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Tuesday, September 09, 2003 |
We're Not Out of this Yet
With Bush’s approval numbers dropping to their lowest since pre-war, with every indication that they will decrease further after calling for another 87 billion dollars for Iraq; getting rid of more environmental measures and safeguards for the protection of our National Forests (allowing logging companies the opportunity to log without seeking environmental reports and approval); and lengthening the stay of American troops serving in Iraq; I’m waiting for something big to happen – something so big that it will take our eyes off the men behind the great curtain and get us back to that time when hero-worshipping was king and the president was too, when the president could say we have to have faith and we would lap it up like newly adopted puppies saved from the pound.
On ABC News tonight, I watched the reactions from the troops that were interviewed. One soldier, when asked his thoughts about their extension to their active duty, replied that they (ABC News) wouldn’t be able to bleep out all of things he wanted to say about it. Not one interview with those soldiers was positive. Meanwhile, they interviewed a few wives and families. They were doing all they could to be positive. One wife, in particular, commented that Bush was weak for not including this news in his national address Sunday night.
And you say September 11th is two days away. Great, if we don’t have a terrorist attack, then we can be graced with another expensive photo-op of the president with lots of fanfare and more hero-worship. How about laying olive branches down in the path of the president as he makes his way to the podium? Oh, I forgot, that’s coming at the GOP convention next year.
Stephan at Absit Invidia has a great blog today, Enter the WILS. He points out what is not conservative about this conservative administration. This is noteworthy because he himself is a conservative. Besides the bulleted list of un-conservative methods, here are two noteworthy paragraphs:
These new conservatives who I can't even recognize as distant cousins, let alone brothers, have expanded the size and scope of the state to levels that our liberal countrymen couldn't have imagined in their wildest Clintonian dreams. They've sadlled this country with a pernicious agenda and have used the sword of "patriotism" to silence and marginalize their critics.
It's not patriotic to burden future generations with crushing debt. Neither is it patriotic to wave a flag as you send your neighbor's kid off to die for a cause that has yet to be justified. Patriotism used to be defined as love of country, but in New America it means blind allegiance to the state, to government and to incompetent and self-interested politicians.
Talking about 9/11, a poignant and truly controversial article, "The War on Terrorism is Bogus," was published by the Guardian on the sixth of the month by Michael Meacher, who served as the Environment Minister for Britain from 1997 to 2003. In it, he shows evidence (at least more substantive than the evidence compiled and "sexed up" for waging war with Iraq), that the Bush Administration intentionally allowed 9/11 to transpire so they could have a backdrop to make their Project for the New American Century a reality, a project that was written up in September 2000, one year before the 9/11 tragedy. I realized that some of the evidence in this article had been discussed in articles appearing in Salon as early as last November. This is an important article because the evidence appears in one spot. When I get the time, I’ll include the names of the articles.
This is Meacher’s conclusion:
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course .
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