August 23, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE BUSH-AL QAEDA SYMBIOSIS

George W. Bush wants U. S. troops in Iraq and so, it turns out, does al Qaeda. The occupation in Iraq has turned into a nightmare for the U. S. military. It is also a great recruiting tool for al Qaeda. It really takes nerve for Bush to bring out Vietnam analogies. He and major members of his administration were chickenhawks when we were in Vietnam. Now Bush talks about the aftermath of Vietnam and implies that a similar fate awaits Iraq if we withdraw. He doesn't mention the incredible destruction and loss of life the U. S. inflicted and suffered in Vietnam before we withdrew. It was another war we should never have fought. If we draw any lessons from Vietnam, it's that the time for leaving is here. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

After hearing his selective historical rendition of the Vietnam experience in his Aug. 22 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, one is tempted to ask Bush what he would have done as President in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Presumably, Bush would have prolonged or escalated the Vietnam War, although it’s doubtful he would have called up the Texas Air National Guard where he was safely ensconced, while skipping his flight physical and seeking an early discharge.

In his speech, Bush justified an open-ended Vietnam War by citing the carnage that followed the U.S. military withdrawal.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields,’” Bush said.

In Bush’s version of history, condemnation should fall on Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford for making the painful decisions that eventually extricated the United States from the Vietnam quagmire – rather than on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon for inserting or keeping U.S. troops in the middle of the Indochinese civil war.

A PATTERN OF REPUBLICAN MISMANAGEMENT

The mantra of right-wingers is that the "free market" is god. Anything that happens in the "free market" is good and regulation is just awful. Back in the days of Herbert Hoover we got the Great Depression. In the Reagan era we got the savings and loan crisis. Now we have the subprime lending crisis. It reminds you, in a slightly different context, of the old song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." There's a line about, "When will they ever learn?" We've got to learn that unfettered free market economics is a disaster. It's a petri dish of corruption and ripoffs. This article by Jim Hightower is at www.truthout.org:

The subprime schemes are run through an intricate, intertwined system of loan brokers, mortgage lenders, Wall Street trusts, hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other predators. To entrap borrowers, the industry created an arsenal of arcane financial devices and maneuvers known by such exotic names as "exploding ARMs," YSPs, teaser rates, low-doc mortgages, loan flipping and equity stripping. Ultimately, these schemes are scams, extracting high payments from the families, sucking out any equity they might build up and stealing their homes.

This is one of those economic stories, like the savings-and-loan scam of the 1980s, that are usually buried back in the business section of newspapers. But, just as with the S&L collapse, this debacle is growing too big to contain, and all of us need to be paying attention. The built-in traps of the subprime mortgage market have already taken the homes of more than a million people in just the past year, and the dangers are quickly rising for millions more. This collapse in homeownership for the working poor has begun seeping into the rest of the economy, causing thousands of job losses, shaking the soundness and reputations of some major Wall Street firms, and slowly - ever so sloooowly - forcing lackadaisical bank regulators and clueless politicians out of their laissez-faire stupor.