Past Imperfect:

[struggle4progress]

"What to the slave is the 4th of July?"
In 1852 Frederick Douglass questioned the significance of the 4th of July to the enslaved Negro. In 2004, we would do well to ask: What is November 2nd to black America?

By William Jelani Cobb

Sometimes, as I have come to understand, the obvious needs to be stated: The Presidential administration of George W. Bush may be the most corrupt and dangerous in the history of the United States. And restated: It is imperative that the Bush administration be voted out of office on November 2, 2004. Or, to put it differently: Es imperativo qu se echa la administracion de Bush. And if I knew how to write an internet column in Braille, I would say it that way as well.
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On the cusp of its 228th birthday, this country is mired in a seemingly endless occupation of Iraq — despite the return of "sovereignty" to the Iraqi "government." The current Presidential administration has misled the public, squandered international goodwill, authored the most disastrous foreign policy in recent memory, undercut the authority of the United Nations, undermined due process by creating secret military tribunals for civilian offenses, curtailed freedom of speech and spent billions waging war in the name of eliminating a false threat to national security. Add into the equation its contempt for international treaties, hostile ecological politics, its implication in the war profiteering of Halliburton and the damning accusation that the Bush administration deliberately blew the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame as retribution for her husband's criticism of their Iraq policy, and you have a broad pattern of dishonesty and political incompetence ...

And the bitter reality is that the disfranchisement of black voters paved the way to all of the above accomplishments.
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... neither Johnson nor Clinton — nor even Nixon during Watergate — was impeached for offenses that cost American lives. To date, Bush's misinformation has resulted in American casualties in the multiple hundreds and Iraqi deaths in the untold thousands. And if Bush's former Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clark is to be believed, the counterfeit "weapons of mass destruction" used to justify the invasion of Iraq were nothing more than a smokescreen for the administration's pre-existing Get Saddam Agenda.

First published: July 5, 2004
http://www.africana.com/columns/cobb/ht20040705fourth.asp