Republicans:

The Party of the Very Rich and the Gullible

Which are you?

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2003-12-28 - 9:34 p.m.

Bush is Author of Dark Chapter for America

To listen to the U.S. mainstream media, you'd think George W. Bush was doing a great job, and is sure to be reelected. But if you were to listen to the rest of the world, you'd get a totally different story.

No modern president is reviled in other countries as much as this one, and none have so destroyed the admiration and respect for the United States in the world as much as this one. We are now seen as the bully of the world, and the words of the president have lost all credibility.

For example, here's an ,editorial in the Toronto Star, with the above title.

Some excerpts follow:

As the year of the war on Iraq draws to a close, the larger perspective that emerges is clear: George W. Bush, a small man in a big job, has dragged America into one of its darkest chapters.

He commands unprecedented military power, but his word carries little or no weight in much of the world.

...

Bush's use of fear as a key tool of governing has turned the world's most powerful nation into its most paranoid, despite two invasions and an expenditure of nearly $200 billion (U.S.).

The administration, invoking 9/11 and the murder of 2,900 innocents as its licence to wage unilateral wars, has so far killed about 10,000 innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's a guesstimate, since America does not count the Afghans and Iraqis it kills in the process of "liberating" them.

The gap between Bush's words and deeds gets bigger by the day, as does the disparity between his illusions and reality.

His war on Iraq was waged on a pack of lies, shoving aside the United Nations when it refused to play its part in the sham exercise of rubberstamping a predetermined course.

Just as he manipulated intelligence to tie Iraq to terrorism and portray its non-existent nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as a threat to America, Bush ignored the State Department's warnings of post-war troubles. He spoke instead of flowers greeting the U.S. liberators and oil revenues paying for the war and rebuilding of Iraq.

...

Surveying these geopolitical ruins, it is politically incorrect to blame the American public. But its gullibility is alarming. Even now, a majority believes that Saddam had a hand in 9/11. The Bush crowd knows only too well the usefulness of Saddam, a former ally now a demon.

All of the above is self-evident, except to a majority of Americans and their apologists, including, sadly, some Canadians.

...

Iraqi sovereignty belongs to Iraqis. They need to write their own constitution, elect their own leaders and make their own mistakes.

They could not possibly do any worse than their occupiers, who have been lurching from crisis to crisis for the last eight months in a haze of incompetence and ignorance.

You can read the whole editorial by Haroon Siddiqui here.

2003-12-27 - 9:14 p.m.

White House Distortions of 2003

The Center for American Progress has tracked the inflated claims of the Bush White House for the past year and posted the documented facts which expose those claims as the distortions they are on their website.

They have compiled an extensive list under the headings of: Drug Coverage, Drug Costs, Health Savings Accounts, the Economy, deficits, Healthy Forests, Power Plant Emissions, Mercury Emissions, Education, Consumer Protection, Veterans, AIDS, International Financing, International Military Help, WMD, Saddam-Al-Qaeda Ties, Military Support, Funding, Terrorist Financing, First Responders, and Cyber Security.

What I can't understand is why this regime has any credibility left at all, and any support from other than those very rich and powerful special interests who benefit from this administration's misguided policies. Unfortunately, they seem to control the mainstream media and are able to spread their distorted propaganda to millions of gullible American voters. Can they keep on fooling most Americans? I guess the election of 2004 will tell.

On December 13, the White House issued a document entitled "2003: A Year of Accomplishment for the American People." The document made various inaccurate and deceptive claims about the Administration's record over the last year. This report by the Center for American Progress seeks to correct those distortions, matching the White House's rhetoric with facts.

Go here to read the distortions and the facts.

2003-12-25 - 9:04 p.m.

Congressional Budget Office Director Sounds the Alarm

In a Christmas editorial, the New York Times calls attention to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, who has warned of the danger of rapidly increasing deficits:

Congress's main budget adviser has looked years into the future and concluded that the nation cannot afford its overheated present as Republicans continue cutting taxes, enriching spending and rolling ever larger debts a decade over the horizon. "Fiscal autopilot is not an option," warned Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office in a no-nonsense estimate of serial budget imbalances to come. Unless the deficit-and-tax-cut-happy Congress begins to put the brakes on now, future Americans will most likely be caught in an impossible crunch of historically higher taxes and plummeting health care and retirement benefits, Mr. Holtz-Eakin concluded in his forecast.

The cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid inevitably must eat up a "sharply increasing" chunk of the nation's economic output as baby boomers retire and people live longer, said Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush adviser. They will face more expensive health care with fewer active workers to help pay the escalating costs, he said.

With short-term economic indicators finally on the rebound, no incumbent Republican is likely to applaud these warnings. They are about problems that will effectively reach a crisis beyond the careers of the very politicians who are most responsible for them. But world markets, in which the dollar is steadily declining against the euro, are already showing a deepening suspicion about President Bush's policy of budgeting by deficit and debt. Congress should heed Mr. Holtz-Eakin's message that "moving sooner is better than moving later."

2003-12-24 - 1:52 p.m.

What this Election is All About

Here's a thoughtful essay that describes pretty well why we feel so strongly that our country is going down a disastrous path, and that the eviction of the current administration from power is essential to our survival as a nation.

But how do we reach our fellow Americans? How do we wake them up to what is happening to our country? I have a Republican friend who seems completely brainwashed by the right wing spin, and blind to what is happening.

Our candidates have a huge task ahead of them to reach the people who are too busy or too blind to see the peril ahead for our nation. And unfortunately, the mainstream journalists on whom we count, continue to treat our situation as politics and business as usual. And without them, what chance do we have?

This essay is by Randolph T. Holhut, and entitled: 'What we need to be fighting for in 2004'.

Some excerpts follow:

It's not an exaggeration to say that it is imperative that George W. Bush is evicted from the White House in 2004.

But how are we going to do it?

Only if there are more of us than there are of them.

By more of us, I mean people who believe in the traditional American values of freedom and justice; people who believe that a functioning democracy demands that citizens ask questions of their leaders and that they receive truthful answers in reply; people who aren't discouraged when those in power ridicule our ideas; people who have proudly upheld the simple notion that the highest form of patriotism is to speak out when your country is doing something wrong.

The things we have seen in the last three years of the Bush administration have been horrifying. But are there more people who are horrified by Bush and willing to do something about it than there are people who like things just as they are?

That, my friends, is the big question that faces us in the coming months.

...

The case against George W. Bush is easy to make, but it's even more important to make a case for a positive vision.

When people wrinkle their noses in the disgust when you say the word "liberal," all it takes to change that reaction is a reminder of the who was responsible for the hard won gains of the 20th century - child labor laws, the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage, Social Security and Medicare, the G.I. Bill and the Civil Rights Act, broader access to higher education and cleaner air and water.

These are the cornerstones of liberalism and they are all things that are firmly supported by a majority of Americans. They are also all under siege by the reactionaries who have made no secret of their desire to turn back the clock to 1900 and wipe away the social and economic progress of the last 100 years.

The recent crusade by conservatives to replace Franklin D. Roosevelt's face on the dime with Ronald Reagan's is instructive. Conservatives have hated Roosevelt for decades. It's easy to see why.

"There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life," Roosevelt said in 1932 upon accepting his party's nomination for president. "The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

"But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party," he said. "Ours must be a Party of Liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens."

...

But Roosevelt's New Deal proved that government can make a difference in people's lives. It reduced poverty through programs such as Social Security and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It created public works programs that not only provided jobs for the unemployed but built bridges, roads, dams and other public facilities that are still in use today. It created the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage. It gave labor unions the right to organize. It helped stabilize farm prices and reclaim farm land ravaged by erosion and overuse.

"Under the New Deal the noble term 'commonwealth' was given a more realistic mean than ever before in our history," the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote after Roosevelt's death in 1945.

...

We are in the midst of a global crisis where decades of social progress are being swept away. It doesn't have to be like this, and contrary to Lady Thatcher's grand pronouncement, there must be an alternative to a rapacious free market that puts profits ahead of human needs.

Here in our nation, it means an electoral system that's not controlled by corporate dollars. It means a press that lives up to its responsibility to challenge the status quo. It means a government that exists to promote the general welfare, and not merely help the rich grow richer. It means developing a sustainable economy that doesn't plunder the earth. It means investing in public infrastructure, health and safety to create more jobs, affordable housing, better schools. It means a health care system that all Americans can have access to.

It also means that our government might try being a little more humble and a little more cooperative with the rest of the world.

Americans must recognize this simple fact - if our leaders decide they will not stop waging war until there are no more threats against America, there will continue to be threats against America because of the permanent war being waged against those our leaders believe are our enemies. We are struck in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of endless warmaking that creates new threats that requires still more warmaking.

Clearly, our nation's - indeed, the world's security - will ultimately depend upon a true commitment to peace and social justice all over our planet.

In a time when it seems as if all the worst instincts of humanity are triumphant, hope is a radical ideal. We have to believe that our nation and the world can become a better place. We have no choice but to embrace the hope that tomorrow will be better than today.

This is what we need to be fighting for in 2004.

You can read this whole thoughtful essay here.

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