SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21
"W" has taken it in the teeth for his war on Iraq, but, to be fair, let's look at Saddam's Hussein's rap sheet:
- He surrounded himself with lackeys so stupid and/or cowed that he never heard any criticism of even his cruelest or most idiotic decisions,
- He literally believed that God was "on his side" and that rationalized any actions he took, no matter how heinous, against those who worshipped a different god,
- His party controlled the media, so they fed his people a steady diet of misinformation about how great he was and how evil his enemies were,
- He rigged elections to ensure he stayed in power while still seeming democratic; winning with results that turned out to be statistically almost impossible. His cronies in government (including members of his family) ignored, overrode, and silenced any complaints about the voting process,
- He had no concept of "civil rights": he spied on his own people when it suited him and stifled free speech when it bothered him, and kept his country in a perpetual state of high alert that was very close to martial law,
- He unilaterally branded those he even suspected of treachery "enemies of the state" and had them arrested without any due process or charges,
- He had these "enemies" thrown into gulags and tortured until they confessed, or just tortured to scare his other "enemies", real or imagined,
- He amassed a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that, if unleashed, could decimate any country he decided was his enemy, which was an ever-growing list,
- He squandered his country's riches on wars and on pampering his rich friends, at the cost of his people's education, health, and well-being,
- He drove his people to war to expand his empire, killing thousands of his own soldiers in the name of "safety" for his people,
- On his order, over three thousand Americans have died in Iraq.
So I say, thank God for men like George W. Bush, who are willing to say to tyrants like this: No, sir, this will not stand. I will do anything in my power to depose you and bring freedom to your people and safety to the world.
"The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit." -- George Bush, 2003
Thank God. If only there were more men like that.
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I know some of you are tired of me making political posts. I am, too. Really. But I don't think I have the luxury of ignoring politics any more. We are on the verge of losing our country, and I refuse to stay silent because I might alienate some people by yelling about it. It's time to yell about it. On October 18th, two days after my birthday, Bush signed a law throwing habeas corpus to the winds, and explicitly ALLOWING Americans to torture their unlawful prisoners: "enemy combatants" which *he* is allowed to define.
Maybe his Secret Service will read this and decide *I* am an enemy combatant that needs to be silenced. They could; there is nothing to stop them. Their jackboots could kick in my door some night, haul me off without charging me with any particular crime, torture me until I tell them whatever they want to hear, and then trumpet to the world how successful they are at eliminating terrorists like me.
In eighteen days we have a chance to elect a majority in both the house and senate who will oppose Bush for the next two years, and stop this insanity. I am urging you to do what you can. Even just showing up and watching for voter fraud would help. Take a laptop to your polling place and blog what you see. We've had the last two national elections stolen from us, and if we let it happen again _we_ are to blame.
This is the *real* national emergency. Compare the number of Americans who have died for no reason in Iraq (2,279), by Bush's order, to the number who died in the 9/11 attacks (2,973). What are we doing? How is this worth it? Why are our priorities so far out of whack?
Why are we giving up our civil liberties, spending trillions on wars, and sacrificing our kids' lives at Bush's behest? Every year more Americans die of cancer (190x), AIDS (4x), heart disease (309x), and car accidents (20x) than died in 9/11. What are we so afraid of? Why are we willing to spend trillions to depose a puffed-up dictator on the other side of the world but not a couple million to educate our kids in music and art?
We have let the fear of violence against us turn us into animals. We're so frightened by those images of jets crashing into skyscrapers that we've forgotten that being the victim of a terrorist attack is, in fact, among the least likely of the bad things that can happen to us. We have to stop.
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