Hours of Daylight – 12:06

So i suppose my new media hero is Keith Olberman. He’s a bit bombastic and a little over the top and he tries just a bit too hard to channel Edward R. Murrow, but his message is clear and delivered with gusto. Granted in this dark period of American history it might be considered low hanging fruit to compare the Bush administration with that of Big Brother in 1984, but the similarities are just too striking, and Olberman went there in a big way on a recent broadcast.

While various humanitarian organizations bemoan the Bush adminstration’s use of Guantanamo Bay and their unilateral reinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions the powers that be go merrily on torturing and killing "detainees" without a single piece of actionable intel to show for it. But Mr. Olberman, quoting Orwell, drives the point home, "The Party seeks power entirely for it own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power." He goes on, "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

This is the state of our government as it exists today. They care only about power. Of course they didn’t kill Osama Bin-Laden! Or maybe they did, but they could never let that information become public. Osama Bin-Laden is better than Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984. He can never die. He will go on forever, a shadowy force always opposing the goodness of Bush. What if all the prisoners we’ve "captured" are actually being kept isolated to keep them silent. Rather than torture them to extract information we’re actually torturing them to keep the information they may have – that Bin-Laden has been dead for years – under wraps.