Suppose George Bush had been a good and courageous leader

Every now and then I consider how he is fully responsible for drying up an Absolutely Unprecedented River of goodwill and opportunity for our country.

I remember watching Studs Terkel on Donahue shortly after Bush's UN speech. Whenever I think of it, I feel almost frantic. He said that Bush should have told the UN that now was our chance. Now we were committed to returning all the bounty of worldwide sentiment expressed to us after Sept 11, that the US would pledge and spearhead a global drive to insure that every living person have access to clean water and food and education. That this would be our mission and we would open our arms to all who wanted to join us in the effort.

40 billion dollars is what it would cost, Studs said. I checked out some WHO numbers at the time and that was the most recent figure cited for global access to food and water.

Suppose he had pledged that much on our behalf. How long would the ovation have lasted? -To conquer terror with generosity and promise, to defeat suspicion and fear, to gain the trust and support of the very masses Bush's actions have driven away from us. To rip all power away from the violent fringe in that one golden moment of opportunity.

"You have mourned with us. Now join us, not in war but in a Renaissance of the human spirit. You have shared our tears. Now share with us the possibilities of a New Century"

He could have proposed a new age of women's rights and worker's rights in a hallelujah pass. What if he had been an exceptional person?

40 billion dollars. How much national security would that have been worth?

Then later on, when the convergence of circumstance was less eerily ideal but when we still could have shone with benevolence and honor: Afghanistan. Weeks after the Taleban fell, I saw reporters showing WTC footage to some villagers. They had never seen it, never heard of it. They didn't even know who we were. Even the TV they viewed it on was an oddity to them.

Instead of committing the full force of the US government into securing that country, instead of throwing our backs into giving them the first chance, Bush asked American school children to send him money and then started a whole new war.

He started a war.

MSNBC's Ashley Banfield safely broadcast interviews from the streets of Baghdad weeks before the invasion. With women. On the streets of Baghdad. With not a mercenary in sight. CNBC had a reporter out doing interviews there, too. She showed how small glassed of tea were sold from wooden carts that dotted the narrow streets. She explained that by custom, Iraqis never make visitors pay for their tea. They wouldn't permit her pay for the tea. They insisted on giving it to her. It was their custom. American women, safe on the streets of Baghdad drinking tea they had been given.

Now that the jig is up, one by one, the war cheerleaders are beginning to criticize Bush. They have to; it's becoming fashionable. Forgiveness isn't coming easily.

I'm feeling very morose tonight.

as Americans. None at all. His total vision is corporatism on the world scale and a third world status for those who aren't corporatists.

He's bankrupted this country and hurt every environmental and worker policy.

He's an elitist like the world has never seen before.

OK, I'll get past blaming * for 9/11. I can overlook principled differences in ideology. But if * had believed his own rhetoric -- balanced budget every year, even in the face of national crisis or war; humble foreign policy; no nation building -- imagine how much better this country and the world would be! What if it were really important to oust a the lame secularist leader of Iraq? Imagine what would have happened if a half a percent of this war's budget had been used to support the pro-democracy groups that already existed in Iraq or international NGOs.

man. his father never taught him to be one. his mother never taught him to be one. his entire family history never taught him to be one. and he didn't have the inner make up to become one by himself.

ergo, little shit was foisted upon us splattering all the world with it.

In the same way they know what a Quisling is. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling)

(Edited to correct a typo.)

precisely because 9/11 was a made-to-order "catastrophic event" designed to give * the political capital to assume maximum powers at home and a pre-emptive war capability abroad. That's all it was, sad as that may seem.

Dead on.

Good juxt-a-position with what is happening after freedom on the march saved us from WMD launched from the Hussein-Bin Laden love shack.

a two party system where one party is founded on racism. The Thugs became "winners" when they began actively courting racists.

So, what does that mean? It means the opposition party is always interacting with the very worst, the most base characteristics of American culture. They have to. Everything they have to plan for is in response to the principle of oppression. Oppression, not social welfare, is kept at the center of American government, maybe even at the center of American social mores.

So, what does that mean? Social welfare goes into the toilet. It becomes okay to kill people even farther away just as people are allowed to languish, suffer and die at home. "National security" becomes code for funneling the wealth of the nation to protect corporate interests. Technology stagnates because the goal is not progress but profit. The life of the people is only as secure as the life of the most oppressed person in the nation -- and we all watched that Katrina footage if we were lucky enough not to be in it.

And among the more ugly consequences of this fun house is the effect on the left. We censor ourselves. We make excuses for our so called political leadership. We keep being dragged to the right and the right's PR campaign becomes our unthinking idealization. Before long, lefties believe they aren't spiritual enough, they don't have "values", they feel nervous about "national defense" -- any number of absurdities. There is no number of counter examples that can keep up with the pollution of the press, of the national conversation, with the deal we cut to feel good about being "Americans".

It is fundamentally insane to found the welfare of a nation on the oppression of its people -- any of its people. And that's what we do here. There is no indignity, no atrocity that should surprise us, even though we are now in a constant state of shock because of the efficiency and frequency of the latest set of atrocities. When the organizing principle of your political system is oppression -- and oppression is an abstraction that describes pain to bodies, miserable lives, needless death and destruction -- it becomes insane to expect anything else but pain, misery, death or destruction.

This is the road we have gone down. Until "social welfare" again becomes a term we say proudly, and until we excise the politics of oppression from the heart of our political life, and in particular, racism in America, this is the road we will continue on. It will become a forced march and it will lead to a lot of terrible destruction, possibly even our own.

You suggest some valid reasons for why it all sometimes seems so overwhelming.

:thumbsup:

I am a liberal

has revitalized us in a profound way because it can't be accident that so many of us are thinking down the bones this weekend.

:)

Wonderful post.

He never would've been "chosen" to front the PNAC's "new direction" for the country had he not been a soulless corporate thug from the git-go.

dang it, next you'll be asking me to imagine that Dick Cheney is an honest man!:)

his poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet

and they are.....

Well I should say * makes me cry.
I truely wish that sick awful feeling I got those weeks in 2001 when they inserted this weasel into our lives was wrong. So much would be different, so many would still be with us if President Gore was in his second term.
I'm gonna go cry some more now...:cry:

:hug:

Maybe I had a Miss America Moment (I want to end world hunger), but Terkel was so unapoligetic in his musings. They sounded so...possible, so pragmatic.

Every time I read how bush says "history will be the judge", it floors me. He will be Custer. He will be reviled. He will be a hated joke. Regardless of the very point in time in which it occured, he altered history.

It just floored me too! A history BA from Yale, AND he's sitting in the Oval Office -- it's those casual remarks that reveal how clueless and uncaring he is. Bravo for your vision ... better a "Miss America" than a greedy warmonger!

Quite sad that Bush's people evidently know that something is wrong, because they feel compelled to blurt out untruths about how dedicated they are to "spreading democracy" and how "young girls are going to school" -- they are trying to have it both ways, grabbing the idealistic ideas of those whom they sneer at.

Vowing to lead a global effort to provide 2-3 billion people with the essentials of life, by 2050, would have gone a long way towards promoting international co-operation and goodwill (since by definition it would have required countries to work together). Bush, alas, doesn't trust that kind of project -- too "commie", and he's paranoid that countries would be uniting against HIM.

They ARE THE PROBLEM.....the Pub Philosophy that is...which is built of sound bites to cover their greed and selfcenteredness. The Common Man, in the Pub party,...... are nothing more than PAWNS...and now they see what we been telling them all along...

"Ya got ROOKED/SNOOKERED/AND CONNED."

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

That's a good one.

I, for one, ain't in a forgiving mood. Anyone who ever voted for, stuck up for, gave money to, or supported in any way that I saw, the bush crime gang (including its congressional and judicial accomplices) is due for a big old steaming pile of justice.

I believe he was quoting from Hamlet in doing so.

You're the first person I've run across who recalls that interview, which has stuck with me, because Mr. Terkel called it so early in the game.

He broke ground with that one.

Even my friends who'd caught the lamentably short revival of Phil Donahue don't remember who Studs Terkel is.

Either way, :cry:

"They kill us for their sport."

:hug:

:hi: :hug: