August 12, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

NAME CALLING IS ALL THEY HAVE

Right-wingers have their inordinate share of venom, for whatever reason. They hate intellectuals. They hate gays. They hate women and racial minorities. They hate poor people. They hate other ethnic groups. They hate scientists. Their "philosophy," such as it is, of imposing a perverted form of Christianity on everyone else in the world, dividing the world into a very few rich people who work like robber barons, and lots and lots of poor people doesn't work well except for the chosen few. So, inevitably, their "arguments" come down to name calling because their "philosophy" is indefensible. This column by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The right wing in America has had its way for a long time now, for all of the century thus far. The wealthiest people in the nation have gotten unimaginably more wealthy, environmental regulations have been undermined or under-enforced. American jobs have been exported by the hundreds of thousands without any protections for American workers in the form of taxation on corporations that sell-out American workers in order to exploit sweatshop labor overseas.

Meanwhile, the HMOs and the insurance companies reap ever greater profits off the pain and suffering of the sick and dying, and the oil companies harvest ever-greater bounty through price fixing and periodic gouging.

Regulatory agencies are staffed with lobbyists from the industries they were created to regulate. Political resistance to campaign finance reform ensures that those who buy influence will keep that influence. The Supreme Court has been successfully stacked so that rulings favorable to the powerful right wing interests in the nation can be expected for a long time to come as that august body begins the work of turning back the clock on things like civil rights, women's rights, and a host of other issues that have long been targeted agenda items for the most reactionary elements in our society.

BUSH HAS ALLOWED AL-QAEDA RESURGENCE

In the days shortly following the attacks on 9/11 George W. Bush made the cowboy pronouncement that we would get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." As we approach the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still at large. The U. S. military is mired in Iraq, a war that was never necessary, and al-Qaeda has grown stronger. Bush's policies have severely weakened U. S. security. He has made generations of enemies of the United States. He has weakened our military and created monstrous fiscal deficits. This editorial is from The Albuquerque Tribune is at abqtrib.com:

One of the blunt realities of this week's al-Qaida threat assessment, which found the terrorist group "considerably operationally stronger" and "regrouped to an extend not seen since 2001," should be that Bush's policies not only permitted this to happen by waging an unnecessary and all-consumptive war in Iraq, but it also created a grand opportunity for al-Qaida to do battlefield training during our four-year occupation of Iraq.

Given that U.S. forces have been largely pinned down in the bloody Iraq occupation and civil war for the past four years, should it surprise anyone in Washington, Peoria or Albuquerque that al-Qaida has regrouped and grown stronger in its historic stomping grounds of Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Is it also coincidence that almost nobody is talking about persistent homeland vulnerabilities here, including U.S. ports, power plants, refineries, depots and other vital elements of infrastructure?