About ANYTHING!
I spent nearly 25 years working exclusively for the U.S. Congress, researching, writing – a legislative specialist, but a subject matter generalist, as my duties required. All of this was within a nonpartisan context; after all, Congress needs at least some information that aims to present all sides of an issue. And it’s the role of my old organization, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress, to do that, although we too were at times charged with partisanship during my years there – from Reagan through George W. Bush, when I retired in May 2008.
This blog started out with a few experimental postings, testing out my partisan “hand,” so to speak. For many years I had chomped at the bit to take partisan positions, and I’m not one who apologizes for partisans of any stripe, on any issue. They are the true lifeblood and passion that drive ideas beyond discussion to implementation. Here I stand for a progressive agenda. I vary at times, and tend more and more toward pragmatism rather than beating my 59 year old head continually against the granite wall of idealism.
Early on, especially in the Bush II era, I noticed that reality, as many have said, was on a holiday. Truth was being often craftily redefined by Karl Rove and others through semantics, not mere outright lying. In fact, lying was being redefined, almost out of existence, again through semantic tricks. I noticed more and more that the Bush administration, and its supporters far and wide, literally would say ANYTHING to push their agenda. It mattered not when they were caught red-handed lying about virtually every major fact regarding Iraq – they simply forged ahead, with their primary “enablers,” a complicit journalist class.
They created 
their own reality unmoored from even obviously distorted facts, as someone within the administration told Ron Suskind. And to a large extent, due to many reasons, their reality became ours – or nearly so. Truly, we nearly lost our country, and the 2006 elections, I believe, bringing as it did a Democratic Congress (however anemic it proved to be) prevented the completion of many of the Bush administration’s more devious plans for politicizing the entire executive branch, subverting the election process, continuing to expand domestic surveillance, speeding their deconstruction of FDR era safety nets, and continuing their rampant kleptocracy (a wonderful term meaning government by theft) via privatization and massive wealth transfer through the tax system from the poor and the middle class to the wealthiest 3%.
Here at They Will Say ANYTHING! I will try to highlight those “anythings” that they do say. I will more often, I suppose, do so from my partisan viewpoint, which is only natural. But not always. Now, in April 2009, I’m beginning to sense that the Obama administration has no honest plan to thoroughly investigate the multitude of nefarious misdeeds of the Bush years. If that continues, I will write often about it. Yet, in my world, it’s the Limbaugh’s, the Hannity’s, the Coulter’s, the Palin’s, the Kudlow’s, the Cavuto’s, the Beck’s, and the Boehner’s of the world who infuriate me almost to head-exploding extremes, so that’s the kind I consider my prey.
I also try to leaven things regularly with humor and satire, and even an occasional essay on some favorite things. I enjoy using Photoshop to create some fun images too, and tinker with Windows Movie Maker to produce videos at times.
they’ll open in a new tab or window:
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And before you leave, please
for unique gifts for your unique self and friends!
