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09/04/2005 Archived Entry: "Bush Must Go"

BUSH MUST GO
I don't have much faith in the political process. Choosing between thieves and parasites is no choice at all; if voting could make a difference, it would be illegal.

That said, it is clearly time for Bush to go. Paul Craig Roberts makes a good start on some of the reasons in Impeach Bush Now. They include diverting FEMA funds to the insane war in Iraq, despite warnings about the danger of levee collapse that preceded 9/11. Even after 4 hurricanes in 2004 demonstrated the danger, the Corps of Engineers was left with 20% of the needed funding to protect New Orleans. Roberts goes on

The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost America’s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost America’s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply. Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed America’s interests to their insane agenda.

There is more, much more. Lew Rockwell discusses some of the background in his excellent essay The State and the Flood. It is even worse than Mr. Rockwell demonstrates. We have a growing body of compelling evidence that FEMA actively prevented aid and rescue from reaching stranded victims.

They turned back a flotilla of 500 boats. commandeered the buses hired to evacuate stranded hotel guests and told them to go to the now-infamous convention center, where they could join 10,000 or more people dying of dehydration while being studiously ignored by the same FEMA. Later that day, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was busy prevaricating about the catastrophic failure of FEMA and insinuating that NPR reporters were lying in an surprisingly aggressive interview by normally docile NPR lapdog Robert Siegel. The FEMA's active disruption and prevention of on-going rescue and recovery work was so egregious that the Mayor of hard-hit Slidell gave a radio interview in which he decried FEMA turning away generators and fuel, and warned that they had "better bring weapons" (MP3) if they tried to commander trucks, generators, and other equipment from city-contracted firms.

FEMA is far from the only government agency making things worse. From NOPD officers participating in looting the shooting death of a man trying to get help for a young girl being raped and stabbed to death inside the convention center, the government response has been beyond incompetent, beyond stupid and dangerous, and far into the realm of criminal negligence. When a response was finally forthcoming, it was in the form of battle-hardened Iraq war troops with "shoot to kill" orders and shouting "Sixteen in the clip" as they roared into New Orleans. But instead of finding funny-looking foreigners crying "Allah Akbar" they found dying Americans croaking "Praise Jesus."

These are only small samples of the horror and brutish behavior of government "relief" agents. One of the many tasks we face is documenting these stories before they are flushed down the memory hole.

If we allow this behavior to go unpunished, if Bush and his cohort are allowed to spin their way out of the worst national catastrophe in generations, one that they helped create and made worse even as it unfolded, then we are doomed. If we leave these people in power, we deserve what we will get, which will be more death and destruction.

Cindy Sheehan has shown us all that one person can make a difference. The forces she has unleashed will converge on Washington and our murderous masters in the very near future.

Each of us needs to decide two things:

Will you take any more of this?
What are you going to do about it?

As I said at the beginning, I have little faith in the political process, but criminality of this magnitude goes far beyond picking which parasites will parcel out the plunder. This demands a response. Not in the next election, not after the committees have spun and whitewashed the truth, not after the worst criminals have been awarded medals, promotions, and cash bonuses. We must act, now, to remove these evil people from their positions of power. There is no time to lose.

Yes, the ones that replace them will be stupid and greedy and incompetent. But they will also be afraid, and just a little less aggressive, a little more humble. They will have the spectacle of their predecessors’ fate to remind them of what happens when government loses the confidence of the governed.

We need that lesson. We need it now. We must act, now, or face the consequences of our own folly in a future that is rushing down upon us all.

Silver

Posted by Silver @ 02:02 PM CST
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