Home > Bush is Falling, But the Democrats are Sinking Faster
Bush is Falling, But the Democrats are Sinking Faster
by Open-Publishing - Sunday 2 October 20057 comments
By RALPH NADER
You would think that with all the troubles surrounding George W. Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress from the life-costing bungling of Hurricane responses to the deepening quagmire in Iraq to the front page stories of corruption, self-dealing and national security leaks you would think th Democrats would be in the ascendancy.
Not so. The polls are plummeting for George W. Bush on a whole variety of questions, including the key approval rating being at a record low for him. But the Democrats seem to be sinking right along with the besieged Republicans. Stan Greenberg, a leading Democratic Party pollster, declares that "feelings about Democrats are at a 54 month low." Another pollster, John Zogby, reports that the Democrats are floundering because people do not perceive them as having any credible national leaders.
Instead of drawing bright and bold lines with the Republicans about the nation’s future directions, leaders in the Democratic Party have persuaded themselves to just stand by and let the Republicans sink themselves. By standing by, the Democrats are feeding the "pox on both your houses" mindset of many citizens.
Apart from protecting social security, what do the Democrats fight for these days? As a Party they are headless regarding the Iraq war-occupation. Their leaders cannot even follow some of their own members in Congress and propose a responsible but definitive exit strategy. This is the passive case even though there are former leading retired military, diplomatic and intelligence officials who have done just that.
I and others have called on the Democrats to raise the roof on Bush’s grotesque dereliction in still not providing adequate protective armor for the military vehicles in Iraq. Billions for the Halliburtons; lethal excuses for the soldiers.
Also, deliberately undercounting US casualties in Iraq because thousands of serious injuries and sicknesses were not incurred directly in combat is a monumental display of disrespect by Bush for these soldiers and their families. Lowballing the human casualties keeps the public’s political opposition lower than putting out the truth about the injury and sickness toll being double the official false figures coming from the Bush regime.
To this day, in criticizing Mr. Bush, even the anti-war Democrats like Rep. Dennis Kucinich use the false lowball figure of injuries.
To this day, Democratic House Leader, Nancy Pelosi, with arguably the most anti-war constituents in the nation residing in her California district, is not leading the Democrats with even comparable statements that some Republicans are making.
Consider the following:
From Vietnam war veteran, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who, after returning from one of several trips to Iraq, said: "We should start figuring out how we get out of thereour involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur."
From Rep. John Duncan, Jr., conservative Republican from Tennessee, who urges conservatives to oppose the "undeclared and unnecessary war" not only because of the deaths but because "there is nothing conservative about this war;itmean[s] massive foreign aid, [and] huge deficit spending."
From CIA Director Porter Goss, who told the Senate in February that the war in Iraq has become a recruitment and training ground for more and more terrorists who will go back to other countries.
From Walter B. Jones, Jr., Republican Congressman from North Carolina, comes the declaration that he wants out of Iraq a war he once prominently supported but does no longer because the President did not tell him the truth when invading that country.
These legislators come from regions where a much larger percentage of the people support the war than in Nancy Pelosi’s District. There is a growing majority of Americans who believe that war was a costly mistake and want out.
On other major matters affecting and afflicting the American people, the Democrats, dominated by their corporate connectors, are not up front.
On defending our civil justice system from the corporate attack on injured or defrauded people’s right to their full day in court, the Democratic Party is gutless.
On moving serious corporate reforms to stop corporate crimes that have drained trillions from workers, investors and pensioneers, the Democrats are spineless.
On challenging the huge waste, fraud and corruption in government contracts and programs under the Republicans, the Democrats are hapless.
On raising the impoverished minimum wage to give working Americans a living wage, the way Senator Ted Kennedy has been calling for, the Democratic Party is clueless.
The Democratic Party will continue sliding into serial haplessness until a new breed of "jolters" comes to take over.
Ralph Nader is the author of The Good Fight.
For more information, see DemocracyRising.US
Forum posts
3 October 2005, 01:20
...Ralph America needs you. Poverty and daily struggle to make it into the "American" dream put so much stress on people, so they can’t see or wouldn’t like to believe what is really going on and effects their life.
5 October 2005, 05:26
Nader has a lot of nerve! His b___s___ run for president in 2000 cost Gore votes, and is responsible for giving us Bush and his band of crazies.
3 October 2005, 01:22
stonefruit
Think the democrats will mention this?
were these people sprayed with Tuleremia?
The Washington Post reports that biohazard sensors detected Tuleremia bacteria were found in and near the area between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. "The causative agent of tularemia, Francisella tularensis, is one of the most infectious pathogenic bacteria known, requiring inoculation or inhalation of as few as 10 organisms to cause disease."
A classified military exercise "Granite Shadow," was being conducted in Wasington D.C. at the same time as the recent peace rally called while Bush was hiding out in Northcom.
The U.S. government has investigated Tuleremia as a biological weapon In fact, in "the 1950s and 1960s, the US military developed weapons that would disseminate F tularensis aerosols; concurrently, it conducted research to better understand the pathophysiology of tularemia and to develop vaccines and antibiotic prophylaxis and treatment regimens. In some studies, volunteers were infected with F tularensis by direct aerosol delivery systems and by exposures in an aerosol chamber."
If you attended the rally and start exhibiting severe pneumonia or any of these other symptoms, it may be Tuleremia infection.
Maybe that is why over 40 of the world’s top microbiologists have been killed in the last few years.
I thought it would be smallpox with all of the smallpox mitigation investments being made by the Bush family, but I guess the Amerikkkan government and their private allies are ready, willing and able to use any number of bio-chemical weapons against its own people.
Sound crazy? The Amerikkkan government would never do that? Maybe to foreign brown people but not its own people?
HISTORY OF SECRET EXPERIMENTATION ON UNITED STATES CITIZENS
1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells. He later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
1932 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. 200 black men diagnosed with syphilis are never told of their illness, are denied treatment, and instead are used as human guinea pigs in order to follow the progression and symptoms of the disease. They all subsequently die from syphilis, their families never told that they could have been treated.
1935 The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations.
1940 Four hundred prisoners in Chicago are infected with Malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
1942 Chemical Warfare Services begins mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen. The experiments continue until 1945 and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.
1943 In response to Japan’s full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.
1944 U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing. Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite.
1945 Project Paperclip is initiated. The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence, and the CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer them immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top secret government projects in the United States.
1945 "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.
1946 Patients in VA hospitals are used as guinea pigs for medical experiments. In order to allay suspicions, the order is given to change the word "experiments" to "investigations" or "observations" whenever reporting a medical study performed in one of the nation’s veteran’s hospitals.
1947 Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission issues a secret document (Document 07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects.
1947 The CIA begins its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.
1950 Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.
1950 In an experiment to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Franciso. Monitoring devices are situated throughout the city in order to test the extent of infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
1951 Department of Defense begins open air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been exposed.
1953 U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.
1953 Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.
1953 CIA initiates Project MKULTRA. This is an eleven year research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological agents that would be used for mind control and behavior modification. Six of the subprojects involved testing the agents on unwitting human beings.
1955 The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human populations with biological agents, releases a bacteria withdrawn from the Army’s biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Fl.
1955 Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000 Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.
1956 U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Ga and Avon Park, Fl. Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials test victims for effects.
1958 LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army’s Chemical Warfare Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.
1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) authorizes field testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East. Testing of the european population is code named Project THIRD CHANCE; testing of the Asian population is code named Project DERBY HAT.
1965 CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs.
1965 Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia are subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Viet Nam. The men are later studied for development of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had been a suspected carcinogen all along.
1966 CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN, a program to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.
1966 U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
1967 CIA and Department of Defense implement Project MKNAOMI, successor to MKULTRA and designed to maintain, stockpile and test biological and chemical weapons.
1968 CIA experiments with the possibility of poisoning drinking water by injecting chemicals into the water supply of the FDA in Washington, D.C.
1969 Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense requests from congress $10 million to develop, within 5 to 10 years, a synthetic biological agent to which no natural immunity exists.
1970 Funding for the synthetic biological agent is obtained under H.R. 15090. The project, under the supervision of the CIA, is carried out by the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the army’s top secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce AIDS-like retroviruses.
1970 United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons" (Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.
1975 The virus section of Fort Detrick’s Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) . It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus).
1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
1978 Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men.
1981 First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine.
1985 According to the journal Science (227:173-177), HTLV and VISNA, a fatal sheep virus, are very similar, indicating a close taxonomic and evolutionary relationship.
1986 According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007-4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no natural immunity exists.
1986 A report to Congress reveals that the U.S. Government’s current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.
1987 Department of Defense admits that, despite a treaty banning research and development of biological agents, it continues to operate research facilities at 127 facilities and universities around the nation.
1990 More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
1994 With a technique called "gene tracking," Dr. Garth Nicolson at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX discovers that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production of biological weapons. Incorporated into its molecular structure is 40 percent of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been man-made.
1994 Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War.
1995 U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research.
1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.
1996 Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were exposed to chemical agents.
1997 Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.
link
Outbreak of the same disease in Russia right now too.
Pissed off yet? Well, that’s understandable, but don’t talk about it to anyone, or military intelligence will come and get you.
Better to do what Bert the Turtle does - just duck and cover!
4 October 2005, 16:20
SPAM>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>this post should be deleted
5 October 2005, 19:53
It is patently obvious that the ruling class within America has absolutely no interest in the people of this country other than maintaining sufficient interest from a ’few’ who vote, so that ’They’ can maintain position. The ’feeder’ mentality, a basis held in an ’ignorance’ of life beyond the self - feeds the power of the M.I.C.. How, why is this state of affairs maintained - is an anathema to me. The political Duopoly that prevails is as a consequence of the apathy of the Populace, is more than likely a consequence of the corrupt Bi-Party structure of American politics. How is that a 3rd party never evolves, how is that an ’Independent’ is essentially labeled as a ’Separate’, as opposed to a Specifically named party - ’Green’ is not good enough either. Why is there no grassroot movement that is becoming cohesive, why is it that nobody is stepping up to the plate? Socialism is a dirty word for many, the past association to communism has warped the interpretation of Socialism and is beyond argument for many. It’s a bit like "What did the Romans ever do for us" ? Roads, plumbing....etc... A Nation is it’s People not it’s rulers - it is time for the Populace to dictate to these Peers to do our bidding - Vote for None of the Above - is a call to political awareness, a filling of the Vacuum. A Party is needed now that is willing to voice the consensus needs - to take the plank out of our own eye, before we deal with the splinter in anothers! The manner that the deck is stacked to prevent change is indicative of corruption - crony-ism - how is it that nobody really cares, how is that there is no outrage beyond the ’living room’ - WHAT IS UP WITH YOU PEOPLE! Speak, discuss, argue .... progress!
7 October 2005, 06:15
Anyone that tries to rock the boat in this corrupt government will be killed it’s as simple as that. We need a revolution this monster of a government is too far evil to salvage.
24 October 2005, 02:35
Ralph Nader: America needs you NOW. Politics has been doing NOTHING but injecting fear into people lately. I say we need to encourage people to use their creativity, and start expanding their minds. (And I want to experiment with zero point energy)
I only voted for you just because I thought you were cool, not because of any political views.
(The other candidates were too boring for my tastes. And we don’t want to end up with Hilery Clinton)