Monday, January 28, 2008
Why President Bush MUST Resign!
The time has come for America to deal with a problem which, if unaddressed, will only get worse with the passage of time. Namely, how does she rid herself of a failed head of state? The question assumes the unspoken consensus of the majority of Americans. It is time to face this question head-on for our posterity's sake!
Not being an historian, I don't feel the constraint of having to wait twenty or twenty-five years to pass judgement on this president. His having been in office for almost seven full years is enough time for any rational individual to grade his performance!
It is my conviction that history is going to judge this president as one of the worst of all tines! Twenty years from now, George W. Bush will be a case study into how a nation can be lulled into a sense of helplessness and acquiescence towards the acceptance of mediocre, if not incompetent, leadership!
The majority of Americans appear to be slowly-but-surely awaking from their slumber to acknowledge what a mess we are in as a nation! The question of the day is how did we allow our society’s well-being to deteriorate to this extent?
Just because someone aspires to the office of President of the United States, it doesn't automatically follow that the individual is fit to hold said office! However good he might have looked on paper as a candidate, if we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that George W. Bush's actual tenure in office has been nothing short of abysmal!
Our nation is hemorrhaging from the wounds inflicted by this incompetent! The havoc which this president and this administration have wreaked is astounding!
As a nation, we now find ourselves scorned if not outright vilified by the majority of the
rest of the nations for our egocentric attitude, fostered to no small extent by this president. One doesn’t have to have traveled overseas recently to know that the world’s attitude towards Americans has changed drastically for the worse in recent years!
We only have to think back to the universal outpouring of sympathy and support by the world’s nations in response to 9-11 to realize how badly things have gone wrong! The world recognized that we as a nation had been rendered a grave injustice which demanded redress! We had the support of the whole world, virtually!
If this president and this administration had called an ad-hoc meeting one day and said, “We’ve gotten all of this good will – the support of the whole world, virtually! Let’s play a game, employing all of the resources of the government, to see how badly we can screw things up?”, it is my opinion that they couldn’t have done a better job (or worse, depending on how one looks at it) than what they have already!
Everything turned when this president and administration hijacked the solemn if not holy mandate for redress, directing it away from our appropriate response regarding attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan for their supporting and harboring Osama bin Ladin . In our attempting to use this mandate to provide cover for our ulterior motive of effecting regime change in Iraq, we lost the support of the majority of the world’s nations!
The fact that this president and administration lied to our nation and the world about our need to go to war with Iraq is what I find unforgivable! I use that term in full cognizance of its weight and gravity! When the intelligence upon which this decision was based is cherry-picked, manipulated, distorted, falsified, and otherwise shaped to support a course of action already decided upon, that all adds up to one big lie!
Make no mistake about it: the Iraq war was sold to the American public and world by this administration! In what has to be regarded as one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the century, this president and administration must be commended on how flawlessly they pulled off such a grandiose undertaking!
Think about it for a minute. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was under sanctions, with a no-fly zone enforced. Saddam’s movements were so regulated that he couldn’t have gone to the bathroom without our knowing about it, let alone engaging in some activity which might pose an imminent threat to our nation!
That the majority of the American public and perhaps the world in the end believed that Saddam’s Iraq played a role in the causation of 9-11 demonstrates how effective this propaganda campaign was!
It should be crystal clear by now to anyone who is honest with him- or herself that this Iraq invasion is going to go down as one of the biggest blunders by a president in the history of this country! It appears that this president and administration drank their own kool-aid when they fantasized about the rosy outcome – our being greeted as liberators, with our path into Baghdad’s being lined with roses! What started out as an initial response of elation has turned into a nightmare!
On paper, it would have made more sense to have invaded Saudi Arabia than Iraq! As provocative as this suggestion is, it appears to be supported by the facts. We know that the majority of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia (was it 14 of the 19 total?). We know that they acted as the ‘brains’ in implementing or carrying out the plot. We also know that they were and still are (presumably) the primary disciples for the spread of Wahabism, the virulent strain of Islam of which Osama bin Laden is an adherent!
Lastly, we know without a shadow of a doubt that 9-11 could not have possibly occurred without the financial contribution rendered to Osama bin Laden by Saudi individuals and corporations or companies, state sanctioned or not!
Even as recently as several months ago, it was being reported that at least 30% of the foreign fighters battling our troops in Iraq were from Saudi Arabia!
Whether or not the financial support to Al-Quaeda by the Saudis was viewed as ‘protection’ payments for the organization to leave the Saudis (or, at least, the monarchy) alone, regardless of what havoc the organization wreaked elsewhere became a moot point when Ryhad was attacked!
Insofar as Iraq is concerned, the question of the day is ‘Where do we go from here?’. Admittedly, there is no easy answer to that question. One thing which appears increasingly obvious as time passes is the removal of the cause of the problem in the first place, namely, President Bush! The underlying supposition is that if this president exercised poor judgement, which resulted in our becoming entangled in this mess in the first place, how can we expect for him to have the wisdom and good judgement to get us out of it? Should we as a nation tolerate the continuance of this incompetent in office after he has made such a horrendous mess of things?
As this president’s whole legacy is going to be defined by the outcome of this Iraq debacle, there is no possible way that he will admit that the Iraq invasion was a mistake! Bad enough that some 3800 of our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters have been sacrificed to this folly, along with some 20,000 (or more) terribly maimed and anywhere from 30,000 (President Bush’s estimate from a year ago) up to 650,000 or more Iraqis killed as of now. We have only to look forward to a continuation of the carnage in the sake of this president’s attempting to salvage his legacy!
Can someone, anyone, give one valid reason why even just one more of our brave men and women in uniform should be sacrificed to this lost cause? It should be obvious by now that no puppet government which we set up is going to have legitimacy in the eyes of the populace so long as it is perceived to be a pawn of the occupying power!
How many more lives – American and Iraqi – are worth being lost to stave off an ultimate reckoning of this Iraqi situation?
The president’s continual insistence that Iraq has become the central battlefront of the War on Terror begs the question: where did the president expect our opponents to gather to fight us – Australia? Of course they are going to fight us where we happen to be – specifically, in Iraq! What the president doesn’t say is that we turned Iraq into a haven for the terrorists when we invaded it!
The president’s recent invocation of the specter of Vietnam in his recent propaganda speech should have incensed all Vietnam veterans in this country, especially since neither Vice President Cheney nor he actually served in Vietnam! It is my conviction that if either one of them had actually been in combat, seeing comrades blown up and dying immediately around him, thereby understanding the cost in blood and treasure such an engagement entails, he wouldn’t have been so anxious to commit our troops to such an hellish endeavor!
President Johnson was supposedly informed at some point that military victory in Vietnam was an impossibility. Yet, he prolonged the war, resulting in additional deaths – I believe in the thousands – which might have been avoided! I would like to think that this president, instead of using Vietnam for propaganda purposes, might learn its lessons and avoid repeating its mistakes!
If our nation is ever assaulted again by foreign-based terrorists – more than a few terrorism experts don’t see it as a matter of if, but when – it may be in no small part due to the invaluable training the terrorists fighting us in Iraq have gained! We are like an elephant under attack by a swarm of gnats. Our mobility is extremely limited, compared to our adversary’s flexibility and capacity to adjust and improvise!
If the mess which this president has created in Iraq is not enough to remove him from office, this country’s potential impending attack on Iran should be! Whether or not there might be valid reasons to attack Iran, the matter should be resolved under more competent, capable leadership! Imagine the specter of a president, desperate to salvage his legacy, acting with reckless abandon on such a momentous issue? That image should frighten all of us!
It would be a travesty to waste the remaining roughly fourteen months of this president’s term, when we know without a doubt that the path is going to be reversed the minute his successor assumes office! Because the pace of change in our society is increasing at such a rapid rate, fourteen months seem like an eternity to travel down this dead-end road!
It should be obvious that any drastic change in course takes time to take effect. How much more sense would it make to use his remaining tenure to implement the changes which we know are going to be made?
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Bush’s removal now would preempt (such a handy word, depending on how it is used!) the piling on of any additional entanglements during the remainder of his term! For all that we know, we may stand to be at war with China before this incompetent leaves office!
As things stand now, we may never fully recover from the damage which this president and administration has inflicted on our nation:
- Our standing in the world has diminished immeasurably! We are increasingly being viewed as erratic and unstable in our response to perceived threats, real or imagined!
- We’ve lost the moral authority which we once enjoyed, due to the sacrifice to our Crusade Against Terror of the very laws of engagement in combat won by the blood of millions over the course of two world wars and other skirmishes – namely, the protocols established by the Geneva Convention.
- Our cause, however lofty, was damaged beyond repair by the images from Abu Ghraib. Those images no doubt did more to recruit insurgents fighting against us than just about anything else we’ve done in Iraq! It is beyond incredulous to believe that the level of intelligence depicted in these images was implemented by these low-level MPs who were ultimately charged without there being direction and instruction from a policy standpoint from higher up the chain of command!
Our nation is being slowly-but-surely turned into a virtual police state! With every passing day, our liberties and freedoms, paid for with the blood of our nation’s founders, are being eroded in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Homeland Security’! The Patriot Act has instituted various laws, under the banner of protecting the homeland, which are ominous in their implications, to wit:
- The specter of Big Brother's peering over our shoulders, seeing what library books we check out and read smacks of Gestapo tactics towards mind- or thought-control (anyone remember the classic Ray Bradbury movie Fahrenheit 451?).
- The authorization allowing the clandestine FBI search of any property in America
without having to notify the owner until after the search is completed should make us all
wonder if the term ‘sanctity of the home’ has any real meaning?
- The ‘PEN/Trap Authority’ allowing law enforcement officials pursuing ordinary criminal cases to track every website visited as well as intercepting all emails of the individual(s) being tracked has some nefarious allowances. Without having to prove the need for the warrant, the officials may merely state that the activity relates to an on-going investigation! Additionally, the warrant may apply to individuals not specifically named by the officials, so long as they ‘certify’ that the warrant was meant to apply to said individuals! Does anyone besides me see the potential for egregious abuse of this authority?
- Identifying who is a terrorist has been expanded from an individual’s being a member of
a group so designated as being a terrorist organization by the State Department to include
any foreign national suspected of publicly endorsing terrorist activity, belonging to a group which does, or providing support for such a group. We have only to look at the extensive dossier which the FBI maintained on John Lennon during the Nixon Era to see how such a law might be abused to discourage those expressing political dissent out of fear of being branded a terrorist!
- The Attorney General is authorized to detain any non-US resident who he has ‘reasonable
grounds to believe’ is involved in terrorism or poses a threat to national security. Although criminal or immigration charges are supposed to be brought against the individual within seven days of his detention, said individual may be held indefinitely! The holding of the Guantanamo Bay detainees for several years before releasing them without a trial can’t have done anything but generate more hatred against us and recruit more insurgents to fight our soldiers on the battleground!
We are experiencing a case of déjà vu, a new or neo-MyCharthyism, in which anyone who questions the wisdom or prudence of the path which this administration is embarked upon - especially as it relates to the Iraq War – might be branded at the least unpatriotic and at the worst a traitor! Would it not be ironic if our brave men and women in uniform were fighting to uphold the freedoms and liberties which we so cherish as a nation, yet no one back home had the courage to express dissent because the “If you don’t support the war, you don’t support the troops” atmosphere was so stifling?
Rarely has this country been so divided as it is today! More amazingly, rarely has an administration been able to sustain a policy which has become increasingly so unpopular! The elections of ’06 provided the Democrats with a clear, unequivocal mandate to bring this war – referring specifically to the Iraq invasion – to an end. Here we are, one whole year later, with the war still in progress! The Democrats have been worse than useless towards carrying out the will of the populace. The Congress’ horribly low ratings have been well-earned!
There is an almost palpable sense in the air of a public which feels helpless towards having its wishes paid attention to. The Democrats appear to have done a bait-and-switch act, promising one thing to get elected, then reneging on that promise, once in office. On the whole, as a collective, they have acted as if, as a condition of their assuming their offices for this session of Congress, they had to submit to castration!
Bottom line: there doesn’t appear to be a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when it comes down to heeding the wishes of the public; for, both parties have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! It’s irrelevant whether a people are stampeded by a herd of elephants or a herd or donkeys – they are just as dead, either way!
It’s time for a REAL grass roots movement to rise up and put pressure on our elected officials to pay more attention to the wishes of the populace! There is enough common interests among the disparate factions making up the voting constituency that organizing comitees from the various groups could convene to figure out what interests the various factions share, which could be pooled together and converted into a SUPER-cause, thereby defeating the ‘divide-and-conquor’ strategy heretofore employed by both parties so effectively!
An excellent case to demonstrate this need is the whole immigration debate. One doesn’t HAVE to be an Hispanic to realize how egregiously they have been mistreated as political fodder! Politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle are riding the backs of Hispanics, stirring up the pot of prejudice and bigotry under the guise of ‘border security’! Truth be told, our OWN country’s policies as relates to trade with Mexico and Central America are responsible in no small part to the flood of immigrants entering the United States.
Googling + NAFTA + Mexico + Latin America + “worker displacement” yielded 244 results. Using two of them for reference (www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/12/bookrevs.htm and www.alcaabajo.cu/design/read/ingles/whatisftaa.tpl.html?news_id_odj_id+1001887), NAFTA, and by logical extension, CAFTA, are not what they are promoted to be! While on the surface, the liberalization of trade amongst the United States and Mexico and Central America might APPEAR to be all good; however, the underbelly of this animal reveals a different picture altogether!
NAFTA established Maquiladoras or Maquilas (industrial region below our border with Mexico) where raw goods from the United States are shipped for assembly, then returned to this country.
What's that, Bush is about to deliver his State of the Union speech ... again? Guess that I had better put this aside; for, he will need someone to write his speech!
The time has come for America to deal with a problem which, if unaddressed, will only get worse with the passage of time. Namely, how does she rid herself of a failed head of state? The question assumes the unspoken consensus of the majority of Americans. It is time to face this question head-on for our posterity's sake!
Not being an historian, I don't feel the constraint of having to wait twenty or twenty-five years to pass judgement on this president. His having been in office for almost seven full years is enough time for any rational individual to grade his performance!
It is my conviction that history is going to judge this president as one of the worst of all tines! Twenty years from now, George W. Bush will be a case study into how a nation can be lulled into a sense of helplessness and acquiescence towards the acceptance of mediocre, if not incompetent, leadership!
The majority of Americans appear to be slowly-but-surely awaking from their slumber to acknowledge what a mess we are in as a nation! The question of the day is how did we allow our society’s well-being to deteriorate to this extent?
Just because someone aspires to the office of President of the United States, it doesn't automatically follow that the individual is fit to hold said office! However good he might have looked on paper as a candidate, if we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that George W. Bush's actual tenure in office has been nothing short of abysmal!
Our nation is hemorrhaging from the wounds inflicted by this incompetent! The havoc which this president and this administration have wreaked is astounding!
As a nation, we now find ourselves scorned if not outright vilified by the majority of the
rest of the nations for our egocentric attitude, fostered to no small extent by this president. One doesn’t have to have traveled overseas recently to know that the world’s attitude towards Americans has changed drastically for the worse in recent years!
We only have to think back to the universal outpouring of sympathy and support by the world’s nations in response to 9-11 to realize how badly things have gone wrong! The world recognized that we as a nation had been rendered a grave injustice which demanded redress! We had the support of the whole world, virtually!
If this president and this administration had called an ad-hoc meeting one day and said, “We’ve gotten all of this good will – the support of the whole world, virtually! Let’s play a game, employing all of the resources of the government, to see how badly we can screw things up?”, it is my opinion that they couldn’t have done a better job (or worse, depending on how one looks at it) than what they have already!
Everything turned when this president and administration hijacked the solemn if not holy mandate for redress, directing it away from our appropriate response regarding attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan for their supporting and harboring Osama bin Ladin . In our attempting to use this mandate to provide cover for our ulterior motive of effecting regime change in Iraq, we lost the support of the majority of the world’s nations!
The fact that this president and administration lied to our nation and the world about our need to go to war with Iraq is what I find unforgivable! I use that term in full cognizance of its weight and gravity! When the intelligence upon which this decision was based is cherry-picked, manipulated, distorted, falsified, and otherwise shaped to support a course of action already decided upon, that all adds up to one big lie!
Make no mistake about it: the Iraq war was sold to the American public and world by this administration! In what has to be regarded as one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the century, this president and administration must be commended on how flawlessly they pulled off such a grandiose undertaking!
Think about it for a minute. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was under sanctions, with a no-fly zone enforced. Saddam’s movements were so regulated that he couldn’t have gone to the bathroom without our knowing about it, let alone engaging in some activity which might pose an imminent threat to our nation!
That the majority of the American public and perhaps the world in the end believed that Saddam’s Iraq played a role in the causation of 9-11 demonstrates how effective this propaganda campaign was!
It should be crystal clear by now to anyone who is honest with him- or herself that this Iraq invasion is going to go down as one of the biggest blunders by a president in the history of this country! It appears that this president and administration drank their own kool-aid when they fantasized about the rosy outcome – our being greeted as liberators, with our path into Baghdad’s being lined with roses! What started out as an initial response of elation has turned into a nightmare!
On paper, it would have made more sense to have invaded Saudi Arabia than Iraq! As provocative as this suggestion is, it appears to be supported by the facts. We know that the majority of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia (was it 14 of the 19 total?). We know that they acted as the ‘brains’ in implementing or carrying out the plot. We also know that they were and still are (presumably) the primary disciples for the spread of Wahabism, the virulent strain of Islam of which Osama bin Laden is an adherent!
Lastly, we know without a shadow of a doubt that 9-11 could not have possibly occurred without the financial contribution rendered to Osama bin Laden by Saudi individuals and corporations or companies, state sanctioned or not!
Even as recently as several months ago, it was being reported that at least 30% of the foreign fighters battling our troops in Iraq were from Saudi Arabia!
Whether or not the financial support to Al-Quaeda by the Saudis was viewed as ‘protection’ payments for the organization to leave the Saudis (or, at least, the monarchy) alone, regardless of what havoc the organization wreaked elsewhere became a moot point when Ryhad was attacked!
Insofar as Iraq is concerned, the question of the day is ‘Where do we go from here?’. Admittedly, there is no easy answer to that question. One thing which appears increasingly obvious as time passes is the removal of the cause of the problem in the first place, namely, President Bush! The underlying supposition is that if this president exercised poor judgement, which resulted in our becoming entangled in this mess in the first place, how can we expect for him to have the wisdom and good judgement to get us out of it? Should we as a nation tolerate the continuance of this incompetent in office after he has made such a horrendous mess of things?
As this president’s whole legacy is going to be defined by the outcome of this Iraq debacle, there is no possible way that he will admit that the Iraq invasion was a mistake! Bad enough that some 3800 of our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters have been sacrificed to this folly, along with some 20,000 (or more) terribly maimed and anywhere from 30,000 (President Bush’s estimate from a year ago) up to 650,000 or more Iraqis killed as of now. We have only to look forward to a continuation of the carnage in the sake of this president’s attempting to salvage his legacy!
Can someone, anyone, give one valid reason why even just one more of our brave men and women in uniform should be sacrificed to this lost cause? It should be obvious by now that no puppet government which we set up is going to have legitimacy in the eyes of the populace so long as it is perceived to be a pawn of the occupying power!
How many more lives – American and Iraqi – are worth being lost to stave off an ultimate reckoning of this Iraqi situation?
The president’s continual insistence that Iraq has become the central battlefront of the War on Terror begs the question: where did the president expect our opponents to gather to fight us – Australia? Of course they are going to fight us where we happen to be – specifically, in Iraq! What the president doesn’t say is that we turned Iraq into a haven for the terrorists when we invaded it!
The president’s recent invocation of the specter of Vietnam in his recent propaganda speech should have incensed all Vietnam veterans in this country, especially since neither Vice President Cheney nor he actually served in Vietnam! It is my conviction that if either one of them had actually been in combat, seeing comrades blown up and dying immediately around him, thereby understanding the cost in blood and treasure such an engagement entails, he wouldn’t have been so anxious to commit our troops to such an hellish endeavor!
President Johnson was supposedly informed at some point that military victory in Vietnam was an impossibility. Yet, he prolonged the war, resulting in additional deaths – I believe in the thousands – which might have been avoided! I would like to think that this president, instead of using Vietnam for propaganda purposes, might learn its lessons and avoid repeating its mistakes!
If our nation is ever assaulted again by foreign-based terrorists – more than a few terrorism experts don’t see it as a matter of if, but when – it may be in no small part due to the invaluable training the terrorists fighting us in Iraq have gained! We are like an elephant under attack by a swarm of gnats. Our mobility is extremely limited, compared to our adversary’s flexibility and capacity to adjust and improvise!
If the mess which this president has created in Iraq is not enough to remove him from office, this country’s potential impending attack on Iran should be! Whether or not there might be valid reasons to attack Iran, the matter should be resolved under more competent, capable leadership! Imagine the specter of a president, desperate to salvage his legacy, acting with reckless abandon on such a momentous issue? That image should frighten all of us!
It would be a travesty to waste the remaining roughly fourteen months of this president’s term, when we know without a doubt that the path is going to be reversed the minute his successor assumes office! Because the pace of change in our society is increasing at such a rapid rate, fourteen months seem like an eternity to travel down this dead-end road!
It should be obvious that any drastic change in course takes time to take effect. How much more sense would it make to use his remaining tenure to implement the changes which we know are going to be made?
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Bush’s removal now would preempt (such a handy word, depending on how it is used!) the piling on of any additional entanglements during the remainder of his term! For all that we know, we may stand to be at war with China before this incompetent leaves office!
As things stand now, we may never fully recover from the damage which this president and administration has inflicted on our nation:
- Our standing in the world has diminished immeasurably! We are increasingly being viewed as erratic and unstable in our response to perceived threats, real or imagined!
- We’ve lost the moral authority which we once enjoyed, due to the sacrifice to our Crusade Against Terror of the very laws of engagement in combat won by the blood of millions over the course of two world wars and other skirmishes – namely, the protocols established by the Geneva Convention.
- Our cause, however lofty, was damaged beyond repair by the images from Abu Ghraib. Those images no doubt did more to recruit insurgents fighting against us than just about anything else we’ve done in Iraq! It is beyond incredulous to believe that the level of intelligence depicted in these images was implemented by these low-level MPs who were ultimately charged without there being direction and instruction from a policy standpoint from higher up the chain of command!
Our nation is being slowly-but-surely turned into a virtual police state! With every passing day, our liberties and freedoms, paid for with the blood of our nation’s founders, are being eroded in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Homeland Security’! The Patriot Act has instituted various laws, under the banner of protecting the homeland, which are ominous in their implications, to wit:
- The specter of Big Brother's peering over our shoulders, seeing what library books we check out and read smacks of Gestapo tactics towards mind- or thought-control (anyone remember the classic Ray Bradbury movie Fahrenheit 451?).
- The authorization allowing the clandestine FBI search of any property in America
without having to notify the owner until after the search is completed should make us all
wonder if the term ‘sanctity of the home’ has any real meaning?
- The ‘PEN/Trap Authority’ allowing law enforcement officials pursuing ordinary criminal cases to track every website visited as well as intercepting all emails of the individual(s) being tracked has some nefarious allowances. Without having to prove the need for the warrant, the officials may merely state that the activity relates to an on-going investigation! Additionally, the warrant may apply to individuals not specifically named by the officials, so long as they ‘certify’ that the warrant was meant to apply to said individuals! Does anyone besides me see the potential for egregious abuse of this authority?
- Identifying who is a terrorist has been expanded from an individual’s being a member of
a group so designated as being a terrorist organization by the State Department to include
any foreign national suspected of publicly endorsing terrorist activity, belonging to a group which does, or providing support for such a group. We have only to look at the extensive dossier which the FBI maintained on John Lennon during the Nixon Era to see how such a law might be abused to discourage those expressing political dissent out of fear of being branded a terrorist!
- The Attorney General is authorized to detain any non-US resident who he has ‘reasonable
grounds to believe’ is involved in terrorism or poses a threat to national security. Although criminal or immigration charges are supposed to be brought against the individual within seven days of his detention, said individual may be held indefinitely! The holding of the Guantanamo Bay detainees for several years before releasing them without a trial can’t have done anything but generate more hatred against us and recruit more insurgents to fight our soldiers on the battleground!
We are experiencing a case of déjà vu, a new or neo-MyCharthyism, in which anyone who questions the wisdom or prudence of the path which this administration is embarked upon - especially as it relates to the Iraq War – might be branded at the least unpatriotic and at the worst a traitor! Would it not be ironic if our brave men and women in uniform were fighting to uphold the freedoms and liberties which we so cherish as a nation, yet no one back home had the courage to express dissent because the “If you don’t support the war, you don’t support the troops” atmosphere was so stifling?
Rarely has this country been so divided as it is today! More amazingly, rarely has an administration been able to sustain a policy which has become increasingly so unpopular! The elections of ’06 provided the Democrats with a clear, unequivocal mandate to bring this war – referring specifically to the Iraq invasion – to an end. Here we are, one whole year later, with the war still in progress! The Democrats have been worse than useless towards carrying out the will of the populace. The Congress’ horribly low ratings have been well-earned!
There is an almost palpable sense in the air of a public which feels helpless towards having its wishes paid attention to. The Democrats appear to have done a bait-and-switch act, promising one thing to get elected, then reneging on that promise, once in office. On the whole, as a collective, they have acted as if, as a condition of their assuming their offices for this session of Congress, they had to submit to castration!
Bottom line: there doesn’t appear to be a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when it comes down to heeding the wishes of the public; for, both parties have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! It’s irrelevant whether a people are stampeded by a herd of elephants or a herd or donkeys – they are just as dead, either way!
It’s time for a REAL grass roots movement to rise up and put pressure on our elected officials to pay more attention to the wishes of the populace! There is enough common interests among the disparate factions making up the voting constituency that organizing comitees from the various groups could convene to figure out what interests the various factions share, which could be pooled together and converted into a SUPER-cause, thereby defeating the ‘divide-and-conquor’ strategy heretofore employed by both parties so effectively!
An excellent case to demonstrate this need is the whole immigration debate. One doesn’t HAVE to be an Hispanic to realize how egregiously they have been mistreated as political fodder! Politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle are riding the backs of Hispanics, stirring up the pot of prejudice and bigotry under the guise of ‘border security’! Truth be told, our OWN country’s policies as relates to trade with Mexico and Central America are responsible in no small part to the flood of immigrants entering the United States.
Googling + NAFTA + Mexico + Latin America + “worker displacement” yielded 244 results. Using two of them for reference (www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/12/bookrevs.htm and www.alcaabajo.cu/design/read/ingles/whatisftaa.tpl.html?news_id_odj_id+1001887), NAFTA, and by logical extension, CAFTA, are not what they are promoted to be! While on the surface, the liberalization of trade amongst the United States and Mexico and Central America might APPEAR to be all good; however, the underbelly of this animal reveals a different picture altogether!
NAFTA established Maquiladoras or Maquilas (industrial region below our border with Mexico) where raw goods from the United States are shipped for assembly, then returned to this country.
What's that, Bush is about to deliver his State of the Union speech ... again? Guess that I had better put this aside; for, he will need someone to write his speech!
