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Parties Elections-Elected Mary MacElveen
Why should Americans vote Republican?
By Mary MacElveen
November 1, 2006
In hopes that this column will reach those who are more inclined to vote Republican in the upcoming midterm elections, I want to ask you flat out, why should any voter even entertain voting Republican? What hope have your candidates given to the American people as many continue to suffer from despair?
As many Americans grow bone weary of the war in Iraq and are beginning to wise up, this war has only delivered misery as the casualty rate continues to rise. While we do not see their coffins coming home to American soil in route to their final resting place, we do know they leave loved ones behind to grieve a lifetime of loss and pain. In all of this, Bush acts like he is a cheerleader of sorts for more death, more destruction and where violence is the only thing he is able to deliver upon the world.
In any speech he gives, I do not see an aura of comfort coming from him which is something we all need right about now. All I do see is a tone of aggression. I am of the opinion that messages of aggression are tantamount to mental rape. Through these war-like messages, the American people are being raped repeatedly. While some may not realize it at this moment, are they more apt to lose their sanity at a later date?
With a message of little or no compassion coming from the GOP led government in which aggression is at the cornerstone of their very governance of us, an interesting, yet sickening phenomenon is affecting some teenage boys. These gangs of boys will go out and repeatedly beat up homeless men and in some cases these men have died.
Bush and the rest of the GOP candidates’ message to the American people is that we can win the war on terror. I want them to prove to the American people just how violence wins anything. It only creates more hate and hostility and our soldiers then become the target. As it escalates, the American people themselves become a prime target for those who are sick and tired of being dictated to. Are we telling the world through this fallacious war on terror that we have the right to invade any country of our choosing? One only has to see the bloody civil war that has broken out in Iraq to know that it is a failed strategy.
Why should anyone vote Republican when the leader of its party lied to the American people, to congress and to the United Nations as to the reasons to invade Iraq? In my opinion and the opinion of many lying does not show leadership, but is symptomatic of megalomania.
Exactly what freedom and democracy can be delivered using bombs and what future do the Iraqi people have when their country is so contaminated with nuclear waste from our use of depleted uranium? I want to again state that it has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Deformities and cancers will be our legacy and gift to the Iraqi people and to our soldiers exposed to this deadly agent.
While we presently have a tepid relation at best with countries such as Russia and China, will they at some point become our worst nightmare as both countries presently own nuclear weapons? Those the clamor for border security and a fence that will separate us from Mexico, no border in the world can stop a missile from hitting an American city. I want you to think about that one as your candidates scream for this border to be built.
How can GOP candidates claim superiority in protecting us when CBS reported “The Pentagon’s Inspector General has found that 14,000 small arms provided to the Iraqis are now missing. The lost weapons were never registered and can not be audited.”
Exactly what leadership did this GOP led government give the American people as a storm barreled its way onto land in which dead bodies were seen floating down the streets of New Orleans.
When Bush’s message in which he is now the campaigner in chief is not resonating with the American people and chances do look good for the Democrats to take back the House and a slight chance to take back the Senate, the AP reported “Now, with polls predicting bleak results for Republicans, he is trying to fire up his party by decrying gay marriage.” He is doing this to rally the troops in within the evangelical base which has been one of his strongest supporters.
To play on words a bit, I do not find anything gay as we continue to witness so much death and destruction coming out of Iraq.
I want the evangelicals to get it through their thick skulls that this administration laughs behind your back as evident in David Kuo’s book “Tempting Faith” Bush is using you in order to remain in power.
We have bigger problems facing us as a nation than the gay marriage issue. When we are seeing our standard of living disappear before our eyes, a world embroiled in hostility and violence. Right now our country is drowning in so much debt in which countries such as China hold these loans and we are worried about Gay marriage? Oh, let us get real, people.
People are losing their homes due to foreclosure because they are losing their jobs. Many go without health insurance and are unable to take their children to the doctor. I am targeting the evangelicals here who wish to protect the unborn, but once born, they are left on their own. I have read recently in which food banks that help societies most needy, are seeing a decrease in donations. They are unable to meet the needs of those that are going hungry. Which would God have us address as our first priority? He would say, “Feed my people”
Bush stated "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,"
Now pay attention to what Salon.com reported just recently, “Two retired senior Army generals, who served in Iraq and previously voted Republican, are now openly endorsing a Democratic takeover of Congress.” They go onto say “they believe a Democratic victory will help reverse course from what they consider to be a disastrous Bush administration policy in Iraq.”
The generals who expressed this expert opinion are Maj. Gen. John Batiste and Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton. They are the real deal instead of Bush who pretends at playing the part as he flew on to a carrier in which a banner hung behind him claiming ‘Mission Accomplished’.
Batiste even stated "The best thing that can happen right now is for one or both of our houses to go Democratic so we can have some oversight," He then went onto say "It is time for a change."
Proud men such as these two retired generals who answered the call to serve their country are the ones to be believed. No one should believe Bush as he hid during the Viet Nam War serving in the Texas Air National Guard. No one should believe Dick Cheney or even Donald Rumsfeld when both men were too chicken to answer the call of their country. Then again, what military branch would want Cheney any way since he can’t aim and shoot straight?
In the media match that pitted Senator John Kerry against Bush yesterday, it was Senator Kerry’s statement as he lashed back which says it all, “I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.”
It was perhaps this statement made by Sen. Kerry that sent the message home for all Americans to think on as they do go to the polls “These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops,” I would just love to see Bush debate Maj. Gen. John Batiste and Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton with the media present. Most likely, Bush would have his head handed to him. These men have seen those that they commanded die in front of them in a land of fire and brim stone. In service to our country, men like Senator Kerry, Maj. Gen. Batiste and Maj. Gen. Eaton have breathed in the scent of death which is a scent that never leaves anyone that has served on the battlefield.
Many like me have had enough of six years of death, destruction, tyranny, lies, sheer hubris in which the most fragile of our society are left to float down the streets of New Orleans. Can anyone with half a brain tell me why should Americans vote Republican? If this piece makes finds its way to the likes of Limbaugh and Coulter, I say “Bring em on” and let us have a real debate of the issues. I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Major General John Batiste as he stated, “It is time for a change”
http://www.marymacelveen.com/blog/_archives/2006/11/1/2465696.html
Forum posts
1 November 2006, 21:25
Gee - I can hardly wait for the Democrats to win majorities in both houses of congress, so that the American peoples’ disillusionment with this corrupt political system can come to full fruition, that is, if they are even paying attention to what is going on.
2 November 2006, 01:42
Yes, vote Republican, Bush will then finish the job he started. I can hardly wait! And, he will finish the rest of us off too!
If there is one thing that politicians are afraid of, it is the voters. Oh, but I forgot, they have got that figured out too! They just rig the voting machines! Oh well, I guess the honest tax paying voters loose again.
It seems more and more like the USA is a third world country. At least it seems like that is what they are trying to turn us into.
I have a feeling that it is not over yet. Cheers!
5 November 2006, 01:53
... don’t you worry, we are paying attention all right - but that isn’t going to stop the Republicans from cheating again - that is what Karl Rove is all about >>> him and "the" math <<< you know "the" math that says Republicans are going to maintain control of the U.S. Congress according to the "real" polls //// the fix may already be in s-o-o-o-o-o-o, stay tuned. Power to the people!
1 November 2006, 22:27
Gallery: Dumb-ya! President Bush’s greatest ever gaffes!
Gore: Bush is ’renegade rightwing extremist’
Oliver Burkeman and Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".
In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.
Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right."
But he claims he does not "expect to be a candidate" for president again, while refusing explicitly to rule out another run. Asked if any event could change his mind, he says: "Not that I can see."
Mr Gore, who appeared at the Guardian Hay literary festival over the bank holiday weekend, is promoting An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary and book detailing the climate change crisis that he warns "could literally end civilisation".
The new levels of attention he is receiving have led some Democrats to call on him to run again for president, while others have responded with anger that Mr Gore did not show the same level of passion in the 2000 campaign.
He has since acknowledged that he followed too closely the advice of his consultants during that campaign, and - before he started to scoff at the idea of running again - swore that if he ever did so, he would speak his mind.
In the years since, he has been a steady critic of specific Bush administration policies. He opposed the war on Iraq at a time when most prominent Democrats were supporting it, and more recently spoke out against what he called "a gross and excessive power grab" by the administration over phone tapping.
In the interview Mr Gore also distances himself from Tony Blair on the subject of nuclear power, which the prime minister has insisted is "back on the agenda with a vengeance". Mr Gore says he is "sceptical about it playing a much larger role," and that although it might have a part to play in Britain or China, it will not be "a silver bullet" in the fight against global warming.
In the US, Mr Gore’s environmental campaign has sparked a backlash from some on the right who accuse him of scaremongering. A series of television advertisements, launched by a thinktank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argue that carbon dioxide emissions are a sign of American productivity and progress.
Mr Gore’s true attitude towards a potential return to the White House - or, at least, a potential battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination - remains unknown.
At the weekend, Time magazine reported that he was telling key fundraisers they should feel free to sign on with other potential candidates. The magazine quoted unnamed Democratic sources as saying that the former vice-president had also been asking the fundraisers to "tell everybody I’m not running".
Mr Gore would not find it difficult to raise millions of dollars, if he did decide to run. But while public denials might prove a wise campaign strategy - not least by prolonging the period of positive attention Mr Gore is now receiving - actively turning away fundraisers does suggest a firmer resolve not to re-enter electoral politics.
It is significant, however, that Mr Gore refuses to go beyond saying that he has no "plans" for such a campaign. "I haven’t made a Shermanesque statement because it just seems odd to do so," he has said - a reference to the famous announcement by the civil war general William Sherman, who unequivocally refused to stand in the election of 1884. "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve," General Sherman said.
Jonathan Freedland’s interview with Al Gore will be aired on More4 on Saturday June 3 at 4.55pm.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1786437,00.html
The Uncompassionate Conservative
" It’s not that he’s mean. It’s just that when it comes to seeing how his policies affect people, George W. Bush doesn’t have a clue."
By Molly Ivins
MOTHER JONES
In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn’t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow — and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.
On the few occasions when Bush does directly encounter the down-and-out, he seems to empathize. But then, in what is becoming a recurring, almost nightmare-type scenario, the minute he visits some constructive program and praises it (AmeriCorps, the Boys and Girls Club, job training), he turns around and cuts the budget for it. It’s the kiss of death if the president comes to praise your program. During the presidential debate in Boston in 2000, Bush said, "First and foremost, we’ve got to make sure we fully fund LIHEAP [the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program], which is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here in the East, pay their high fuel bills." He then sliced $300 million out of that sucker, even as people were dying of hypothermia, or, to put it bluntly, freezing to death.
Sometimes he even cuts your program before he comes to praise it. In August 2002, Bush held a photo op with the Quecreek coal miners, the nine men whose rescue had thrilled the country. By then he had already cut the coal-safety budget at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which engineered the rescue, by 6 percent, and had named a coal-industry executive to run the agency.
The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, "I don’t understand how poor people think," and had described himself as a "white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to." What’s annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.
There was a telling episode in 1999 when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual statistics on hunger, showing that once again Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger because we have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be first in poverty, first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in poverty, first in the percentage of adults without a high school diploma, 51st in income per capita, and so on.
When the 1999 hunger stats were announced, Bush threw a tantrum. He thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state look bad because he was running for president. "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You’d think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas." You would, wouldn’t you? That is the point at which ignorance becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time with people in the colonias, South Texas’ shantytowns; he had never been to a session with Valley Interfaith, a consortium of border churches and schools and the best community organization in the state. There is no excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality of Texas.
Take any area — environment, labor, education, taxes, health — and go to the websites of public-interest groups in that field. You will find page after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals, no-big-deal new policies, all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent change in regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below the radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody’s favorite government program, is being targeted for "improvement" by leaving it to the tender mercies of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps refugees in Africa and Asia gets its funding cut because one of the seven groups involved once worked with the United Nations, which once worked with the Chinese government, which once supported forced abortions.
So what manner of monster is behind these outrages? I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. They all play well politically with certain constituencies.
Let’s assume the religiosity is genuine; no one is in a position to know otherwise. I leave it to more learned commentators to address what "Christian" might actually mean in terms of public policy.
The anti-intellectualism is also authentic. This is a grudge Bush has carried at least since his college days when he felt looked down on as a frat rat by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools, he ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy schools in that time. John F. Kennedy, the consummate, effortlessly graceful, classy Harvard man, had just been assassinated in ugly old Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson’s public piety gave many people the creeps. Texans were more or less thought of as yahoo barbarians somewhere between the Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance. I do not exaggerate by much. To have a Texas accent in the East in those days was to have 20 points automatically deducted from your estimated IQ. And Texans have this habit of playing to the stereotype — it’s irresistible. One proud Texan I know had never owned a pair of cowboy boots in his life until he got a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard. Just didn’t want to let anyone down.
For most of us who grow up in the "boonies" and go to school in the East, it’s like speaking two languages — Bill Clinton, for example, is perfectly bilingual. But it’s not unusual for a spell in the East to reinforce one’s Texanness rather than erode it, and that’s what happened to Bush. Bush had always had trouble reading — we assume it is dyslexia (although Slate’s Jacob Weisberg attributes it to aphasia); his mom was still doing flash cards with him when he was in junior high. Feeling intellectually inferior apparently fed into his resentment of Easterners and other known forms of snob.
Bush once said, "There’s a West Texas populist streak in me, and it irritates me when these people come out to Midland and look at my friends with just the utmost disdain." In his mind, Midland is the true-blue heartland of the old vox pop. The irony is that Midland along with its twin city, Odessa, is one of the most stratified and narrow places in the country. Both are oil towns with amazingly strict class segregation. Midland is the white-collar, Republican town; Odessa is the blue-collar, Democratic town. The class conflict plays out in an annual football rivalry so intense that H.G. Bissinger featured it in his best-selling book, Friday Night Lights. To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.
In fact, people in Midland are real nice folks: I can’t prove that with statistics, but I know West Texas and it’s just a fact. Open, friendly, no side to ’em. The problem is, they’re way isolated out there and way limited too. You can have dinner at the Petroleum Club anytime with a bunch of them and you’ll come away saying, "Damn, those are nice people. Sure glad they don’t run the world." It is still such a closed, narrow place, where everybody is white, Protestant, and agrees with everybody else. It’s not unusual to find people who think, as George W. did when he lived there, that Jimmy Carter was leading the country toward "European-style socialism." A board member of the ACLU of Texas was asked recently if there had been any trouble with gay bashing in Midland. "Oh, hell, honey," she drawled, "there’s not a gay in Midland who will come out of the closet for fear people will think they’re Democrats."
The machismo is what I suspect is fake. Bush is just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he’s tough. The minute he is questioned, he becomes testy and defensive. That’s one reason they won’t let him hold many press conferences. When he tells stories about his dealings with two of the toughest men who ever worked in politics — the late Lee Atwater and the late Bob Bullock — Bush, improbably, comes off as the toughest mother in the face-down. I wouldn’t put money on it being true. Bullock, the late lieutenant governor and W’s political mentor in Texas, could be and often was meaner than a skilletful of rattlesnakes. Bush’s story is that one time, Bullock cordially informed him that he was about to fuck him. Bush stood up and kissed Bullock, saying, "If I’m gonna get fucked, at least I should be kissed." It probably happened, but I guarantee you Bullock won the fight. Bush never got what made Bullock more than just a supermacho pol — the old son of a bitch was on the side of the people. Mostly.
The perfect absurdity of all this, of course, is that Bush’s identification with the sturdy yeomen of Midland (actually, oil-company executives almost to a man) is so wildly at variance with his real background. Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, "He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High." He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.
Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush, "Born on third and thinks he hit a triple," is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth — he’s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s son — it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School). He got into the Texas Air National Guard — and sat out Vietnam — through Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the "Fucking Air National Guard," included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well — they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father. He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.
That Bush’s administration is salted with the sons of somebody-or-other should come as no surprise. I doubt it has ever even occurred to Bush that there is anything wrong with a class-driven good-ol’-boy system. That would explain why he surrounds himself with people like Eugene Scalia (son of Justice Antonin Scalia), whom he named solicitor of the Department of Labor — apparently as a cruel joke. Before taking that job, the younger Scalia was a handsomely paid lobbyist working against ergonomic regulations designed to prevent repetitive stress injuries. His favorite technique was sarcastic invective against workers who supposedly faked injuries when the biggest hazard they faced was "dissatisfaction with co-workers and supervisors." More than 5 million Americans are injured on the job every year, and more die annually from work-related causes than were killed on September 11. Neither Scalia nor Bush has ever held a job requiring physical labor.
What is the disconnect? One can see it from the other side — people’s lives are being horribly affected by the Bush administration’s policies, but they make no connection between what happens to them and the decisions made in Washington. I think I understand why so many people who are getting screwed do not know who is screwing them. What I don’t get is the disconnect at the top. Is it that Bush doesn’t want to see? No one brought it to his attention? He doesn’t care?
Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and so we have to cut services for the poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification along the lines that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something. If there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to watch him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely. Welfare, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps — horrors, they breed dependency. Whereas inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole life handed to you on a platter is good for the grit in your immortal soul? What we’re dealing with here is a man in such serious denial it would be pathetic if it weren’t damaging so many lives.
Bush’s lies now fill volumes. He lied us into two hideously unfair tax cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous consequences; he lied us into the Patriot Act, eviscerating our freedoms. But when it comes to dealing with those less privileged, Bush’s real problem is not deception, but self-deception.
The Bushspeak Machine at Last Chance Democracy Cafe
http://lastchancedemocracycafe.com/flash/06/01/bushspeak.html
6 November 2006, 18:36
Limbaugh and Coulter will never, ever agree to a no-holds barred debate on the real issues.
These two parasites are nothing but well oiled mouth pieces incapable of original or independent thought.
Imagine Shostakovich or Sakharov debating with Stalin’s head of internal security, Berria, and you will get the picture.