Dubya’s Plan
for Winning in Iraq
March 25th, 2006
When asked at a recent news
conference how long US troops would be in Iraq, our brilliant leader said
“that will be for future presidents and future Iraqi governments to decide”.
There you have it, the brilliant
tactical plan of George W. Bush for winning the war in Iraq. Leave the huge
mess for the next president. For those of you who need a Bush translator,
what he is really saying is “I f’ed up, now someone else's gunna have ta fix
it.”
Perhaps this explains why the
Republican Party is in meltdown mode, they can't wait to lose the next
several rounds of elections and dump this mess on the Democrats. It will be
impossible to leave Iraq any other way but in disgrace, and George would
rather have that disgrace fall on the Democrats as much as possible.
We are currently constructing
permanent military bases in Iraq, and my guess is the Republicans have no
intentions of leaving that country. And how do you think Muslims around the
world will feel about more US military bases in and around the holy lands?
It should not be lost on the American people that many large corporations,
some of them connected to Bush and Cheney, are making billions of dollars on
war profiteering. This way the “long war” becomes the “huge profit” for
Halliburton, GE, Northrop Grumman and others.
But don't talk about impeachment,
or you’re a terrorist sympathizer.
It is sad how low we have sunk.
Dr John
Are
they naïve, ignorant, or dumb?
March 19th, 2006
Bush administration officials seem
more and more confused and frustrated about their failing attempt to force
democracy on the sovereign Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. As you may recall,
Bush and Co. insisted that the war would take a few weeks at most, would
cost no more than $1 billion, that we would be greeted as liberators, and
showered with flowers and chocolates, and that we would be able to install a
democratic government in an Islamic nation in no time flat.
I ask again, are they naïve,
ignorant, or just plain dumb? It is now three years later, 2300 lives later,
$250 billion later, and the members of the puppet government we have
installed can't even meet in the same room for more than a few minutes
because they hate each other. As Maxwell Smart might have said… “missed it
by that much”.
Traitorous liberals such as myself
suggested 3 1/2 years ago (before anyone died, or any money was wasted) that
all that talk from the Bush administration was pie in the sky stuff; that
you could not possibly expect an Islamic nation to all of a sudden become a
perfectly functioning democracy just because Mr. Bush said so. Ask yourself
now, were liberals like me “terrorist sympathizers” as Dick Cheney would
suggest, or were we correct about the massive insurgent quagmire that Iraq
could become if we invaded it? Hmm, let me think about that for a minute.
Now Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld
say it is “time for resolve, rather than retreat”. They say that the Iraqi
government is making great progress, and that the new Iraqi army is
performing magnificently. Does that ring true to your ears based on what
you are seeing and reading from Iraq? Can these guys be trusted to give you
unfiltered truth of the matter? Hmm, let me think about that for a minute.
No tale of our woes in Iraq would
be complete without mentioning the great enablers; the war drum-pounding,
macho chest-beating US media. You know, the ones that the Republicans love
to call “the liberal media”. Without their unflagging and continuous
support, Bush and Co. couldn’t have pulled off such a horrendous series of
deadly mistakes. The media, such as they are, continue to give the Bush
administration a pass on all of their erroneous claims and the ensuing
debacles. Hell, the cheerleaders can’t all of a sudden start rooting for the
other team, now can they?
To top it all off, the Democrats
are acting like a bunch of wet noodles. So without a functioning,
questioning media, and with cowering Democrats everywhere you look, it is no
wonder that we are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole in the
Middle East.
So hang in there for the “long
war” as they are calling it now. And hold on to your wallets while you're at
it, Bush just raised the national debt ceiling to over $9,000,000,000,000,
or about $30,000 per man woman and child in the US. Don't worry about roads
and schools and infrastructure and port security in the US, we are going to
practice all that stuff over in Iraq first before we try it here.
Dr John
Winners and Losers
March 10th, 2006
When someone is elected to an
office in the United States, whether it be president, Senator, or Mayor of a
city, what do we call him in America? He is “the winner”. And the other
candidate who lost the election, what do we call him? “The loser”.
Take a minute to think about this
in relation to governing our country. What do we really mean when we say
winner and loser? We mean that there was a contest, a game of sorts, where
someone comes out victorious, and the other person is defeated. If you think
about this a little bit deeper, it is somewhat unsettling to note that we
are treating something as critical to our democracy as electing a president
as though it were a sporting event.
So what's wrong with that? For one
thing, it turns one of the most important civic duties that each citizen
should perform into a trivialized and shallow endeavor, and artificially
polarizes the electorate. I say artificially because many Republicans and
Democrats are simply voting for their team, regardless of the previous
performance record of their team.
For the good of our country,
wouldn't it be much better for Democrats and Republicans to work together to
accomplish at least those things that they can agree on? The Maryland
legislature yesterday voted unanimously, 135 to zero, all Republicans and
all Democrats, to scrap the Diebold electronic voting machines that had been
slated to be used in the upcoming 2006 elections. They have agreed to the
simple idea that a paper trail back up is essential in the case of close
elections if a recount is required. This proves that we can all work
together when the objective is clear and important.
When we let a sports mentality - a
desire for our team to win at all costs - insinuate itself into the deepest
aspects of our political elections, we all lose. But the entire concept of
civic duty is lost in modern America, and I am not certain that we can get
it back anytime soon. Rather, most Americans sit on the political sidelines
and cheer for our team (and vehemently harass the other team) without any
real concept of what either team stands for. Just as good sportsmanship has
become so elusive in America, honest political discourse also seems beyond
our grasp. But Americans are not are particularly introspective lot, so I'm
not sure what it would take to reignite the concepts of honest political
discourse and civic duty into our national psyche. We seem to be inexorably
infatuated with the spectacle of winners and losers.
Dr John
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