It's
Time To Go Back To Crawford
September
30, 2003
By Dennis Jones
We are already deep into the election cycle which will decide
George W. Bush's political fate. The real American pastime
- that of spinning the truth - is once again front and center
on the field of politics. Each of the teams in this contest
will compete with all of the skills at their command and the
truth inevitably comes up with the lower score. Somehow we
must sift through all of the bullshit to decide who will lead
us in the next four years.
For me the answer is easy - anybody but Bush! In my
opinion this president is on a fast track to competing with
Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Franklin
Pierce as the worst president in American history. I'm putting
my money on Bush.
I believe that the president is a decent person and I think
it's ludicrous to say that he is a liar. Like all politicians
he has mastered the ability to look through the rosiest-colored
glasses and present what he sees as the absolute truth. George
Bush wasn't responsible for the recession. He didn't have
anything to do with the corporate scandals, and he was as
much of a victim of 9/11 as the rest of us.
I also know that he hasn't done anything useful to fix these
problems, but you wouldn't know it if you listen to the daily
propaganda put out by the Bush spin machine. And while he
wasn't setting our country on the road to solutions, he was
managing to drag us backward on many, many other problems.
George W. Bush's record on the environment is absolutely
awful. He steadfastly refuses to address human contributions
to global warming. His answer to oil dependence is more drilling
everywhere without any intent to address federal fuel efficiency
standards. He advocates ruinous changes in forest policy as
an answer to forest fires. He is right about that - if we
cut down all of the trees there will be no more forest fires.
He has emasculated controls over mining on federal lands.
His administration steadfastly refuses to consider any new
protections for wild lands and has weakened regulations covering
those already protected.
Almost always, his answer is that the corporate leaders,
through the goodness of their hearts, will do the right thing
- never mind that they lie about their profits, cheat on their
taxes, and lay off thousands of employees while simultaneously
counting the outrageous multi-million dollar bonuses that
they pay themselves. In any situation when there is a potential
conflict between big business and the environment can anyone
remember when George W. Bush came down on the side of the
environment?
He pushed tax cuts with practically nothing in them for
the working men and women and then distorted the truth. He
has perfected the method of throwing a few bones to the poor
and the middle class while the steaks and dessert roll in
the back door for the wealthy. We're told that they benevolently
fuel the engine of the economy with their money and create
jobs for us stupid schmucks at the bottom of the feeding chain.
They've done such a great job so far that we have only lost
three million jobs in the last two years and managed to run
up record deficits so that our grandchildren will have something
to remember us by.
In the meantime he also thumbed his nose at beleaguered
state governments. The result is that governors are going
to have to cut wasteful spending like education, fire and
police protection and health care for the poor. If not that,
then they will have to raise taxes on those of us who are
lucky enough to have a job. I guess it fails to dawn on those
who support Bush that those state and local tax increases
will nicely cancel any crumbs which the middle class received
from federal tax cuts. Net result - no additional demand and
no new jobs! What we did get, according to Forbes magazine,
was a tidy 10% increase in the net worth of the wealthiest
among us.
I could go on and on about the damage to domestic policy
that George W. Bush is responsible for. But foreign policy
is the area where Bush has done the most damage. After 9/11
the country as a whole rallied around the president. As a
matter of fact the support for the U.S. around the world was
almost unanimous. He said all of the right things and he took
the right action when he sent the military into Afghanistan
to nail the terrorists who struck us. The country supported
him and was entirely willing to make any sacrifice to purge
Afghanistan of al-Qaeda and their supporters. While the purse
was not bottomless, most Americans were willing to do what
was necessary. They were willing to make hard choices.
I love my country, and on the whole I believe that our record
in foreign affairs is a good one. We have not always acted
with the most noble of motives but most of the time we have
been on the right side in international disputes. The American
people have sacrificed blood and treasure repeatedly in the
defense of freedom and opportunity. It would be impossible
to find another example in history when the most powerful
of nations acted as benevolently as we have. Our standard
of living and our values have been the envy of the world for
over 200 years. The attacks of 9/11 helped to bring almost
every nation on the face of the earth to support us. There
was unbelievable support for our policy of bringing the perpetrators
of the attacks to justice as well as the Taliban which supported
them.
George W. Bush correctly used that support to drive the
Taliban from power. With all of the wisdom of the ages he
then decided to turn to Iraq and turn that support into unbelievable
opposition. "Iraq is definitely the most dangerous place
on the face of the earth. This is where we can smite our foes
a blow and deliver the American people from terror. This is
where we can get al-Qaeda. This will make us safer. The world
will thank us and see the wisdom of our leadership."
The Bushies weren't looking through rose-colored glasses.
They weren't looking at all. They just knew that they
were right!
A huge majority of the American people believed that Saddam
Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and the Bushies did
nothing to set that record straight. They said that he had
ties to al-Qaeda. They told us that he had huge quantities
of weapons of mass destruction and was preparing to use them.
They told us that he was reinstituting his nuclear weapons
program. They told us that he was an imminent threat to the
United States. They said that we couldn't allow the next warning
to be a mushroom cloud over an American city. Had those things
been true I believe that they would have been justified in
invading Iraq and diverting our attention from Bin laden and
al-Qaeda.
But surprise, surprise, surprise, they were wrong. What
we have here is industrial strength miscalculation. Five hundred
years from now they may still be looking for proof of their
argument. They can dig up the entire country and they are
never going to find that imminent threat, because it wasn't
there and anybody really looking at the situation could see
that. They will argue until they are blue in the face that
Saddam Hussein was a very bad man that he treated his people
horribly and that was reason enough for committing American
lives and treasure in the sands of Iraq. They will still
be wrong.
And what have we won for our efforts in Iraq? Bush has done
the impossible. He has managed to place the United States,
the victims of 9/11, on the list of international bad guys.
We are privileged to have 140,000 of our sons and daughters
serve as targets for every terrorist within 5000 miles of
Baghdad. It is our good fortune to be able to spend $170 billion
of our money on Iraq at a time when we are running staggering
deficits and many programs are wanting for funding here at
home. Does anybody really believe that they are being honest
about those figures?
And the really great thing is that our luck in this regard
in going to continue into the foreseeable future! Bush finally
did hit the real trifecta. We don't have the troops to address
the really serious problems which confront us, we don't have
the money to even clean the road kill off of our roads, let
alone repair them, and we don't have the support of anybody
in this misguided adventure.
Now we are stuck. No person of knowledge would seriously
suggest that we can leave Iraq now that we are there. There
may not have been terrorists who were threatening the United
States in Iraq before the war, but there sure as hell are
a lot of them there now. We bombed their country and now we
owe it to the people of Iraq to help fix it up. The prestige
of our country demands that we do everything that we can do
help them govern themselves while we keep the wolves from
their door. The idea may be a noble one, but the cost is going
to be staggering and our efforts will have done nothing to
help make us safer. Get ready for thousands more casualties
and be ready to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq.
In the meantime we are going to have to deal with North
Korea. They are as brutal as Saddam Hussein ever hoped to
be. They say that they have nuclear weapons. We say that they
probably have nuclear weapons. The world agrees that they
probably have nuclear weapons and they have the means to strike
us with those weapons. We have proof that they have sold some
of their weapons to rogue regimes. What is to prevent them
from doing so with the terrorists?
And let's consider Pakistan. They have nuclear weapons, they
have missiles and they have terrorists - lots of them. People
in their intelligence agency and large numbers of their population
sympathize with our enemies. The regime in power lacks popular
support. It may very well be the most dangerous country in
the world.
We have many hard choices ahead of us and the question before
us is about whether we trust George W. Bush and his coterie
of advisors to make those decisions. His gifts to us are numerous
- huge deficits and the prospect that they will be with us
for a long time, a lousy economy, a declining environment
and a social program based on religious zealotry. He has committed
our country to a cause in Iraq that we may very well not win,
but in which we cannot fail. How can we believe them when
they cannot even admit the obvious about Iraq now? Personally
I will never forgive him for committing us to the bottomless
pit in Iraq at a time when we should have been routing out
the bastards who attacked us on 9/11.
|
