Vote For A Man, Not A Puppet

May 21, 2004

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.

I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.

It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.

John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.

But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me o­nce, but he won't fool me twice.

It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.

It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?

This election really is important, not o­nly for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not o­nly hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.

July 10, 2004

I love the sharp tongue of the British. A former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office has said George Bush's war o­n terrorism is “legal nonsense” and confers no more power o­n the United States to detain people than the war against obesity.

That's true. The British lady, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, is quite correct, too, that the war against Iraq was illegal and thus the occupation of Iraq was/is illegal. I say “was/is” because that depends o­n whether you believe the fairy tale of Iraqi sovereignty.

So it turns out old Saddam Hussein was correct. He is still the legal president of Iraq; the new Iraqi government is illegal and has no right to try him. That, of course, will not prevent him from being tried and eventually hanged. o­ne of the things I hope Americans are learning, besides the fact that the war wasn't worth it, is that the rule of law is a farce. Like language, the law is twisted to justify what the Bush administration wants to do. This administration is bound by neither law nor truth.

I'm no lawyer, but I pointed out some time ago that you can't declare war o­n a tactic, and that's all terrorism is – a tactic. Real terrorists, as opposed to people resisting occupation of their country or guerrillas fighting to overthrow a government, are criminals, and as criminals deserve to be hunted down. That, however, is not a war.

For all time, when bad governments wanted to increase their power, they spread fear and claimed the new power would allow them to “protect” the people. If there were no real enemies at the gate, they would invent them. The threat of terrorism has been enormously exaggerated by this administration to justify a very un-American lust for power. It has spread fear like a glutton spreads butter o­n hot pancakes.

Some local law-enforcement officers also fearmonger to get bigger budgets. Some in burgs no international terrorist could find with a satellite are warning the local folks to suspect everybody they see.

Another word that is vastly abused in this crazy time is “intelligence.” Do you know what intelligence is? It's just knowledge, and knowledge must be factual. Assertions are not knowledge. Beliefs are not knowledge. Fears are not knowledge. Regardless of what so-called “intelligence” said, the facts are that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, had no programs to produce them and had no cooperative arrangements with al-Qaeda.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who probably should see a psychologist as well as a cardiologist, continues to claim a connection, but what he calls a connection is o­ne or two meetings in a period of years from which nothing ever came. If a mere meeting is a “connection,” then all of us have connections with every human being we've ever met, however briefly. This is another example of language abuse.

Another architect of the illegal war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, still coyly claims that just because we haven't found the weapons doesn't mean they don't exist. That's true. We haven't found any Martians, either, but perhaps they do exist, perhaps even in the offices of the Pentagon. It's always been hard to prove a negative.

This is an administration of sick puppies whose minds are haunted by lust for power, ideological phantoms and a profound contempt for the American people. A willingness to deceive is always proof of contempt.

Hopefully, in November, a majority of Americans will decide that this administration, like its illegal war, isn't worth reelecting.

From: David Lorimer [dl@scimednet.org]

Thanks Suzanne. These pieces are terrific!!