THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRESIDENCY
By Mel GoodmanSeptember 9, 2005
Over the past three years, we have been watching the gradual unraveling of the integrity and credibility of President Bush and his entire administration. In the winter of 2002-2003, there was the calculated misuse of intelligence collection and analysis to justify the invasion of Iraq, the first preemptive war in the history of the United State. Then, there was the war itself with President Bush donning a flight suit on the USS Abraham Lincoln to make a premature declaration of "mission accomplished." The post-war period revealed the absence of any coherent plan, let alone strategy, for U.S. forces in Iraq. Finally, we have the tragic events of the past two weeks on America?s Gulf Coast, marked by the loss of a great American city and thousands of lives in the poorest and most powerless reaches of New Orleans.
The president actually defended the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and his mother declared it a success for the evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway, so this is working well for them."Over the past three years, we have witnessed the results of the libertarian policies of the Bush administration, which includes reduced spending on social programs and even medical programs for U.S. veterans and exploiting the tragedy and terror of 9/11 to
provide huge sums of money to the richest and most powerful bureaucracies in the American system of government. The Pentagon's budget is climbing toward $450 billion, which does not include the $5 billion monthly stipend for Iraq and Afghanistan. The intelligence community has a budget of nearly $45 billion,
which is more than the rest of the world spends on intelligence activities. And the gargantuan Department of Homeland Security,
which was unprepared for the devastation of a major American city, has a budget of nearly $40 billion for its 180,000 personnel.
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Thus far, the American people, along with the Congress and the American media,
have been incredibly complacent in responding to the brutalities of Abu Ghraib, the horrors of the war in Iraq, and even the criminal negligence in New Orleans. There is still no anti-war movement in this country and the few attempts to rally opponents of the war have been disappointing.
Such voices of conscience as Cindy Sheehan in Crawford and Senator Robert C. Byrd in the Congress have been largely ignored or marginalized. Fortunately, we the people have one more chance to demonstrate our opposition to the policies of the Bush administration.
On September 24, 2005, there will be a series of anti-war rallies in Washington, D.C. and other American cities. If we cannot assemble hundreds of thousands of citizens on that day, then our silence will have established that the American people have the government that they want and even deserve. For the sake of the nearly 1,900 lives that have been lost in Iraq and the untold thousands that have died on the Gulf Coast,
it is time for the American people to speak with the only voice left to tell truth to power. Link:
http://www.ustourofduty.org/pages/opinion.html#mel Perhaps DU can be the source of a unifying, direct, immediate objective of 24 September 2005 -- Be unrelenting in the demand that Bush and Cheney resign.
We must rid our government of the two of them if we are going to have any hope of halting the decay, negotiating with other Nations to provide peace-making and infrastructure building teams in Iraq to follow our rapid and complete departure - just for starters.
Peace.
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