December 21, 2006

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

HEARING THE VOICES

Every so often you'll hear a story about a parent or guardian who has killed his or her children, and claiming that God told them to kill the children. Most of us would conclude these people are either lying or delusional. Yet we have a man occupying the Oval Office who has claimed that he was chosen by God to be President of the United States. Considering his reckless disregard for the truth and morality, you have to wonder why George W. Bush would have been chosen by the Deity to do anything. Bush had all kinds of warnings not to invade Iraq. Even his own father, George H. W. Bush, warned of the dangers of occupying Iraq. Millions around the world demonstrated against this war. The U. N. weapons inspectors found nothing to indicate that Iraq was a danger to the United States. There was nothing linking Saddam Hussein to the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11. But Bush launched his war, and now he doesn't want it to end. This article by Joseph L. Galloway is at www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16250266.htm:

The power brokers in Washington spent the week carefully arranging fig leaves and tasteful screens to cover the emperor's nakedness while he was busy pretending to listen hard to everyone with an opinion about Iraq while hearing nothing.

Sometime early in the new year, President Bush will go on national television to tell a disgruntled American public what he has decided should be done to salvage ''victory'' from the jaws of certain defeat in the war he started.

The word on the street, or in the Pentagon rings, is that he'll choose to beef up U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq by 20,000 to 30,000 troops by various sleight-of-hand maneuvers -- extending the combat tours of soldiers and Marines who are nearing an end to their second or third year in hell and accelerating the shipment of others into that hell -- and send them into the bloody streets of Baghdad.

These additional troops are expected to restore order and calm the bombers and murderers when 9,000 Americans already in the sprawling capital couldn't. They're expected to do this even when Bush's favorite (for now) Iraqi politician, Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki, refuses to allow them to act against his primary benefactor, the anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army militiamen who kill both Americans and Sunni Arabs.

NEW ORLEANS, 2006

I just watched the classic movie A Streetcar Named Desire that was set in New Orleans in the early 1950's. Here we are approaching the end of 2006, almost a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We're over a year past the time when George W. Bush made his photo-op speech from Jackson Square and promised, promised, promised that the federal government would do everything possible to restore New Orleans. The city still lies mostly in ruins. A good part of the population is gone. It's another indictment of the incompetency, greed, and callousness of this administration. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

Whatever you’ve heard about New Orleans, the reality is much worse. Think of it as a vast open wound, this once-great American city that is still largely in ruins, with many of its people still writhing in agony more than a year after the catastrophic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Enormous stretches of the city, mile after mile after mile, have been abandoned. The former residents have doubled-up or tripled-up with relatives, or found shelter in the ubiquitous white trailers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or moved (in some cases permanently) to Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and beyond. Some have simply become homeless.