Commentary on the
World Commentary on the
World I have spent some time in the last year observing the world politic. I have decided that I have some strong opinions in this area. Until GWB got appointed president, I had considered myself a disenfranchised Republican. That is, I thought I was a Republican even after I saw what Reagan and the first Bush did to my taxes (doubled them), removed food subsidies for school children (replaced money with available but non-nutritious surplus food products) and privatized our public parks and forests (they are now 'profit-centers').
When I was in college, I took Contemporary Foreign Policy as my history requirement. This was a senior-level course for which we needed to write a paper. My thesis was that the United States is the most militarily aggressive country in the history of the world. My prof disagreed with the thesis but agreed that I was not the first with this ideal. Mostly the US has beat around the bush with idealistic pseudo-goals under the cover of some more visible agenda.
The American Revolution is taught as necessary due to a bad king. I wish I could be as convincing as a fellow in my speech class. He pointed out that the English king was taxing the colonies less than the homeland for the costs of the war with Spain. This war was necessary for the protection of the English colonies. The king went through multiple taxes attempting to find one that the colonists could live with. Representation? The people sent to America and Australia were criminals. In our current government, do prisoners vote? I just want to make the point here – enough.
In 1898 we fulminated a war with Spain with the sole purpose of stealing colonies from Spain. The people living in these colonies much preferred the Spanish. Some, for example, the Marianas immediately surrendered when informed they were at war.
In 1917, we invaded Russia (Archangel) with the intent of overthrowing the Bolsheviks. We lost but were successful in establishing the Communists.
We basically stole Panama from the Columbians and put a banana farmer in charge of our new country. He immediately granted us access to build the canal.
The Chinese Boxer Rebellion was to remove the American troops there for keeping the peace.
I think we had better excuse in Korea but we did it there too. We did not even lose gracefully.
We started a war in Viet Nam under the guise of the United Nations. Viet Nam was a French colony. The Vietnamese had thrown out any colonizer throughout their history. When the French lost, they signed a treaty immediately drawing behind a line leaving weapons and materials behind. They committed to leaving the remainder of the country as soon as elections could be held and they could remove their remaining armaments and people.
This treaty did not establish two countries. It did not claim to be anything more than terms of surrender and evacuation. The US did not sign the treaty and had no business invading the country. But it did. It declared that the line was now the separation of the North and South as separate countries. This was an attempt to keep the Communists out. Read anything by George F. Kennon on Containment Policy.
The amount of lies to the American public to justify this war will never be totally admitted. We have found that Johnson did manufacture the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
You really ought to look up the lies that the Secretary of State manufactured to justify the Archangel invasion. The US never did own up to that one.
My history book never discussed moving soldiers out of China in the Boxer Rebellion.
In other words, our history books have really whitewashed our history with lies, half-truths, and omissions. Our politicians have been less than forthright. It took 90 years for the US to own up that the Battleship Maine blew up because of faulty design, not anything anybody else did. Placing the ship in a foreign harbor by itself could have been an act of war.
Is this all bad? I write these descriptions to give you something to think about. You have been lied to consistently. You know that. You are still waving the flag. I have mixed feelings about all of this. But this is my country. I have no control over this mess. Certainly not control over its aggressive history. I only want people to understand that this is the personality of our country. We are the ultimate might-makes-right in the world.
And we are not a democracy. We are a democratic republic organized such that our primary representative is not even elected by the people. Now, I agree with the Electoral College concept and have defended it. It needs to be defended because the alternative sounds so simple and good. If we abolish the Electoral College, then the candidates only play to the major metropolitan areas. North Dakota would not even get a radio address. We must improve the integrity of our election process so that the governor of a state cannot appear to reverse the state’s votes and the courts cannot appear to be manipulated.
With this preface you can see that I believe the pot needs stirring.
I did not like Mr. Gore but I found an immediate dislike for GWB that bordered upon hatred. The man comes across as an illiterate klutz who has difficulty completing an entire sentence. He admitted bribing judges while governor to make sure that laws were interpreted in his way (Harpers, Spring, 2000). His tactics after the election were more aggressive than his competitor. I believe that an equally valid path through the legal jungle of the Florida election fiasco would have made Gore the appointed president.
I was in Denmark last summer (2001) when GWB trashed the Kioto Conference of the European Union. The EU finally managed to piece together a treaty and were looking to the new president of the USA to lead the way through its ratification. Instead GWB came over and insulted the group and embarrassed his country for his lack of knowledge in what the treaty did and the amount of effort to get it to the place that it was.
I, like the rest of the country, heard both GWB and Cheney state on TV that the Palestinians and the Jews could settle their own turf battles without need for us to be involved. Any attempt at extending the pseudo-peace or its talk initiated by previous presidents was lost and the war seriously escalated. GWB chose sides and invalidated the Palestinian leader. I mean, I do not like Mr. Arafat but dissing him to the world does not make the problem go away.
GWB other than trashing the treaty in the name of the people who elected him, he insisted on telling them that the world needs his Star Wars missile-killing system. From Kioto he went to Russia and argued with Mr. Putin about why our nuclear non-proliferation treaty needs to be abandoned. Both the EU and Mr. Putin told GWB the same thing: ABM is nice but the terrorists are an immediate threat. GWB ignored them all and sounded more like Krushev at the UN (he pounded a shoe on the table).
When the people around you know you are an American and have responsible questions about how a democracy permitted this tyrant to appoint himself president, it is difficult to give good answers. You must because it is your country and your president, regardless.
So now comes 9/11. GWB and his administration had been warned by leaders around the world that the terrorists ignored oceans. The local FBI had warned national FBI that pilot training needed investigation. Immediately after this became public knowledge, Ms. Rice, says that had we known that they were going to use their training to fly planes into buildings, we would have done something about it. She did not deny knowing who the people were or hat they intended to hurt us. She just denied the warnings were sufficiently specific. Watching her choose the exact, proper words, you wonder how specific the warnings needed to be before the White House clan would have seen past their immediate ambitions. Bin Laden in his first tape on TV said that the timing was appropriate because the warnings were being ignored.
So now a year later what do we have? Bin Laden never caught. A president who has side-lined his Star Wars project in favor of becoming the 21st century Ghengis Khan. It is not enough that we pounded a country into sand (although it already was sand). NOw he is taking on our government and the world to attack a 2-bit dictator. If Saddam Hussein were that bad, would not at least one other world leader stand by him? Even Britain is questioning the role of their country standing next to us.
And yesterday the joke was really on us. The Nobel Peace Prize
was
awarded to President Jimmy Carter for his ongoing and continuous
efforts to
recognizing human rights and attempts at world peace. WHen asked
if this
was a snub against the current administration, the committee chair
answered yes
and some opinions in that direction. The morning headlines read:
"GWB snubbed". I got a kick out of how long this lasted --
about 4 hours. After that the headlines were more politically
correct an
no longer said bad things about our current president.
The California Governor/Terminator may not have raised taxes but he did raise park fees. RV living costs are rising much faster than inflation. The Bush tax machine termed full-time RVers as “semi-affluent homeless”. They decided we were under-taxed: the RV cost of living has grown rapidly since the 2000 election. Just like his father, the Bush Tax Reduction was just a shift of taxes to make them more regressive. Oh. He gave married people a break since this is good for re-election.
You know my opinion on the marriage penalty: there is no marriage penalty. Compare the taxes of a fixed income for a family of three where two are daughters to that of a family of three where one is a spouse and the other is a daughter. The family with a spouse (marriage) pays less in a situation where the expenses of the family are lower.
Now comes the gay marriage issue. In this area I concede bigotry: homosexuality makes me nervous. Nevertheless the concept of ‘marriage’ has historically been religious pairing one man with one woman. This seems to be legacy. It would seem these people want to keep the marriage-tax preference (not penalty) for themselves and punish people with contrary beliefs with higher taxes. It would seem that the term ‘civil union’ would cover the other issues of inheritance and child custody. Whether of or not ‘civil union’ does cover these, ‘marriage’ unambiguously covers them and should, therefore, be the term used for such relationships.
Please get me straight: I am against these relationships in the same way that I am against abortion: they are sins against God. Nevertheless, depriving people of civil liberties based upon religion and sex and race are wrong. I shall get over my bigotry. Religious bigots need to do the same.
It does seem that the various states will have different laws and since the US Constitution requires one state to honor another states laws, this shall be a problem until an amendment is passed or a court decision is made in this manner: the law of the land should be to permit these relationships. Then again, I do not know all of the issues and better men than myself are spending much time on this.
The primary job of the President of United States of America is to protect the domestic tranquility. This is the one job at which Mr. Bush has shown himself to be totally inept. Remember when Mr. Kennedy saw the threat of Soviet Missiles? He stood up and sent them back. As stated before, I was in Denmark when Mr. Bush told the European Union to stick the Kyoto Treaty. He we not diplomatic – he told them to shove it. The world looked at this appointed president and saw incompetence. I saw it on their faces and in their discussions. The President of the EU told Mr. Bush, when informed that it was the US intention to abandon the ABM treaty and restart Star Wars, that the problem was not a rogue nation but terrorists. Mr. Bush responded that the Kyoto treaty would cost American jobs and he would not sign it. When Mr. Bush left Europe for Moscow to present President Putin with the same Star Wars policy, President Putin, made the same warning: Watch out for the terrorists. After the terrorists struck, the first tape from Bin Ladin stated that the timing of the attacks we due to the belligerence of Mr. Bush’s world-wide tour. You can look at the old tapes: these were public speeches.
Since then Mr. Bush has encouraged the exportation of our most precious product: technology research. Thousands of engineers are now out of work. The stock market is recovering? It always does. The rich people did not need a tax break to do it. My taxes did not go down. I shall pay more than I did 3 years ago with the same income – at $24k per year I am certainly not rich.
Presidents always blame their predecessor for the ills of the economy and they take credit for its improvement. The stock market is up and so is unemployment: permanently. That is, unless Bush gets his way and Burger King hamburger jobs get reclassified as manufacturing jobs. Orwell would be smiling: doublespeak is in full force in the Bush White House. And Clinton only lied about sex. He did not lie about his job performance. But then he did not have to.
I bought the Taxcut software – it shows me that I owe $2,200 in taxes last year. Either the Bush tax cut has increased my tax debt or this software works differently than the Turbo-Tax. I shall now buy the TurboTax just to see. I weigh either situation equally although I hope that it is not another Bush tax cut that raises my taxes like the last Reagan/Bush tax cuts. I have borrowed against a credit card to pay for this and for the brake assist for my RV because Fleetwood lost the lawsuit against it for building inadequately braked RVs. TurboTax came up with the same increase that TaxCut did – so much for believing in the Bush tax cuts.
I ran into a woman I know from El Golfo. This is reasonable since both Yuma Lakes and the El Golfo Park are CRA parks. She is really on the right side of right in support of the entire Bush referendum. It has confirmed my belief that the stronger the opinion, the weaker the thought process. She is a nice woman but she got me thinking about things. In 2000 I concluded that either Bush or Gore could have been appointed President depending upon which set of laws were used and how positions were argued. Bush was more aggressive and he took it. It could have gone the other way if Gore had been more aggressive.
It seems that there is so much truth and so much falsehood out there that you can pick and choose your own set of facts to match your own set of opinions and end up where you wanted to be in the first place. To me this is sad because it permits the radical agenda to be more easily pursued than if there were fewer facts. I belong to the anyone-but-Bush group, as you already know. I shall be happy to get back to Mexico or California where I do not have to hear the violent attitudes in support of Mr. Bush and his religious zealots. It is this zealot attitude that frightens me but then Jesus had something to say about lukewarm people. Many people claim that Jesus was a Zealot.
I was expecting April to be easy except that I find that the new Bush tax cuts have increased my taxes from $0 to $2300. Sort of the original Reagan/Bush tax cuts: those raised my taxes by about the same amount. So, I have to borrow some money so I can pay my taxes. Not happy but what can you expect from a Texan.
I want to remind people that in 2000, Bush ran on the platform that he would mend the country and put us all back on the same track. Whether you agree with the track he has chosen or not, he has been the most divisive president in my lifetime. In 3 years we have seen such division in our country that I am not sure what it will take to put it back on the same track. The one thing that will not is another 4 years of Bush. For that reason alone, you should vote against the man.
Remember also that the Republican Senate, pre-Bush held up more judges than the current, split-even Senate. The Republicans do not like the liberal, remake-the-Constitution nominees. The Democrats do not like the radical, anti-abortion nominees. There are reasonable judges out there folks, if the president wants to be divisive, he can continue avoiding them. If Bush gets elected for a second term, he will pack the Supreme Court with at least two and maybe three anti-abortion judges. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and then we will have serious rewrite-the-constitution problems.