During the presidential election in 2004 a close friend of mine confided in me that she was going to vote for Bush, even though she has no Republican values and lives a very “liberal” lifestyle. Her main reason for supporting Bush was that he would do the best job protecting us from the terrorists and that critics of the Iraq war were aiding the enemy.

We debated the issue at length, but in the end neither of us convinced the other to change our choice for who should lead our country. Bush, as we now know, won the election.

My friend that I had the discussion with was not only a devout Bush fan but also a devout StarGate SG-1 fan, a show which I had not watched in depth until recently.

After seeing a majority of the episodes I found the reason why my friend wanted Bush to be president: In StarGate SG-1 a secret group of people know of secret enemies, the knowledge of which cannot be revealed to the rest of humanity. This group of people engage in war with other civilizations with no explainations or meetings with other governments, and the only people who want to stop the main characters from doing what they do are crooked, self-serving politicians who have ulterior motives galore. Most importantly, the main characters in StarGate are pure good and the enemies are pure evil who want to crush freedom.

It became obvious to me why my friend backed Bush: he was keeping us safe from the evil secret forces that we are not allowed to know the truth about. Who knows, Osama Bin Ladin might be a Goa’uld and Al Qaeda a faction of Jaffa building an empire on Earth.

Is StarGate perhaps a propaganda piece for Bush administration? Not likely, but it may have been enough to tip a few Sci-Fi liberals over to the other side when it came time to vote. It makes me wonder if the writers of StarGate SG-1 support the war or not.

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