Reply #88: It's the only valid response, I'm afraid.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

If people treat this kind of question seriously, even rebutting it seriously, it makes it looks as though it deserves to be taken seriously. Condescension and scorn are the only response appropriate.

DU is a very, very safe and protective environment for this kind of conspiracy-theorising, but if you try advancing a question like this out in the real world, where there are people who don't believe everything they read that confirms their existing prejudices, you will fall flat on your face, and queer the pitch of any points that *are* worth making that you subsequently make because everyone will dismiss them as coming from that guy who thinks the US is a dictatorship; better to get a hint of the lesson here in safety where there are hundreds of fellow-believers agreeing with you and only a few easily-dismissed Cassandras pointing out how silly the question is than to have it hit you from cold.

To compare what people living under a dictatorship have to endure to the current state of the US is to massively cheapen and demean their oppression.