Monday, May 10, 2004

Chicken(hawk)s coming home to roost

Well, it’s been a disturbing couple of weeks - no, who am I kidding? - how about 3 1/2 years…

Today, Bush told Rumsfeld he was “doing a superb job” as Secretary of Defense. Guess it goes to prove that nobody ever takes a fall for anything in this administration. Nobody has been disciplined for any aspect of 9/11, or lying to get us into war, or grossly mismanaging the aftermath of the invasion. Or any of a hundred other acts of willful negligence or outright malfeasance.

And now this - one of the “worse things to come” that Rumsfeld himself warned about in his testimony last Friday. Photos of Iraqi women being raped by U.S. troops. (note: server now down) Be forewarned, it’s pretty rough stuff. So much for any last vestige of the “moral high ground” and claims of “we’re bringing them democracy”. If this is going to represent the face of democracy to the Muslim world, they’ll fight it to their last breath. As would we.

We’re better than Saddam because he tortured, raped and killed the Iraqi people and left mass graves behind. See, we didn’t get to the mass graves. We got caught before we got to that stage.

What we have seen in the last couple weeks is absolutely sickening and revolting, and is the direct result of administration policy, starting with the declarations that we don’t have to obey international law. Like the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or our agreements with Russia over nuclear weapons or missile defense. Or international environmental agreements, or not being subject to the International Criminal Court. And that was before the so-called “War on Terror”.

After 9/11, Rumsfeld declared that we were no longer going to abide by the Geneva Convention in the conduct of war or in dealing with prisoners. You can see the results of this policy in the paper, everyday. These are war crimes, plain and simple.

But the real concern the administration has is about damage control, to put a lid on this and get things back to “normal” and of course, to hope that this doesn’t turn into a political issue. After all, thank god it isn’t a real item of national importance like the President got a blowjob from an intern or something like that…

Since the administration won’t hold their own accountable, let’s hope the American people do in November.

One thing that gives me hope is that today I finally saw a Kerry ad that said something substantive about him and his values. It’s the first one I’ve seen that has had any impact. About damn time.

Another is this excerpt from a Wisconsin newspaper, begging people to write some pro-Bush letters so that they can appear to be “balanced”, since virtually all of the letters to the editor these days are highly critical of Bush. I wonder why?

Editorial: We need more letters to achieve a balance

Letters to the editor, a staple of The Post-Crescent’s Views pages, are a way to take the political and social temperature of the Valley. A well-written letter allows readers to ponder different points of view, perhaps made more poignant because the author is someone you might know. At best, they should offer a full spectrum of beliefs and topics.

Recently, though, as the race for president heats up, we’ve been dealing with this quandary: How can we balance the perspectives and topics of our letters when many of our submissions have been coming only from one side?

We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today’s increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.

Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can’t run letters that we don’t have.

- Bob Woods