October 29, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH




IMPEACH CHENEY


LIMBAUGH'S WORLD

Rush Limbaugh is pompous, egocentric, self-righteous, and cruel. He easily mocks people less fortunate than he is every day because he doesn't have to live in the real world. He stays insulated in his sound proof radio booth. In the meantime, he stirs up hatred of gays, women, racial minorities, and even people who have Parkinsons disease. Maybe it's time people like Limbaugh and the fat cat Republicans he supports to live like the people they oppress. This article by William Saletan is at www.washingtonpost.com:

Here we have two completely different notions of reality. Fox's job is to portray characters in movies and on television. For him, Parkinson's was an invasion of the fake world by the real one. The medication, designed to hide this from the audience, became part of the fiction. In going off his meds, he was dropping the act.

Limbaugh's life story has gone the other way. His job is to explain politics, a branch of nonfiction. But for him, the fake world has overtaken the real one. He thinks "Boston Legal" is reality. Anything that doesn't match this must be "acting." If you go off your meds, you're not revealing your symptoms. You're "portraying" them.

Radio, television and the Internet greased Limbaugh's descent into fantasy. Years ago, a profile described him "holed up in his New York apartment with Chinese takeout and a stack of rented movies." In another profile, he "complained that he has virtually no social life." Click the video links on his Web site, and you can peer into his world. He sits in a soundproof studio. He never has to go outside.

BUSH'S IMMORAL WAR

This columnist points out that most of the debate and criticism of Bush's war on Iraq has centered on incompetence. Even if the war had been waged competently, however, that doesn't alter the fact it was an illegal and immoral venture from the very start. Aggressive war is a crime against humanity and it should be framed in that light. This column by Linda McQuaig is at www.thestar.com:

But incompetence is a side issue. The real problem is, and always has been, that it is illegal — not to mention immoral — for a country to invade another country, in other words, to wage a war of aggression.

The fact that Iraq is the last unharvested oil bonanza on earth, in an era of increasingly fierce global competition for dwindling oil reserves, only makes U.S. motives all the more suspect.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded after World War II: "War is essentially an evil thing ... To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

If the U.S. had a genuinely open media, there would be a ferocious debate raging about how to deal with the fact that Washington initiated a war of aggression that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of Iraqis, and almost 3,000 Americans.

U.S. troops should be removed now.