January 20, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

HERBERT HOOVER PART TWO

In this article Brent Budowsky is optimistic that there will be a Democratic sweep in 2008. I hope he's correct. He compares George W. Bush to Herbert Hoover. After the horrendous economic policies of the Hoover administration brought on the Great Depression, Republicans didn't have another president until Dwight D. Eisenhower. In some ways it's unfair to compare Hoover to Bush. I think Hoover was basically a decent man. He was certainly intelligent. Bush is neither of those things. This article is at www.opednews.com:

Our great aspiration is that January 2009 will bring a new Democratic President leading an uplifted America, with up to 60 Democratic Senators, additional gains in the House, and a wave of more Democratic governors ahead of the next census and reapportionment.

I served with senior Democratic Senators such as Lloyd Bentsen and with the House Democratic Leadership when Democrats were in control of Congress and have no doubt about this:

Democrats have only begun to realize the full magnitude of rejection of Bush and Bushism, the full magnitude of our power in Congress to set the agenda through legislation and investigations, and the full magnitude of opportunity in 2008 for a historic realignment. Republicans are politically incarcerated by a politics of Bushism that is dominated by an extreme right wing base, a royalist economics that makes them servants of the 1% at the expense of the 99%, and a psychology of national division, fear politics and war fever.

The traditional base of the Democratic Party is converging with the mainstream base of Middle America.

Fighting Democrats and war hero candidates appeal to tens of millions of Americans in military families who know well the bad faith and incompetence of Bush war fever and war partisanship.

BLAMING EVERYONE ELSE

Right-wingers are responsibility challenged. They talk a good game about "personal responsibility," but they can't accept the blame for anything they do wrong. We have right-wingers in full-throated roar trying to blame Presidents Carter and Clinton for al-Qaeda and the attacks on 9/11 when the evidence is that it was Republican administration policies that led to the disaster then and the disaster ongoing in Iraq . This article by Walter C. Uhler is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Incredibly, on January 18, 2007, the Lost Angeles Times (no typo) published Dinesh D'Souza's thoroughly biased Op-Ed, "How The Left Led Us Into 9/11." Mr. D'Souza's article is riddled with errors and all-too-convenient omissions, suggesting both ignorance and fraud. Although a fellow at the Hoover Institution, D'Souza writes history (judging by his opinion piece), as if he studied under the tutelage of that historian-imbecile, Ann Coulter.

Consider that D'Souza expects Americans to believe that "the Clinton and Carter administrations made the U.S. look like a weak, attractive target for terrorists." Well, perhaps some Americans will - especially if they've never read a newspaper or history book devoted to the issue, if they've just returned from a thirty-year visit to Mars, or if they're the incompetents at the LA Times who published D'Souza's Op-Ed.

You see, D'Souza gets it wrong virtually every possible way it can be gotten wrong. Thus, when he blames President Carter for pulling "the rug out from under [Iran's] shah," thereby allowing the Ayatollah Khomeini and his forces to seize power, you will not find D'Souza acknowledging the conclusion reached, for example, by Kenneth Pollock: "The shah brought the Iranian Revolution on himself. At the strategic level, his many mistaken policies created tremendous animosity against the regime across the breadth of Iranian society." [Pollock, The Persian Puzzle, p. 137] According to Pollock, America's real "policy failure in Iran was to tie ourselves so tightly to the shah's regime." [Ibid]