Free Speech Zones, which were a real thing and not a plot element in a particularly ham-handed dystopian novel.
The phrase “hidey hole.”
Watching a budget surplus become a massive deficit that was bigger than it even looked because the White House was just like, “Okay, we’ll just not put the wars on the books and just ask for more money for those every few months.”
The sheer number of times Alberto Gonzalez said, “I don’t recall,” to Congress regarding war crimes and human rights violations.
“…now watch this drive.”
Mission Accomplished.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” “yellowcake uranium,” Condoleeza’s “mushroom clouds” fearmongering, and all the other bullshit we were fed to get into Iraq.
The President of the United States said so many stupid things that there were one-a-day calendars consisting of an individual quote for each day of the year. They didn’t all have the exact same quotes.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
And then we went to war.
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.” – George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union
Okay, that’s the best one.
Bush watched that Batman Beyond splicing episode and had nightmares for a week
was it hidey-hole? i thought it was spider-hole.
Yeah, it was spider-hole
I think my favorite was how we un-ironically referred to a whole set of countries as the “Axis of Evil” as if that phrase gives us some kind of meaningful understanding of their geopolitical role and isn’t borrowed straight out of a mediocre made-for-TV superhero movie.
And then there was:
We literally got a terrorism forecast on the news every morning like it was pollen. So many of the things that happened, if they were in a dystopian novel, people would be like, “That’s way too goofy and ridiculous to actually happen in real life,” and yet they did.
Not only was the terror threat system real, but it was often raised and lowered based entirely on how panicked they wanted us to be. Famously they raised the level for no reason during the 2004 election.
Also, “Free Speech Zones” looked something like this:
It was literally a cage.
I genuinely forget that people, even within my own age group, has forgotten the Bush era since they were teenagers and below the voting age at the time, and so forgot how fucking horrifying it was.
