So the whole national feeling is supposed to be measured by the fact that you hung out with idiots? 
Like I said, all I can do is recount my past experiences during the Bush years. There were fellow students all around me - smart students, guys who nailed their SATs and who were majoring in cognitive science, economics and political science, guys who got As on everything - insisting that there was a conspiracy to rig the Diebold machines and that they were going to move to Canada. People used to talk about how great it would be if Bush were assassinated; there were flyers everywhere with Bush dressed up as a Nazi, or some other evil archetype. There were people claiming that Bush was going to institute martial law; that he was going to declare himself dictator or “president for life”; that he blew up the Twin Towers, of course; that he was a puppet controlled by Israel; and that he was going to “go out with a bang” by nuking Iran right before he left office. All of this was, as I said, so omnipresent, it was like the air you breathed. This was the climate I experienced at Indiana University from 2004 to 2008.
I seem to recall a movie where President Bush was assassinated. I also recall that we had at least one thread about it, and that it went the way you might expect that it did.
The existence of one does not condone the other, but it certainly takes away the moral high ground if one wishes to be consistent.
I found out about this on SadlyNo (it’s a few days old, you have to scroll down for it). Lengthy discussion on this with some very good points.
I dunno. Just doesn’t strike me as a very interesting game. The right wing has already gotten the big victory; all you’re doing is taking out the leftovers. I always thought the whole point of roleplaying was delving into the unknown and facing challenges. You’re faced with outcomes that are not certain and adversaries that you are not guaranteed of defeating or even surviving, and you have to work to prevail. If you do prevail, great, ad victor spolarum and pass the XP. If you flee with your tail between your legs, you’re still alive to fight another day, and you can come up with a better strategy or superior equipment to help even the odds. If you’re obliterated, well, at least you gave it your best, and you can always roll up a new hero and give it another go. The whole point isn’t “winning”, it’s playing; the treasure and titles are just a bonus.
Now, how this could work is as a Romance of the Three Kingdoms-esque conquest/diplomacy game, with lots of factions with widely varying goals and ambitions. With the left wing vanquished, the once-unified Republican coalition has given way to petty squabbles and bitter vendettas. You have the old-school conservatives (y’know, the guys who actually believe in small government, minimal taxes for all, and proper benefits for war veterans), the Bushite neocons who want to party all night at everyone else’s expense, the hardcore war hawks, the fundies, the talk show cult, the militant Southerners, etc. You’re thrown right into the middle of an impending civil war. What is your cause? Whose side are you on?
Think of the possibilities. Go the Great Unifier route, reconciling the disparate factions and restoring the red white and blue. Go for cold-blooded conquest, crushing your pitiful rivals one by one. Support three or four powerful factions that can coexist peacefully. Be against all flags, plundering and exploiting all you see, then making a break for it before reinforcements show up. Use espionage and covert operations to undermine your foes and eliminate troublesome leaders. Start a peace movement and win the good citizens to your side. Or simply rule as a petty tyrant, living the good life, and having a nice, fast jet ready when the revolutionaries storm the gate.
Now THAT’S a game. I mean, what’s the damn point of some dumb fantasy that just reinforces your prejudices? If that’s all you want, write crappy fanfiction like everyone else.
North American Union? What makes this a threat to the RW even if it was announced? The combined populations of both Canada and Mexico are less than half that of the US, so voting power would still reside with the original 50 states.
There was an art professor who created a video game about assassinating GWB, and it created a small controversy, but it never got major publicity.
The Bush assassination movie won an award at the Toronto film festival, but I don’t think it ever got released in the US.
The RW seems unable to grasp that. These are the same people who think things like ( to use an example from my home state ) the Mexicans are infiltrating California so they can take it over and hand it over to Mexico. Or who claim that markings of highway signs are guides for an invasion by UN troops. They think that America is under imminent threat of conquest from evil foreigners on all sides.
The fact that it’s Mexico and Canada who would find themselves dominated ( and therefore would never go for such a “NAU” ) is simply beyond their grasp. It violates their worldview of America in Peril.
Is the link dead or something? I’ve been trying to play for over an hour, but the page doesn’t seem to load.
Whats a “Cong”?
Sure it did. It played at my local indie theater and is currently available for purchase on DVD. I watched it and remembered being vaguely bored. If the makers hadn’t put Bush in the movie, no one would have ever heard of it.
The only “Cong” I know of would be the Viet Cong.
I think ‘Cong’ in this context is a congress critter.
Bah. Fighting an Obama allied with a horde of time travelling renegade Viet Cong is much cooler than fighting a bunch of out of shape politicians.
Ohh, or they could do it like “The Young Indiana Jones” and follow a 9 year-old Barack Obama in his adventures as he runs away from home, ends up in 1970’s Vietnam and joins the NVA. He could interact with historical figures, hang out with Jane Fonda, shoot down a young John McCain, and in the final cut-scene when you win the game, be ordered by a zombie Ho-Chi-Minh to return home, pretend to have been born in Hawaii, and infiltrate the US political system. It’d be like a prequel.
I’d play that game.
Yeah, but hunting politicians you have to frequent airport washrooms and wait until one of the patrons makes googly eyes at you from their stall to be sure of who to eliminate from your search. The guy not waving his hand under the stall at you is the ‘Cong’. The guy doing the waving and blinking at you is your ally and you get bonus points for making a ‘connection’ with him.
I am now less intrigued. I, too, thought it was guerrilla warfare in the Jungles of Asia. The RW had a teabag party but instead of tea bags it was all the stockpiled guns and ammo and instead of a party, it was the wholesale slaughter of the SS and Capitol police. Obama was forced to climb atop the big dome of the Capitol and SE Asian (perhaps Il himself) fly in to rescue Obama and his family.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, would be to hunt down Obama and family and take out those Charlie Commie bastards!
I must have been in a different dorm, subject to different selection biases. I was next to the dorm where criticising Bush’s policies of theft and torture got you labelled a traitor and where wearing an anti-Bush shirt in silence got you arrested and escorted from His Holy Presence.
Anyway, it’s silly to compare valid criticism of the torturer Bush with the peurile whinings about Obama coming from the right, regardless of how overwrought the critics are. Your comparison is not valid because while people had legitimate beefs with the Bush Administration, the pro-torture Republican party is just making stuff up about Obama because they’re pouting over losing the election last fall. So even if tu quoque was a valid argument in general, yours in particular would not be.
I wonder if perhaps all these conflicting personal experiences suggest that the experiences of one person can’t be generalised to a nation of millions.
No, that can’t possibly be.
I voted for Obama, and I think the GOP is rapidly becoming a lunatic fringe populated by the paranoid and the hypocritical.
As for the game, “Obama and the Renegade Cong”? Eh, don’t much care. It’s just a game, no doubt just as stupid as any Bush-era counterpart game was.
I’m sure that Argent Towers will remain unconvinced, however, that those of us Left of center aren’t as evil as he’d like to paint us.
The game itself isn’t so scary. This is scary (from the OP’s link):
And this:
There is an almost seamless transition from the game, to a paranoid’s nightmare vision of reality, and back again. More of the same self-reinforcing hysteria that has become so much of the right’s world view.
I guess the real question is the chicken and egg conundrum-- is this game a deliberate attempt to inflame self righteous anger by blurring the line between fiction and fact? Or is the game a result of such overwhelming cognitive dissonance that reality is no longer discernable from fiction?