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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonkie who wrote (40447)	3/26/2004 6:26:52 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Why do Americans just LOVE getting sucker-punched by George Bush? buzzflash.com A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION by Jane Stillwater Recently I went on a tour bus with a bunch of senior citizens. This trip was a pivotal point in my political education! All I did was mention...that I thought George Bush had stolen the 2000 election and...Holy cow! Sixteen irate little old ladies immediately attacked me with umbrellas! Were it not for my daughter Ashley's quick thinking, I would not even be here to tell the tale. Americans just seem to LOVE getting sucker-punched by George Bush. Cite unemployment statistics to them? Line up facts about Bush's close alliances with, say, the bin Ladin family or Enron? THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED! I double-dog dare you to drive across Texas with a bumper sticker that says "Bush lied, our soldiers died." At the very least, you would get your tires slashed. Walk into almost any church in America and casually mention that perhaps Christ actually believed all that nonsense about "Thou shalt not kill" and/or that Bush might be exhibiting a tad too much blood-lust to be a good Christian and Boy howdy. You will be in Deep Dog Dookie. Just go to any unemployment office in the nation and attempt to tell the poor jobless souls there that Bush's outsourcing policies have cost American workers over three million jobs in the last three years. Not a good idea! Or try telling your Great Uncle Henry that Bush might have blown it on 9-11 by not scrambling our air defenses until over TWO HOURS after the first jet was hijacked. Your Great Uncle Henry will not only stop speaking to you forever, HE WILL WRITE YOU OUT OF HIS WILL! Or go to a PTA meeting in California's central valley and mention that educational funding has been cut so drastically that EVERY child has been left behind. You'll be sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on before you can even recite the Pledge of Allegiance! Or check out one of those spit-shined, buzz-cut American military men who fought the Vietnam war from an armchair in front of his TV set. With this guy, if you so much as even HINT that idealistic young American soldiers are dying in Iraq because Bush told 237 documented lies, John Wayne, Jr. here will pull out his 1967 Army-issue side arm and shoot you. "You don't like it here then go move to Cuba you unpatriotic bitch!" he will crow over your bleeding corpse. Just try explaining to Captain America here that all you were trying to do was protect our valiant enlisted men and women from Bush's motley crew of con-artists, hustlers and pimps. Nope. Forget it. Bush is God. Why is it that whenever I point out to people that Bush does NOT have America's interests at heart, they look at me like I'm some nasty little bug? "America is NOT a superpower," I tell them. "The only superpower in the world today is George Bush. True Americans like you and me are just being used -- systematically hooked and gutted like trout on a fish farm. Do you think that Bush controls our freedom, our education, our jobs, our personal life and our oil because he LIKES us?" Then, after finishing this cute little speech, I run like hell. Try telling Americans that corporations are not persons -- and even if they were, they need to stop playing Lex Luther and act morally like everybody else. Go ahead. Just tell that to your average dot-commer whose job is now in New Delhi. You will NEVER get asked to the prom. Why do Americans just LOVE getting sucker-punched by George Bush? George Bush just keeps hitting us again and again -- right where we live: In our homes, in our hearts and in our pocketbooks. Yet Americans still keep passionately lining up to get hit again. Over and over and over again -- like so many bowling pins. If anyone can figure out this phenomenon, PLEASE let me know! Americans need to stop playing Queen of Denial. It's time for us all to stop letting Bush and his billionaire friends destroy the country we love.

To: zonkie who wrote (40447)	3/26/2004 7:08:02 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Aznarization _________________________ By Patrick Sabatier Liberation FR Wednesday 24 March 2004 truthout.org Does Bush risk being "Aznarized" from now to November 3? That is, to pay at the ballot box for having played with the truth? We're not quite there yet. However, the succession of former advisors' revelations that spit into the anti-terrorist soup the White House has been serving to Americans since September 11 begins to seriously erode that image of a frank, inflexible, and farsighted "War President" on which Bush is betting his reelection. In a country decreed to be in a state of war, the citizenry's trust in their President, in his honesty, and above all, in his competence, count more than ever. However, the question that is asked ever more openly on the other side of the Atlantic is simple: by claiming to make war on terrorism by the war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, did Bush and his men mistake the target? Still worse, did they fool their own citizens and their allies? By wrongfully accusing Iraq of links with Al-Qaeda and of possession of forbidden weapons, did Bush act with cynical calculation or culpable blindness, just like Aznar designating- wrongly- ETA the evening of March 11? Could his Iraqi obsession have even blinded him to the Islamo-terrorist threat before the attack against the Twin Towers? The same causes may not produce the same effects. The 2004 presidential race will probably depend first on the economic situation and the candidates' respective electoral war chests. However, foreign policy and security questions will play a role they have not enjoyed for a long time. It's not good for Bush, therefore, that more and more Americans may be asking themselves, as the rest of the world has already done, whether he didn't make a big mistake. Or whether he lied. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

To: zonkie who wrote (40447)	3/26/2004 8:25:10 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

New World Disorder ____________________ By James Carroll -- a best-selling author, most recently of An American Requiem, which won a National Book Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and many other publications, and he writes a weekly column for The Boston Globe. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things." This warning is from Niccolo Machiavelli, yet it has never had sharper resonance. More than a decade ago, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush explicitly sought to initiate, as he put it to Congress, a "new world order." He made that momentous declaration on Sept. 11, 1990. Eleven years later, the suddenly mystical date of 9/11 motivated his son to finish what the father began. A year ago last week, Bush the younger launched a war against the man who tried to kill his dad, initiating the opposite of order. The situation hardly needs rehearsing. In Iraq, many thousands are dead, including 564 Americans. Civil war threatens. Afghanistan, meanwhile, is choked by drug-running warlords. Islamic jihadists have been empowered. The nuclear profiteering of Pakistan has been exposed but not necessarily stopped. Al Qaeda's elusiveness has reinforced its mythic malevolence. The Atlantic Alliance is in ruins. The United States has never been more isolated. A pattern of deception has destroyed its credibility abroad and at home. Disorder spreads from Washington to Israel to Haiti to Spain. Whether the concern is subduing resistance fighters far away or making Americans feel safer, the Pentagon's unprecedented military dominance—the costs of which stifle the U.S. economy—is shown to be essentially impotent. In America, the new order of things is defined mainly by the sour taste of moral hangover, how the emotional intensity of the 9/11 trauma—anguished but pure—dissolved into a feeling of being trapped in a cage of our own making. As the carnage in Madrid makes clear, the threats in the world are real and dangerous to handle, but one U.S. initiative after another has escalated rather than diffused such threats. Instead of replacing chaos with new order, our nation's responses inflict new wounds that increase the chaos. We strike at those whom we perceive as aiming to do us harm but without actually defending ourselves. And most unsettling of all, in our attempt to get the bad people to stop threatening us, we have begun to imitate them. The most important revelation of the Iraq war has been of the Bush administration's blatant contempt for fact. Whether defined as "lying" or not, the clear manipulation of intelligence ahead of last year's invasion has been completely exposed. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" has been transformed. Where once it evoked the grave danger of a repeat of the 9/11 trauma, now it evokes an apparently calculated American fear. The government laid out explicit evidence defining a threat that required the launching of preventive war, and the U.S. media trumpeted that evidence without hesitation. The result, since there were no weapons of mass destruction, as the government and a pliant press had ample reason to know, was an institutionalized deceit maintained to this day. At the United Nations, the United States misled the world. In speech after speech, President Bush misled Congress and the nation. And note that the word "misled" means both to have falsified and to have failed in leadership. To mislead, as the tautological George Bush might put it, is to mislead. The repetition of falsehoods tied to the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq has eroded the American capacity, if not to tell the difference between what is true and what is a lie, then to think the difference matters much. The administration distorted fact ahead of the invasion, when the American people could not refute what had not happened yet. And the administration distorts fact now, when the American people do not remember clearly what we were told a year ago. That Bush retains the confidence of a sizable proportion of the electorate suggests that Americans don't particularly worry anymore about truth as a guiding principle of their government. In that lies the irony. The Bush dynasty has in fact initiated a new order of things. The United States of America has become its own opposite, a nation of triumphant freedom that claims the right to restrain the freedom of others; a nation of a structured balance of power that destroys the balance of power abroad; a nation of creative enterprise that exports a smothering banality; and above all, a nation of forcefully direct expression that disrespects the truth. Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war for the United States is clear. We have defeated ourselves. Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in The Boston Globe on March 16, 2004. tompaine.com