounding to me.

Honestly, I just don’t have the energy to reconstruct my whole post. I only pray that Bush be held to the standards that he proposed for others.

From Common Dreams, “The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party” by David Orr:

The Republican Party has chosen to deny social, ecological, cultural, religious, and economic realities which are unavoidably complicated, complex, diverse, ironic, and paradoxical. Instead they have chosen to make their own simplistic, ideological, and chauvinistic fantasy world that has little affinity for law, science, a free and independent press, fairness, true security, ecological sustainability, and the accountability that is requisite for genuine democracy.

Republicans, notably, are on the wrong side of the largest issue in human history: human driven, rapid climate change. They’ve chosen instead to live in a Crichton-esque science fiction fantasy in which real science has no standing and human actions have no tragic, irreversible, and global ecological consequences. This is not just boneheaded, it is a form of criminality for which we have, as yet, no adequate words.”

What exactly has to be outright denied under this ideology? Here are a few examples from the same source:

Deny science when its findings are not agreeable to your base.

Deny the looming approach of peak oil extraction thereby advancing the potential of economic, political, and social chaos when global oil supply and demand diverge as soon they will.

Deny the proven potential of superior technologies, design strategies, and policies that would move the country toward energy efficiency and a secure energy base of solar and wind power as well as the reasons of self-interest and economic advantage for doing so.

Deny the true costs of air and water pollution thereby undermining the health of Americans.

Deny the human and economic effects of pandering to the wealthy, thereby undermining social cohesion and the sense of fairness?historically, often a prelude to societal breakdown and revolution.

Deny any and all mistakes, bad judgment, and corruption, relying on spin not truth and thereby building a solid reputation for mendacity and incompetence.

Deny the limitations of military power to impose order on a recalcitrant world and thereby condemn the U.S. to a future of international isolation, conflict, and endless terrorism.

Deny the great vulnerability of the American infrastructure to malice, malfeasance, and acts of God, thereby laying the groundwork for a future of recurring disasters.

Deny the necessity for civil discourse, honesty, and transparency in the conduct of public life, thereby holding the citizenry in contempt and promoting a spirit of meanness.

Deny without admitting it the democratic values of the country enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt, thereby undermining democracy at home while purportedly fighting for it in Iraq.