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Exploiting Horror To Win Election
(a very biased commentary, but it's hard to refute the facts presented)
Exploiting Horror To Win Election
The Bush regime uses our catastrophe as a tool to advance its right-wing agenda and embroil America in an un-winnable war.
By Regis T. Sabol
Saturday marked the third anniversary of 9/11. Most Americans don’t even have to explain what that means. It’s like Pearl Harbor, or the Titanic, or Waterloo. It’s an abbreviation for disaster caused by folly.
On September 11, 2001, 19 members of the Al Qaeda guerilla movement, 15 of them from our ally Saudi Arabia, hijacked four commercial airliners. They flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, sending two of the tallest skyscrapers in the world crashing to the ground. One hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed into a field in Western Pennsylvania as it was heading to Washington, presumably with the White House or the Capitol as its target.
On 9/11, more than 3,000 innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered in the most catastrophic attack on American soil in the nation’s history.
9/11 is the official beginning of America’s war on terror.
9/11 is the “trifecta” George Bush told his Chief of Staff Andrew Card he was looking for to justify everything he would do afterward.
9/11 is the reason our armed forces attacked Afghanistan and routed the repressive Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government, which had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda movement, before we turned our attention to Iraq and left Afghanistan in chaos.
9/11 is the original excuse George Bush and his regime used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq even though his own intelligence agencies had already told him Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with those attacks.
9/11 is the justification for a needless war that has now cost more than 1,000 U.S. troops their lives, maimed and wounded 5,000 more, killed upward of 30,000 Iraqi civilians, and forced us to fight a war against an indigenous insurgency that we cannot win and that will sink us into a desert morass for years until we admit defeat and end the occupation.
9/11 is the American tragedy George Bush and Dick Cheney are falsely manipulating to win the 2004 presidential election.
9/11 is a political paradox in an campaign where those who did not prevent this disaster, even when they had sufficient information and resources to do so, claim they are the best choice to protect America from similar catastrophes.
9/11 is a political football that Bush and Cheney are cynically using to frighten the American people into voting for them in the November election.
And, according to all national polls, the American electorate is buying it. How can this be? Americans believe that George Bush is better equipped to make America safer from terrorist attacks than Senator John Kerry, his Democrat opponent, by an astounding 22 percent.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in New York City, George Bush declared repeatedly that America is safer because we toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and occupied Iraq. At the same time, New York City was under a Code Red Alert, the highest level of warning for a potential terrorist attack, and Madison Square Garden was surrounded like a feudal castle by a series of concrete barriers and other obstacles. The city was as heavily guarded as a city under siege.
Am I the only one to see the obvious contradiction here? Or has much of the American electorate gone through the looking glass into a bizarre wonderland where fiction is fact, fantasy is reality, and blatant lies are accepted as immutable truths?
Campaigning in West Virginia and Ohio on the eve of 9/11/04, Bush told adoring crowds that if Kerry had his way, “Saddam Hussein would still be in power and would still be a threat to our security and to the world.” It is possible that if John Kerry had his way, Saddam Hussein might still be in power, but we have ample evidence that Saddam never was a threat to the security of America and the world. And Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the gang knew this even as they prepared for an invasion that was a foregone conclusion.
More than 130,000 troops, many of them ill-trained and ill-equipped members of the National Guard and the Army Reserves, are fighting for their lives in that desert hell-hole against enemies that before the invasion fought each other. These insurgents are now bolstered by outside fighters emboldened to enter the fray because of the American invasion and occupation of a Muslim country.
“Five times in his speech in West Virginia,” according to a report in Saturday’s Washington Post, “Bush spoke of making the country and the world ‘safer.’ He told members of the audience to bring their friends to the polls and ‘remind them, if they want a safer America, a stronger America, and a better America, to put Dick Cheney and me back in there for four more years.”
Safer? Stronger? Better? This is not the America I see after almost four years of Bush/Cheney rule.
We are not safer. Our borders are porous. Most container ships enter our harbors without being inspected. Bush and the Republican Congress have drastically cut funding for the U.S. Border Patrol and Customs Agency; have eliminated a program initiated by President Clinton to put more police officers on America’s streets; have denied promised funding for equipment desperately needed by police officers, fire fighters, and first responders in our cities; have arbitrarily allocated Homeland Security funding evenly to all states so that sparsely populated Wyoming gets as much money as New York City, already the target of two terrorist attacks; and have allowed the assault weapons ban to lapse so that these deadly weapons whose only purpose is to kill people will now be easily attainable by those who want to kill people.
We are not stronger. Because of our Iraqi misadventure, our armed forces have been stretched dangerously thin as North Korea and Iran blithely develop nuclear weapons. Because Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have wasted billions on obsolete high-tech weaponry and an absurd, unworkable, and useless missile defense program, we cannot afford to field sufficient armed forces and provide them with the equipment they need to protect themselves and us. Because of the staggering deficit created by the Bush regime’s unconscionable tax cuts for the rich, we have become a debtor nation subject to the whims of countries who now prop up our wobbly economy. Because of the Patriot Act, our Constitutional liberties have been eroded, weakening our democratic system. We have lost the trust and friendship of our allies and encouraged the enmity of those who would be our enemies.
And we most certainly are not better. Almost two million Americans remain out of work, the highest number since the Great Depression. More than 36 million Americans have slid into poverty, the highest number since the Great Depression. Fifteen percent of the American population lacks health care coverage. Our infant mortality rate is among the worst in the industrialized world. Most Americans are unable to save money because they need every cent simply to survive. The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth upon which we live are less safe because of the Bush regime’s attack on the environment--to make America a better place for the energy companies and other corporations who have been given carte blanche to do whatever they choose.
Still, Bush has gained a nine to eleven point lead over Kerry, according to national polls. Why? Because Bush and Cheney have convinced too many Americans to be afraid, very afraid, and to believe that our current leaders are the only ones who can protect us from the unseen enemies who surround us and walk among us.
Cheney slunk to a new depth of demagoguery last week when he warned that a Kerry victory in the election would result in terrorist attacks on America. He said, in short, that voting for Kerry will lead to a reign of terror in America.
The truth is we already live under a reign of terror.
Regis T. Sabol is a contributing editor to Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought.
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/...order=0&thold=0
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