Proof Bush is the Anti-Christ!

I was going back through my previous posts, and was amused to note that I'd made a reference to Bush as the Anti-Christ. Just casually tongue in cheek, to be sure, and even then not an outright assertion that he was really the AC -- only that it might be hard to believe that he's not. It might (or might not) be appropriate on Halloween to note that, a few weeks later, I was flipping through the few channels on my television set (I have what you might call "sub-basic" cable, the minimum you can order) and landed briefly on a program discussing such phenomena as the rock group Black Sabbath and the so-called "religion" of Satanism. Although film clips of the group rocking out and of Satanism founder Anton Lavey looking silly playing cheesy organ in a cape might at first have seemed like an amusement and even a pretty good advertisement for Sabbath records, the show turned out to be a couple of relatively sincere evangelical guys warning about the DANGERS of Satanic -- er -- stuff. However, when they quoted (I think) the Bible to remind us that the Anti-Christ would come dressed as a preacher or a prophet, I could not help but to stop and think once again that perhaps "W" was the mark of the beast this season. True, George W. Bush is not a religious leader in the strict sense of the term, but much of his appeal is through his own claim of being "born again" (videotaping his conversion at the feet of the Rev. Billy Graham, no less -- but was this a calculated move?) and the perception he wishes to bring forth policies in the spirit of true belief. Yet with his ill-advised adventures in Iraq, his wholesaling of the environment and natural resources, his brilliant plans to make nuclear bunker busters acceptable and bury nuclear waste next to earthquake faults, to arm all Americans to the teeth and set us against each other (OK, that's a slight stretch, but not that far, given recent legislation in Florida), all of which seems to lead to the short term profits of his mega-wealthy but incompetent cronies... and on and on ... you can't help feeling he's leading us to Armageddon. By the time he delivers what the Religious Right presumably really wants -- an end to abortion -- we'll all be dead, from war, radiation, bullets, pollution etc. There will be no more babies to deliver and not much of a world for them to be born into. Now that's a macabre thought.

Boo! Happy Halloween from W!

Just another way of saying it here...

Impeach Bush petition here:
http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/65

Here's the note I added to my Congress members:

In every regard, it becomes more clear all the time that the Bush Administration thinks it is running the government for the personal benefit of Bush's cronies, through laws, policies, and the appointments of yes-men and yes-women that benefit the Administration's best friends and contributors at the very top of the corporate ladder. It's already criminal to sacrifice what's left of our environment for these sordid goals. To sacrifice human lives directly in the cause of falsely conjured wars is the ultimate insult to the people.

I forgot to say, "If this ain't grounds for impeachment (high crimes and misdemeanours), I don't know what is!"

Hanging on to War

Here's my reply to a young man in the local student newspaper, hanging on to the presumed righteousness of the Iraq war, in the context of the new terrorist bombings in Bali. I must admit that I failed to pay attention to the Bali question in my reply, and will have to give further thought to the connections. Brian Stewart's column may be found at
http://www.idsnews.com/subsite/story.php?id=31610&adid=opinion

Ah, "Publius", thou art but a young fool, daring to call over half the country "naive" when you still seem to believe that if things are bad enough somewhere, war must be the answer. Basically, you just ain't lookin' at the whole picture. But perhaps the testosterone coursing through your veins has blinded you only temporarily.

Hardly anyone disagrees that Saddam is a bad man, and made for one hell of a nasty dictator. Still, removing even the nastiest of dictators isn't necessarily synonymous with "liberating" the tyrant's country. First of all, the means to the end was horrible, and Americans mostly only viewed sanitized footage of what went on. Thousands of people, many of them innocents, were killed and mutilated by our bombs. Just about everybody else in Iraq has had their livelihood and survival plunged into lasting uncertainty, which brings us to a second issue, the actual outcome of the war, which has been mediocre at best, potentially catastrophic at worst. Sure, the war got rid of Saddam, taking power away from an evil dicator. But did we liberate the people of Iraq? Let me use an analogy. If you meet a family who is in chains, remove their chains, but then, whether or not it is your intention, leave them lying in a minefield without a map, have you liberated them? You can hardly deny that living in Iraq today is like living in a minefield. Aside from the literal minefields there, there is of course the minefield of terrorism.

Who created the minefield of terrorism? Surely it is the terrorists who conspire to create this unholy hell, which somehow they see as a holy act. They seem to believe (somewhat as you do, "Publius") that countering a perceived evil with evil can somehow result in good. They are wrong, wrong, wrong to be doing what they are doing. But, frankly, the war helped them to get there, by creating a vacuum of power and by making the United States occupation look bad enough, whatever our intentions (the subject of a future conversation, perhaps), to create a fertile recruiting ground for new terrorists. This was bound to happen, and saying so is not a matter of hindsight. Months before the invasion began, I downloaded a poster depicting Osama bin Laden dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing a finger and declaring "I Want You to Invade Iraq". A sad comment, indeed, but I knew it was true. Later, by allowing torture to happen and looking for exceptions to our own rules about treating prisoners, "our" side made things that much worse in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, of young Muslims, and of people everywhere.

It is not that we should be afraid of angering terrorists. We can't capitulate to their threats and terror, thus allowing them to realize their ambitions of power. But that doesn't mean that just any old thing we do that is "against" them is morally acceptable, or even helpful. We must dissipate their appeal by acting morally ourselves; Muslims and all other people of good will should have little or no cause for grievance against us, of the magnitude that leads young people toward terrorism. Again, terrorism is always wrong, and, yes, the terrorists bear their own responsibility for choosing this path. But in almost any feud -- whether between families, clans, nations, religions or some combination thereof -- both sides almost always bear much of the responsibility for being stubborn and insensitive to the needs and grievances of even total innocents born on the "wrong" side, for exclusively blaming real and imagined enemies while refusing to look within for responsibility, and simply for either not realizing or not caring that even seemingly righteous violence sows the seeds for more violence, often lasting centuries into the future. Everyone must consider the consequences of their own actions, even if some of those consequences proceed indirectly through provoking "bad" people whose responsibility is therefore also great.

After all of this, we can only hope that a new Iraqi Constitution will not just be approved through the process that has been put into place, but that it will successfully provide the means to govern the country according to just principles, leaving both the people of Iraq and people everywhere better off. If, my young friend, and I do say "if", if that happens, we can reasonably ask "was it all worth it?" Even then, we must take into account the viewpoints of untold numbers of mothers who had their children killed and mutilated by both sides, as well as everything else that has been stirred up. Even if the answer is "yes, it was worth it, and it was the best we knew how to do at the time", we must further ask "Is there a better way for us to accomplish these goals next time?" We might start this inquiry by studying the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There's a lot more to this war thing than meets the eye, "Publius", and a lot more than I've said here. But consider my words well, my young friend, and perhaps we shall speak again.

Cronyism: The Bigger Picture

I took the Moveon.org "How Are We Doing" Survey today, which ended with the open-ended question, "is there anything else you'd like to share with us?" This is my reply to that question.

I don't know if we have to go rabid over every single so-so appointment Bush makes. What we need is to go after and educate people about the Big Picture. In the case of the Bush Administration, the Big Picture is what is finally being recognized as cronyism. But it goes well beyond rewarding Yes-men and Yes-women with good jobs that they're not qualified to do, the way Time magazine recently portrayed it, albeit as a cover story. Jim Hightower (Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush, Thieves in High Places) and Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) have nailed it more precisely. The really key jobs are going to exactly the people who want to do the opposite of what the jobs are for, often for their own or for their own cronies' profit, like giving control of the EPA to anti-environmental corporate lobbyists, with Bush Pioneer fund raisers benefitting in particular. So the country is being sold out; the environment that sustains us and the lives of our young men and women who, bravely if perhaps foolishly, become soldiers, are being traded for profits in the forms of avoiding regulation, allowances for pollution, and war profiteering. The government is being run essentially by a criminal network, a gang if you will, of "business" people who are willing to quite literally destroy everything we hold dear to make a quick buck! To build a movement, people need to see the fundamentals of what's going on, and this extreme of Faustian bargaining is what's dominating the current Administration's policies. Some appointments and policy maneuvers are more crucial and emblematic of the phenomenon than others, and those are the ones we really need to focus on.

Let me add what has become somewhat of a common place disclaimer, but one which bears repeating. Bush and Co. did not invent cronyism. They have just taken it to new extremes, and these extremes threaten untold lives, and almost everyone's way of life. At best, as I've mentioned before, maybe they know not what they do; but make no mistake, they're doing it.