Is GW a lemon?

Published on November 25, 2007 By Artysim In Politics

In this article I would like to discuss my opinion of GWB. This is not a Bush-bashing article, nor an attack on the right. This is an explanation of why I believe some of the things I do.

This may shock some people to hear, but I used to be a conservative and I rooted heavily for GW back in 2000. I have no problem with conservatives or their policies, although I do disagree with some of them. I have no problems with "the right" or even the republican party for that matter. Certain individuals in the republican party, I do have a big beef with but that is another topic. But first, a little history-

I was born and raised in a VERY right wing town. Everyone there voted conservative and went to church on sunday because that's just the way things are done around there. Just about anything was permissible so long as you kept your nose to the grindstone and didn't make waves. Want to become an abusive alcoholic? No problem. Want to cheat on your spouse and neglect your family? No worries. If you'd like you can even get a nasty cocaine habit and steal from your friends. Just as long as you vote for the party and say your prayers we'll still accept you, both in the bar and the church (both of which have more in common than either would like to admit). But if you dared to question the status quo, or ask WHY the town was owned and run by a small handful of very wealthy families while everyone else struggled just to make ends meet, boy you'd be in a world of hurt. I noticed that this conservative, deeply religious town that I grew up in was steeped in a very rigid belief system. Believe in God or you'll burn in hell. Vote conservative or the commies will take over and put us all in concentration camps! Everything was boiled down to absolutes from religion to politics and yes, the real demon in the room that no one pays attention to- economics. In this system of absolutes any questioning is met with derision, and quite often some kind of personal attack (and we never see Limbaugh or O'reilly launch any personal attacks do we?) In this environment if you asked someone a well-meaning question about the system they wouldn't even consider it, but search for an instant rejection.

Free markets and competition are the best model of all history and will be for rest of time, end of discussion!

Anything the government does, private industry can and should do, and they'll do it more efficiently, end of discussion!

Right wing politicians are tough, steely-eyed men who live in the "real" world while all lefties hate themselves and just want to destroy the country, end of discussion!

All of the above are just some of the absolutes that I grew up hearing. They were etched in stone. Proven. To even question them was heresy.

So anyways, come the year 2000 and it's Bush vs. Gore. Ewww. Gore. The guy's some kinda robot who can't even change the pitch and tone of his voice. Not like that GW guy. He's saying all the right things. He even says he's a God-fearing born again christian. That's gotta be our guy, right?? He'll set things right. I wanted GW to be elected. And when Colin Powell went before the UN and testified about mobile chemical weapons labs and suspected nuclear programs that were being hidden I thought "no WAY would they ever lie about something this serious".

Well, suffice it to say that today my opinion of GW has shifted considerably. This has nothing to do with left or right wing political ideology. It has nothing to do with the fact that he's a republican or so-called conservative. It has everything to do with justice. I believe he has lied to the good folks of the U.S. I believe that he's been instrumental in tearing up your constitution, and should have been impeached long ago for his use of signing statements to fundamentally change or ignore laws without vetoing them. Furthermore, he's incompetent. This was illustrated in his reaction to 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. Did you see the footage when he was sitting in that classroom when the planes hit? When they told him the news he just sat there. No questions, no jumping into decisive action. It wasn't until several minutes later one of his handlers told him it would be a good idea for him to go did he actually get up and leave the room. The night before the levees broke Bush was briefed on the situation in New Orleans. Again, he just sat there. After listening to all the problems and concerns (which were fully laid out before him) He simply said "we'll give you everything you need. Good night". He asked no questions to his stunned briefers. Again, no decisive action that one would hope the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES would be capable of doing.

My problem with all of this is that the people who should be the most critical of the president, should be the people who voted for him.

Even if you're tickled pink with the person you voted for, you should still be the one who's most critical of them, because you endorsed them as your candidate. It's like buying a car that doesn't run properly but never questioning it because you're convinced that the dealer who sold it to you is a good guy who has your best interests in mind.

I regularly see people who are unwilling to question Bush or his policies because it goes against the grain of a rigid belief system which makes no room for questioning anything.

Question the president? That's unpatriotic. Question the Iraq war? What are you, some kind of terrorist? Well, we had to go over there anyway, even though there was absolutely no reason to in the first place. I'm sorry, Saddam shooting at a few planes with outdated AA fire over Iraqi airspace is not a threat to the U.S nor does it justify the deployment of 300,000 personnel and hundreds of billions of dollars and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and relocation of approximately 2 million people as refugees to surrounding nations. Yes, Iraqis are human beings too so they are included in the death toll, but of course the only casualty figure that gets talked about in the states is the U.S military deaths.

Make no mistake, I don't think that every bad thing that's happened is Bush's fault. Truth be told, I don't believe he's smart enough to have come up with most of this stuff on his own. I believe that there are many people with agendas that do not have the best interests of the U.S in mind that have capitalized on the opportunity to use GW as their tool to get the things done that will profit them enormously. For example, Halliburton has made tens of billions of dollars in profit from YOUR tax dollars being spent in Iraq. To show their gratitude to the U.S, they have relocated their headquarters to Dubai. There are serious questions that need to be asked about the U.S presidency and the job it's doing, and the people who do that shouldn't be angry lefties like myself. It should be the right who voted for him!

Comments (Page 2)

Leauki

on Nov 28, 2007

Leauki, please believe me when I say that I spent the last half hour composing my response to you, only to click on "post comment" to get a wonderful URL error.

I believe that. Sound like JU all right.

Suffice it to say that I respectfully disagree with you and look forward to picking your brains as we obviously have differing viewpoints. Remember, it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it!

What do you disagree with? That one cannot hide one million bodies without leaving traces of mass graves or furnaces?

Please apply the critical thinking to what people tell you about Iraq, especially when these things are so obvious lies (one million violent deaths, it just doesn't work mathematically) or easily verified (US selling arms to Saddam, you can easily verify this on SIPRI's Web site or via news reports about Saddam's army using Russian weaponry).

Artysim

on Nov 28, 2007

What do you disagree with? That one cannot hide one million bodies without leaving traces of mass graves or furnaces?

Who said anything about hiding the bodies? My problem is that there is no definitive body count because, well, no one is really counting. Reporters can't really go out on their own and investigate, and it has been verified that the Iraqi government has been, how shall we say, "massaging" the data on their morgue numbers. And that's just the bodies that are brought to the morgue, not to mention all the unreported corpses that are buried directly by families on the same day of death. Others float down rivers or if not identified are taken straight to unmarked graves (I believe Fallujah had some soccer fields turned into graves to accomodate all the bodies from the fighting there?)

A million bodies over five years is actually not that difficult to get rid of- a nation disposes of far more physical garbage in landfills when comparing the physical mass. It's the same problem as Chechnya- no one can really say how many people have died there because the Russians don't want to air their dirty laundry to the world and it's not a very friendly environment for journalists.

The "one million bodycount number", to be fair comes from a report in 2006 that estimated the death toll between the invasion and 2005 (not murder, so that includes disease, starvation, accidents etc) to be 655,000 since the invasion, with 601,000 of those being from violent causes. Since then, extrapolating from the death rate in the report, it's safe to say that the death rate could definitely have reached close to the one million mark especially considering how nasty 2006 was with all the sectarian fighting and death squads ala nicaragua that disappeared people in the night.

This report was produced by Iraqi doctors and epidemiologists from John Hopkins university- and I quote-

"Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate "excess deaths."

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

Burnham said that the estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate -- 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people -- found in both of the Hopkins surveys was roughly the same estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census Bureau. He said he believes that attests to the accuracy of his team's results.

He thinks further evidence of the survey's robustness is that the steepness of the upward trend it found in excess deaths in the last two years is roughly the same tendency found by other groups -- even though the actual numbers differ greatly.

The survey cost about $50,000 and was paid for by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies."

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