They Still Don't Get It

I got quite a phone call this morning in response to my letter published in the News-Leader yesterday. It was a blocked call, so the caller was unwilling to let me know who he was, but he wasn’t reticent about sharing his opinion, opening and closing his call with, “Before you write another letter, you’d better get your facts straight.”

In the course of the call, he contended that Jimmy Carter was responsible for the 18% interest rates that cropped up during his administration, that the war in Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein refused to let WMD inspectors into his country, and that “This country is not ready for a black Muslim or a woman to be president”.
He did ultimately agree with me that no president was capable of single-handedly affecting interest rates. His position there ultimately became that this was true because Congress and the Courts tied a president’s hands. He had no response, though, when I replied that it was this president’s attempts to remove the balance of powers that most strongly led me to fault him.

When I said that it was Bill Clinton who pulled the inspectors out of Iraq, he denied that saying I still had my facts wrong and went off onto a tangent about how Clinton bombed the wrong targets then anyway. I didn’t get a chance to follow up with the FACT that, in the face of many requests by the inspection teams to do so, W refused to consider sending inspectors back in.

As to his assertion that the country just isn’t ready for a black man or white woman to be president, my response was that the same thing was said about civil rights in 1964 and that the country had better get ready because one or the other was about to be president.

My new friend’s final assertion was that Clinton has said that she believed the Saddam had WMD’s too, proving that Bush had only acted on the best intelligence available at the time. To this, I said that Bush had picked through and twisted the intelligence available at the time in order to mislead the Congress into supporting his push for war.

This continues to be a bone of contention though it doesn’t take much fact sifting to find the truth. For any far-rights who might be reading this blog, I include the following which comes from an article written by one of America’s leading historians. (See: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/worst_president_in_history)

“All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened.”

A majority of historians, by the way, are on record as considering George W. Bush the worst president in the history of this nation. Here, taken from the same article, is a one paragraph explanation of why they feel that way:

“Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.”

Sadly, I have long thought noticed that “unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy” is far too common a valid description of people like my caller. At the bottom line, their biggest objection to those of us who take positions in opposition to this administration is that we refuse to honor the office and follow the president in everywhere he wants to take us.

That’s just a little too much like goose-stepping for me.



Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle