Can You Hear Me Now?

If you have tried to contact our Commander-in-Chief with your opinions on the Rafah situation, using the White House fax number for messages from the general public, you may have received the same message I did from my local carrier:

---- Unsent job status ----

Destination: +12024562461
JobID: 17020
GroupID: 17020
Sender: XXXXXXX
Mailaddr: [email protected]
Submitted From: localhost
Page Width: 215 (mm)
Page Length: 279 (mm)
Resolution: 196 (lpi)
Status: REJECT: Sorry... based on past failures we think this fax machine currently has problems
Dialogs: 0 (exchanges with remote device)
Dials: 0 (consecutive failed calls to destination)
Calls: 0 (total phone calls placed)
Pages: 0 (pages transmitted)
TotPages: 0 (total pages to transmit)
Attempts: 0 (attempts to send current page)
Dirnum: 0 (directory of next page to send)

Annual military aid to Israel: $3bn.

Illegal invasion of Iraq: $87bn.

Installing a working fax machine in the WH comms room so that the American public might express their views to their elected leaders: Priceless.

UPDATE: 21 May 2004; The war on accountable government continues. Got a complaint about US policy vis-a-vis Israel? Well, our Embassy in Tel Aviv values your opinion as much as the White House does, if the response I got is anything to go by:

Sent : 21 May 2004 03:24:30
To : [email protected]
Subject : Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server: [email protected]>

Comments

[Diane]

Judging from their past actions I suggest they've disconnected a working fax machine as opposed to never installing one. This administration has a history of making it difficult for people to make their opinions known and a propensity for ignoring those that aren't in line with their own.

Thanks for the brilliant posts you've made of late. I've learned a lot from them.

Peace,

Diane

[LoC]

Diane, Thank you so much.

And yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw that the fax was undeliverable was that this seemed like a very effective way of not hearing what you don't want to hear!