Barbaro Uncensored

Developments in recent weeks have finally pushed me over the top. I now realize that we must impeach George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors. He has not lived up to the oath of office when he was sworn in as president, “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. He hasn’t protected or defended the Constitution—he has, in my view, violated basic provisions of our Nation’s Charter.

Iraq, WMD’s, Plamegate, Katrina, Halliburton, bankrupting the country, cronyism, torture, secret prisons, adios habeas corpus, detention and imprisonment without charges, the imposition of a theocratic form of government while retroactively passing laws to eliminate the possibility of prosecution when this fiasco is over. The Republican controlled U.S. Senate has now declared that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen that the President says is an enemy and can be arrested and held as long as the President wants without any right of appeal or resort to a court to look into the actual facts.

It will all sort out on Nov. 7, 2006 when voters select our new Congress. If the Democrats don’t at least capture one house of the Congress we will never know what has really occurred in the last 6 years. With control of one, and hopefully both Houses, and with the pointed use of the subpoena power, we can finally learn the truth. I predict it will be ugly. I predict that it will demonstrate that retaining power has become more important than telling the truth. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the Mark Foley massacre. Keeping a pedophile in office who is endangering 16 year olds, then covering up for him for over a year and putting him in charge of the committee to oversee abuse of children, is beyond imagination. Pretty sick. In totality, a shameful retreat from American values.

The “Stay the Course” policy in Iraq, currently being touted by this administration, is absurd, ill-advised, and intellectually and logically bankrupt. It is based on lies. We are not being made safer.

The National Intelligence Estimate of April, 2006 (suppressed as ‘classified’ until September, 2006), points out, “The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

As I predicted, the Iraq war has made us less safe and has created more terrorists than we have killed or could ever kill. The jihadists (people whose goal is to kill Americans) have grown exponentially since the invasion of Iraq. Tens of thousands of Muslim women and children were killed during “Shock and Awe’s” smart bombing. Taken with the torture and mortifying humiliations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo the only logical conclusion you could arrive at it is that we are breeding hundreds of thousands of future generation jihadists that will truly make the world unsafe for us and our children. Meanwhile the Republican Congress is busily doing the Olympic Backstroke by passing CYA laws that make violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War legal.

Today Republicans are saying that if they had been told the truth there is no way they would ever have voted to support the Iraq invasion. The sound of the Republican philosophical retreat grows ever louder as we approach the mid-term elections. Our very own governor, Arnold Schwartzenegger, won’t be in the same area code as Bush and the rest of the Bush mob is busily running away from him, except when it comes to fundraising.

The truth, while not new, is starting to penetrate the average American’s psyche. We are starting to “get it.” It is now harder for the Limbaughs and O’Reilly’s to mislead us. Bush and his fellow riders have been following the advice of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Nazi Propaganda Minister when he said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” On May 24, 2005 in Rochester, N.Y. Bush stated, “You have to keep repeating things to catapult the propaganda.” Don’t worry, he was just kidding!

Colin Powell, who we now know was forced out, said, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” Strange he used the word “beginning”—where has he been the last three years? All 16 intelligence agencies have concluded that there is absolutely no truth to the Republican assertion that the occupation of Iraq has made America safer. Bush doth protest too much when he complains about the leak of this “classified information;” isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black? Why did he withhold the information for 5 months? Why and how could he then lie and tell the American people just the opposite?

What is truly amusing, or not, is that the religious right is rushing to the defense of the Republicans. James Dobson of the tax-exempt Focus on the Family told 3000 attendees at a Pennsylvania rally a few days ago that it would be “downright frightening” if the Republicans lost control of the Congress and that failing to vote would therefore “be a sin.” Our moral compass has been smashed. Is this tantamount to an endorsement of “business as usual”? If so, I’m out of Dodge. Let the Focus on the Family followers send their 16 year olds to be Congressional pages. Send their kids to Iraq to be maimed and killed.

When you insert religion in the terror equation you present a way to de humanize the object of your attack. You glorify yourself for doing “God’s Work.” Bill Clinton addressed the mentality of any religious radical, be they Muslim or Christian, when he gave this thoughtful example of the thought process: “My crowd has the whole truth and therefore you are less human than I am…therefore those things that are unique about me are more important than our common humanity.”

The slaughter continues.