Why No Push To Remove Bush?
Lately, we see more and more cracks in the moralistic, patriotic façade of the policy makers. We also see people in the media one by one start to realize that we have a real problem with our corrupt and criminal leaders. I wonder why more of us don't catch on. What's holding you back, America? You are the voting public of the world's great democracy. Are you going to continue to swallow the snake oil that this traveling salesman says will cure all your ills? Are you going to continue to bend over and take it, big time, to the tune of (ch-ching!) your family and neighbors being sacrificed? How can you keep from getting sick, thinking about the damage we continue to inflict on countries under the scrutiny of the corporations and their agents in Washington, including our own country? What sense can we make of the ongoing behavior of a junta that has usurped our authority to govern ourselves? Are you going to continue to eat the simplistic, old lies that have been specially formulated to keep you docile, like a general anesthetic? Are you so amoral yourselves that you will continue to support the wanton destruction of foreign neighborhoods and helpless and destitute civilians in the name of American control? Are you so arrogant and stupid that you think we can handle the entire world at one time?
"Look, Ma, no hands!" "Piece of cake! Why didn't we do this years ago?" "Bring 'em on!" First we'll do Iran, because we'll have them sandwiched in, between Iraq and Afghanistan, our two staunch allies. Russia won't mind, and Iran wouldn't dare use their nukes on us. Then we'll do North Korea. That one's a lead-pipe cinch, just like in '51! China won't mind if we stash a mere handful of troops at Inchon. And that high-heels-wearing worm, Kim, will be quite "Il" when we take him down. Nukes? He's bluffing! Next stop? Venezuela, of course. Secure all the oil we can, 'cause we're sure gonna need it. We'll have supply lines all over the world, longest in military history, so we gotta get that pain in the butt, Chavez. And let's get some plans together for the takeover of Kazakhstan. Lot's of oil there, and that'll come in handy when we invade Russia. And while we're at it, we should have enough troops left over to finish the job we started in 1812. That's right, Canada! They're virtually ours already, and there's enough oil in Alberta alone to smoke the rest of the world. India, Southeast Asia, Mexico, all the world is there for the taking. Who is better qualified that the world's lone remaining super power? I believe we can do all this before the next presidential election, at a maximum cost of $166 trillion, and no more than 3,000,000 US casualties. That's worth it, ain't it? Just take my advice and buy all the oil stock you can.
Am I making sense? No? That's because I'm putting into words the obvious outcome of the present insanity. Insanity does not make sense, except to the insane. Now you can claim to be sane, but that would be surreal, if you don't back it up. You're welcome to try to reason your way out of this. But you can't. The best you can come up with is fear and fatalism. I can see the posts now. "You obviously aren't aware that there are a bunch of sub-human maniacs whose sworn intention is to destroy us!" (racists) "It would be nice if everybody in the world wanted peace, but unfortunately, that's not the case." (defeatists lying to themselves) "Tell it to the terrorists!" (not our fault, not at all) "Democracy needs a war once in a while." (So the voters are always the ones who start wars?) "You obviously did too much LSD during your hippie days." (I never said I was normal...) "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists." (Get out of Dodge by sundown) "This is not about oil or control, it's about democracy." (hook line and sinker) "The God of Israel is on our side." (Just like he was at Gettysburg and Hiroshima) "They worship an evil god, the Pope even said so, and our god is going to kick their butts, because he's the one true god, and he can really take care of business!" (Ain't it the truth!)
Wake up! Your country is being stolen from you! Come to your senses! America is partying on a pontoon boat that's about to go over Niagara Falls. Get your overfed, hypocritical self off the couch and start writing, calling, talking, and protesting to your abusers. The will of the voters is the only chance this corrupt system still has to end this madness, and turn off Niagara Falls before we start WW3. Government of, by, and for the people is at a crossroads. Will you be led into the abyss, or will you lead this world to a new age of reason?
As always, thank you for your time and interest. I am looking forward to reading your thoughts.
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Comments: 15
It is much worse than you can imagine.
Hey YesManRoadKing, I wondered when I would recognize one of your signature comments.
Dane, Welcome to planet Earth. You got a lotta catching up to do.
Instead of focusing all your venom at Bush, how about you broaden your attack to all members ogov't who are corrupt? Such as the democrat who was busted for taking bribes earlier this year.. caught with several hundred thousand in bribe loot stuffed in his freezer. Or the Dems who have been convicted of having sex with pages, but had their party lobby for them to keep their jobs?
N.Korea wants to test their nukes (but they aren't bad, right?) and Iran wants nukes. (but all they want to do is wipe Israel off the face of the map.) For the first time in a long time we have a president who is willing to take the fight to the enemy. This didn't all start when W. took his seat. Remember the Khobar towers, USS Cole, first attack on the WTC? He's had the guts to do the right thing when others in the past cowered.
This isn't to say that Bush hasn't made mistakes, but He's alot better than any other option we have right now.
Foley's creepy behavior might have done him in even if he'd been the most liberal of Democrats. But that's not assured. With a Republican at the center of the seamy scandal, however, it was almost a slam-dunk that Foley would have to quit.
That's how it usually turns out for members of the conservative, traditional-family-values party. Just ask Bob Livingston, Jack Ryan, Bob Packwood, Dan Crane or others in the GOP who've watched their careers go pffft! with salacious disclosures. Or ask Bill Clinton, Gerry Studds, Barney Frank and other Democrats who've withstood embarrassing revelations to govern another day. Consider, for example:
· Packwood, from Oregon, resigned his Senate seat in 1995 amid repeated allegations that he had sexually harassed women. A few years earlier, Rep. Jim Bates, a Democrat from the San Diego area, faced similar allegations by two female staffers. Bates refused to resign and won reelection (he eventually lost his seat to Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who ran into his own ethics problems last year, and resigned after being convicted of bribery).
· In 1998, Livingston won the Republican Party's blessing to succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. But Livingston, of Louisiana, never served a day in the job. He was sunk by revelations that he'd had an extramarital affair, a disclosure that carried the additional baggage of hypocrisy since, at the time, Livingston was leading the Republican impeachment of President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton, of course, ultimately survived impeachment.
· Rep. Thomas Evans (R-Del.) was voted out of office in 1982 after he publicly regretted his "association" with a lobbyist named Paula Parkinson, who later posed for Playboy; Evans and two other Republican House members (including one named Dan Quayle) had shared a Florida cottage with Parkinson on a junket. Contrast this to the reaction to allegations of an affair between Sen. Chuck Robb (D-Va.) and Tai Collins, a former Miss Virginia. Robb claimed that Collins had only given him a back rub in a hotel room. Robb won reelection three years later.
· The clearest illustration may be in the divergent outcomes of the cases against Crane (R) and Studds (D) in 1983. Both men were censured by the House for having sex with underage congressional pages -- Crane with a 17-year-old girl in 1980, Studds with a 17-year-old boy in 1973. Crane, of Illinois, apologized for his actions, while Studds, who declared he was gay, refused. Crane lost his reelection bid the next year; Studds, of Massachusetts, kept winning his seat until he retired in 1996.
A double standard? And if so, by whom?
"The reality is that Democrats seem to get away with more," says Chuck Todd, editor in chief of the Hotline, a daily political journal. "They can have an affair and bail [themselves] out. There's a lower threshold for Republicans. I guess it's more of a hypocrisy thing," he adds, because such scandals put Republicans at odds with the party's socially conservative image.
Todd thinks he knows who's to blame for this: "It's the media, to be honest. What is the standard 'gotcha' story in the media? It's hypocrisy. If we can prove hypocrisy, we have a story. . . . So in a sex scandal, the bar for Republicans is lower."
He cites the case of Jack Ryan, the Illinois Republican whose bid for the Senate was derailed in 2004 when his wife, actress Jeri Ryan, alleged in divorce papers that he had taken her to sex clubs and had asked her to engage in sexual activity in front of other patrons. "What's amazing is that his candidacy hit the wall not because he had sex, but because he was thinking about having sex," says Todd.
But it's tough to blame the media when it's the electorate that determines who stays and who goes.
In Studds's case, he happened to represent a liberal (and apparently quite forgiving) district, while Crane came from a conservative rural district. Ditto with Barney Frank, who was reelected in his liberal Massachusetts district after it was revealed that he hired a male prostitute in 1985 to work in his District apartment, and the young man used the apartment to run a prostitution service. Clinton, meanwhile, was elected president twice, which may have had something to do with his ability to survive the storm over alleged extramarital affairs.
"A scandal's a scandal and the media will jump on it, no matter what party," notes Michael Farquhar, author of "A Treasury of Great American Scandals." On the other hand, notes Farquhar, a reporter who is on leave from The Post, "there's probably that extra twinge of delight [in the media] when, say, a gay-bashing Republican gets caught soliciting sex in a men's room, or a pious espouser of family values sleeps with his secretary."
There are exceptions, of course. A few Democrats have lost their jobs as a result of scandals. Wayne Hays, a Democrat from Ohio, resigned his House seat in 1976 after the disclosure of his affair with Elizabeth Ray, the curvaceous blonde who "worked" in Hays's office despite no evident secretarial skills. Gary Hart, who famously dared reporters to follow him around to prove he was squeaky clean, blew up as a Democratic presidential candidate in 1984 after reporters found him leaving a Capitol Hill townhouse after spending the night with a woman not his wife. And Gary Condit, a conservative Democrat from Modesto, Calif., lost his seat in 2002 following saturation coverage of his relationship with murdered intern Chandra Levy.
It's also true that Wilbur Mills, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the 1970s, lost his chairmanship after cavorting in the Tidal Basin with Fanne Foxe, "the Argentine Firecracker."
What's forgotten, however, is that Mills won reelection after his Tidal Basin romp; he was stripped of his chairmanship only after he appeared on a stage in Boston with Foxe, apparently drunk. House Democrats demanded his resignation, and got it.
The list of cases in your comment is all about sexual impropriety, and I don't see the connection to my piece, which is about world conflict and how to avoid it. I speak for peace. Human sexuality is a different topic. You're comparing baseballs and rutabagas. But if you want a parallel between military policy and sexual perversion, here's one: George Bush's policies make the US military the biggest rapist in modern times. Rape is when you force yourself upon a victim, hold the victim down, do bodily violence, make threats, scare the heck out of the person, brandish a weapon, perhaps, bust up the room for intimidation, and then actually violate the person against their will, sometimes leaving them dead, comatose, but definitely bereft of their very being. Now, rapes and contact with minors aside, which is worse, and which is the more impeachable offense, extramarital sex between two consenting adults behind closed doors, or the premeditated, willful destruction of thousands of people, way beyond the number that were killed in the WTC, the maiming of thousands more, the sacrifice on the altar of American power of the finest of our youth, sewing the seeds of eternal enmity the world over, that just keeps going and going until today we are threatened with global conflict?
1. They are the stereotypical moveon.org talking points.
2. I usually laugh at absurd things.
So you claim the U.S. is the biggest rapist of our times? The why is it after 'liberating' 10 million Iraqi's that their new free Gov't is begging us to stay?
They certainly aren't yelling "yankee go home." Well, the terrorists groups are, but thats because we actually stood up to their mindless violence. We didn't force them into anything. The Iraqi's didn't have any rights before we went in. By your definition they were being 'raped' by Saddam and his crew. We have given the choice to the people of where their country will go through free votes. How did the remnants of their oppressors respond? by threatening to kill them. But we Americans protected them from that threat, and 10 million voted that they wanted the same types of freedoms you enjoy today.
Yes, we have lost over 2,500 soldiers in 3 YEARS of sustained combat. It is a heavy loss. Just to put it into perspective, we lost that many on D-Day. the same amount of losses in a single day as in the past 3 years. The fact is we have lost fewer soldiers in this war than in any other war the U.S. has ever been involved in.
BTW, the courts yesterday ruled Bush's wiretapping program IS LEGAL and can continue. But unless you are getting calls from Muhhamed-Akbar-Bin-Bomber living in Iran, then you don't have anything to worry about.
Peace is a great thing, but only if everyone agrees to it. With wild cannons such as N. Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations wanting to play with nukes and threatening other countries, someone has to play world police. The U.N. is inneffective, and so the smaller nations look to the U.S. for help. We help others because we can.
President Kennedy said it best:
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, That we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the Survival and success of liberty."
(Inaugural Address Washington, D.C. January 20, 1961)
"Let the world go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today, at home and around the world!"
Because the jobs and probably the lives of the people in the puppet government the US has set up are at risk without US troops to protect them.
>Well, the terrorists groups are, [yelling "yankee go home."] but thats because we actually stood up to their mindless violence.
If the violence of the terrorists is mindless, why is the violence of the US military, and the violence our presence has spawned in Iraq any less so? Yes, Saddam was doing his own people, and he is rightly on trial for those charges. Why are we any better, in effect, when we busted the place up worse than Saddam ever did? The present government in Iraq is no shining example of the will of the people, and the US presence doesn't amount to anything like the post-war Berlin airlift. It may be the first puppet democracy in history, and as such, is doomed. Even if the majority of Iraqi voters carried the day, that majority is Shiite, a group with whom we have had less than placid dealings during the past decades. Are they supposed to be our good buddies from now on? We did them a huge favor by taking Saddam down, but does that mean they will stop hating us?
>The fact is we have lost fewer soldiers in this war than in any other war the U.S. has ever been involved in.
The US suffered somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 dead during Desert Storm.
I believe Antietam, a battle in the civil war, still holds the record for troops killed in one day's fighting, a figure I think is between 20,000 and 25,000.
>But unless you are getting calls from Muhhamed-Akbar-Bin-Bomber living in Iran, then you don't have anything to worry about.<
I say bring 'em on. I have nothing to hide. I simply do not want the CIA snooping around my life. Do you know how the Nazis came to power in Germany? Through subterfuge, intimidation, and manipulating the law to their exclusive advantage. When they took sole control of the German government, well, the world remembers the war. We would do well to study how this band of fanatics came to be in the position to lead the German people straight to hell on earth.
>With wild cannons such as N. Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations wanting to play with nukes and threatening other countries, someone has to play world police.
Talk about being a mouthpiece! What better nation to keep the rest of the world in line than the sole remaining superpower? Oh by the way, China has about 200 million troops in its armed forces, and enough nukes to turn the earth into a second asteroid belt. Do you know how Korea ended up divided between north and south? The US kicked butt all over Korea until Chinese troops got involved. Then the US decided it better strike a deal, rather than risk conventional or nukyaler war with China. What do you think China's reaction to a US invasion of Korea would be today? Do you think that rusty old Russia could come up with an objection or two if we stirred things up with Iran?
Do you really see us as defending our own liberty by messing with Iraq? I draw much different conclusions. We're working from much different data bases, it appears. I think Kennedy would look at the present situation and be appalled, especially as a veteran of WW2. This is no altruistic war to spread liberty, nor to defend our own freedom, nor to bring democracy to oppressed peoples. I see the US presence in Iraq as an attempt by a corporate-controlled government to extend its sphere of influence in an oil rich region. US actions have never had the spread of liberty as their main goal, but rather the spread of capitalism and making the way safe for corporations to leech riches from underdeveloped nations. There is only one thing that Bush appealed to in the speeches leading up to the invasion of Iraq: the fear still raging in America that another 9.11 should happen. The rest is propaganda of the most usual and despicable kind. You can claim correctly that all these criminals have designs on US skyscrapers, but they in no way endanger our liberty. Unlike the Chinese, the mid-eastern terrorists possess nowhere near the people, resources, or materiel to threaten America. You twist and cheapen the meaning of Pres. Kennedy's words, spoken in the era after WW2, when the Allies had defeated a huge worldwide threat from two huge, highly industrialized, highly armed, and highly motivated empires and their collaberators, at the same time. Iraq is a whole 'nuther animal.
Call me crazy because I read history books. They contain so much more than the cleaned up, corporate, religiously correct, factually incorrect version of events you see on Fox.