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They
Must Think Americans Are Idiots
January
9, 2004
By Becky Burgwin
 You
know, I'm really starting to think that our current president
and his cronies must not have gotten in very much trouble
when they were kids. I'm thinking that maybe they had permissive
parents who were oblivious and let them get away with everything
because they don't seem to have the skills they need to be
successful liars. You know, the tools that experienced liars
use, like covering your tracks and getting your stories straight.
The fact that I can tell when they're lying makes me think
that nobody's even listening anymore - especially Congress
and the press. Or maybe it's the same syndrome that happens
to children who are allowed to watch tons of movie and TV
violence - they become desensitized.
The question really is, though, why does our president,
our vice-president, our defense secretary and our national
security advisor think that they can lie over and over to
our faces and get away with it? I'm guessing that it's because
they think Americans are really stupid. In the days leading
up to the war, when they were talking about the WMDs, even
I knew that they were lying. Bush said several times, "Time
after time we have asked Mr. Hussein to let the inspectors
in and time after time he has refused."
Now that's just bad lying. Even as he spoke, Hans Blix was
in Iraq saying that Iraq was being very cooperative and that
they hadn't found anything so far in their months of inspections.
After that, Bush started calling them the "so-called
inspectors." I am not a rocket scientist and I am not
a politician, but I knew he was lying. I knew why they wanted
to get into Iraq and I knew what was going to happen if they
succeeded in getting into Iraq. The members of Congress and
the press who heard him saying these things must have had
that heard-so-many-lies-I'm-just-completely-oblivious-to-them
syndrome.
Then we have the famous forged document. In order to convince
the American and British citizens that Iraq had purchased
uranium from Niger, someone forged a document. Now let me
tell you something. I, like many Americans, have forged documents
myself, in my younger days. There's the ever-favorite fake
ID. What college kid didn't do that? And in my generation
there was the phony draft card. So even I know that if you're
going to forge the signature of a government employee on a
document with a date on it, you'd better make sure that guy
worked in that position on that date. Because it's really
not going to be very effective if it's signed by J. Edgar
Hoover and dated 1996. Bush's document was so phony, only
someone who thinks that they're untouchable and everybody
else is an idiot would even dream of using it.
It hasn't yet, but this comment from our national security
advisor is what I think is going to finally bring these guys
down: "How were we supposed to know someone would hijack
an airliner and crash it into a building?" Well, here's
how - because Bill Clinton's national security advisor, Senator
Hart, Senator Rudman, and terrorism expert Richard Clarke
started trying to warn you about it before Clinton left office
in Jan. 2001.
Did she honestly think that all of these men were going to
keep quiet about how much effort they put into warning her
and her boss about the impending terrorism threat? Did they
underestimate how bad they would look when the public was
told that, in spite of the ever-increasing level of alarm
being expressed by these men, President Bush took a month
long vacation that ended on Sept. 4th ? Mark my words, this
is the one that's going to come back and bite them in the
ass.
Here's the problem, though. I really think that Congress
and the press are so desensitized to Bush's lies that he could
get away with standing in front of them and saying, "Look,
we lied about the reasons for going to war. We really just
want their oil. And we wanted to help our cronies make a shitload
of money by overcharging the American taxpayer for rebuilding
the country after we destroyed it. And we really don't give
damn how many Iraqi men, women and children or American kids
have died or been maimed by what we've done. Not only that,
we ignored repeated warnings about a terrorist attack on our
country and then, at the very least, we were completely inept
on the morning of that predicted attack because I sat in a
school room reading a book about goats to children while 3,000
of our citizens were being murdered by weapons of mass destruction
and the greatest military in the history of humankind stood
by and never fired a shot. It was the very the next day, after
we flew the Bin Laden family out of the country on a private
jet, that we started blaming Saddam and using fear as a political
tool to convince you that we needed to alienate all of our
allies and go to war with Iraq. And furthermore, we don't
give a damn that the country is spiraling into a devastating
economic collapse because me and my friends are getting richer
and richer every day. And as for the environment, what do
we care whether we drill for oil in our national parks or
sell pieces of old growth forest to logging companies who,
in turn, give us campaign contributions? We're not going to
be here when the polar ice caps melt."
But while Congress and the press may be desensitized to
this stuff, the American public is not. And neither are we
stupid. If you're not paying attention or you're just relying
on the press for your information, you need to know that our
administration has committed grave crimes against its own
people, particularly our troops, and against the Iraqis. We
need to fight them with everything we've got if we're to have
any hope of rescuing our broken and beleaguered country.
So we should make it our mission for 2004 to make sure that
these people - who believe that it should be a government
of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, these people who
claim to be men of God while blithely causing the deaths of
tens of thousands of innocent people - lose, and lose big.
Ms. Burgwin's writing has appeared in Newsweek, Time, New
York Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Tribune
Review as well as several online Op Ed sites. She is also
involved in gay rights, women's issues and the environment.
She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.
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