UPDATED: FEB 3, 2008
REFLECTIONS ON THE G W BUSH YEARS
All of us remember the days when we were a proud people. Before Bush, we believed in fairness and plain-dealing, both with our neighbors and all the peoples of the world. We thought of ourselves as benevolent givers of democracy, truth, food, and medicine to the poor countries of the world. We believed in the dignity of man. The unalienable rights of all humans given to us all by the Creator were our credo. We believed in defending the underdog and being very careful with the tender, e.g., civilians caught in the crossfire of a war.
Throughout time we Americans have never hesitated to hold our public servants up to the light and accountable for wrongdoings. We have punished them, no matter how high the throne upon which they sat. Nixon could tell you that even presidents, if they break the law, must pay a consequence. It’s the will of the people. It’s imperative in preserving our sacred Constitution.
But who are we now, in early 2008? Where to begin? It all started with 911, where Americans at home and all the nations in the world got behind Bush. His polls were high back then. The world had our back in going after the terrorists. We knew that al Qaeda killed us in New York City, and we knew that they had terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. So we attacked the Taliban there who shielded Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s leader, and the world cheered us on. We were the white hats who could deal tremendous blows to the terrorists who had been blowing up parts of the world for years. The Lone Ranger had come to the rescue. But abruptly, things changed. The cheering crowds vanished.
See, Bush wanted to attack Saddam Hussein. He alluded to Saddam’s connection with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and tried to tell us that Iraq, too, had conspired to kill Americans on 911. Bush said that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake Uranium from Niger. Joe Wilson tried to tell Bush that the Niger intelligence on that was bogus. Bush would not listen. His state of the union speech had Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the crosshairs. He asked us to believe him, to trust him. Colin Powell showed us the way when he addressed the UN General Assembly. Bush cautioned us that we must fear Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and warned that if we waited too long to attack Iraq, that the smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud. We trusted him. And he attacked.
Count me among many Americans who thought something was terribly wrong when Bush demonized Iraq, a country who never attacked the United States. I wondered that, in the days of sophisticated spy satellites, high-flying Blackbird surveillance planes, why was it that Colin Powell had nothing more to show us than a bunch of drawings to support his contentions that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. As time passed, Americans began to get the nagging feeling that we had been had. It felt like the core of all we believed to be good and right was being sucked out us by a giant syringe. We were now killing innocent Iraqis, women and children in their cities, in their country, and it did not seem to matter to us. Bush and Cheney had America wrapped in the flag. Yet we diverted our resources, our uniformed soldiers, and paid military contractors like Blackwater 5 times the pay of our own American soldiers without holding Blackwater accountable for their actions. We borrowed billions of dollars from the Chinese to make war on Sunnis and Shias who hated us and our presence as much as they hated each other. We had no money of our own in the US Treasury. Bush has borrowed us into bankruptcy to finance his obsessive war on terror, while all that’s in our Treasury is a giant IOU for 9 Trillion dollars. We became a new nation where millions of Americans looked the other way while trying to support our president, full well knowing that he had charted America’s ship of state on a course of madness, and we were the deckhands who had no say on where we were going or why.
Knowing that your country was held hostage by the Neocon elite in Washington has to be the epitome of feelings of helplessness. Over the years, many Americans expressed that they did not think that they could fight City Hall, much less the White House. So we set about watching Bush change and dilute and destroy our very Constitution, our very lives. We are wiretapped illegally, NOT in accordance with the Bill of Rights protecting all Americans from illegal search and seizure and our rights to privacy. Bush’s combination of impatience and arrogance precluded his lawfully following FISA Court laws that require him to first ask permission before wiretapping without court orders. To add insult to injury learned legal scholars pointed out that Bush could wiretap today and ask the court’s permission two days after the fact and still be in compliance with the FISA laws. Nothing doing. Bush wouldn’t wait for no court. He was bigger than any danged court and would defy all laws that said otherwise. Heck, as president, he didn’t even have to sign laws passed by Congress if he didn’t want to. He said so on many signing statements he affixed to duly passed laws, including McCain’s Do Not Torture bill. Heck, Bush wrote, “I kin dang well torture if’n I wont to ‘cause I’m president.” Things in America had changed. The world and the nation were aghast at such a display of raw tyranny. But the courage to confront Bush was not in us.
The Bush years were even more remarkable for their ability to intimidate Congress. When the House and Senate had a Republican majority, many congressmen who voted to help enable Bush to trash the Constitution and our system of government, even allowed that what they were doing for Bush was wrong and that it would be up to the next Congress to change things and fix the damage to the Constitution. Even more breathtaking was when the Democrats won both houses in 2006, they immediately took impeachment off the table. It was like Bush could break laws in compounded multiples when compared to Nixon who would have been impeached, and nobody raised a stink. Congress was frozen in the headlights and still is. Remarkable. So Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury in the Valerie Plame trial, but neither Bush nor Cheney was implicated as giving the order to expose Plame’s secret CIA identity because her husband, Joe Wilson, had exposed Bush as a liar for telling Americans that Iraq had attempted to buy Uranium from Niger. The White House exposed one of our own secret agents, and not even Carl Rove or Harriet Meir got called to the witness stand. They were subpoenaed, but they scoffed at Congress’ right to mess with Bush’s lust for power. Scooter Libby fell on his sword, but it wasn’t fatal. Bush commuted his prison sentence. And America yawned and forgot to care once again. So what would this president have to do to move Congress to impeach or the American people to picket in throngs of thousands for him to resign? Stay tuned. Nothing big enough to matter has moved us yet.
What if Bush got Attorney General Gonzales to try to stack the federal attorneys with their own cronies? Nope. Done that already. What about Bush’s pompous indifference to the poor people of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita who have suffered without relief for over two years? What about the mayor of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi who is living at the jailhouse because the insurance companies refuse to pay for his house damage? Or the US Congressman who pointed to a piece of tin roof in the top of an oak, much higher than the storm surge, who tells us that the insurance company will not pay because they said his house was destroyed by water, not wind? “How could that piece of tin be that high in the tree when the water level did not rise that high? What about all those cheated by our government, by George W. Bush who vowed to help when the world knows better? But alas, not even that was enough to move people to act.
The cesspool of Washington lobbyists and no-bid contractor cronies like Halliburton, the filth, the mire that has our country by the throat has not seemed to stir us. Neither did the loss of sacred freedoms like habeas corpus which died when Bush and his lapdog Congress signed into law, the Military Commissions Act which nullified our right to trial by jury or even being informed as to the nature of the charges against us. What a body blow we all took when those freedoms got hammered by an uncaring president and a rogue Congress who sadly, are into looking out for themselves, not the people.
Still, at the end of each day, I have to believe that caring about each other is still a basic human value cherished by us all. As the election draws nearer, perhaps we can see the difference this time that sets Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apart from the Bush years which is like walking barefooted down memory lane on a bed of broken glass. Perhaps we will listen to their words and check out their voting records of how they have championed the people, not some lobbyist group or some giant corporation like Exxon or Halliburton. Perhaps we have had enough. Maybe the Bush years, for all the death, destruction, division and corporate crony greed, will serve to teach us a lesson that we will never forget. And perhaps we can regain our country again. We are Americans, and we must rescue ourselves and our country. Barack Obama says, “Yes we can.” And I think he’s right.
Last Update: 02/09/2008