Wow, I’m angry

There are three sets of people I’m really frustrated with right now:

  1. Young people who didn’t vote, and who should have known better.
  2. People who continue to blindly believe the Bush administration, and the Rove-ite/neo-con lies.
  3. The Kerry campaign and its close advisors for not fighting harder in Ohio. I’m surprised that there aren’t court cases pending, and lawyers ready to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, just like there were in Florida in 2000. Maybe the Democrats really are the wimps everyone says they are.

I see lots of people in comments on blogs saying that it’s time for us to all get behind the President — country at war, yadda yadda, support our troops, etc. Andrew Sullivan for example wrote:

“I’ve been more than a little frustrated by the president’s handling of this war in the past year; but we have to draw a line under that now. The past is the past. And George W. Bush is our president. He deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent. He needs our prayers and our support for the enormous tasks still ahead of him. He has mine. Unequivocally.”

I couldn’t disagree more. I can see absolutely no reason for Bush to deserve a chance to prove himself. We’ve been trying the constructive criticism approach for four years, and that approach didn’t work when it came from Congress, it didn’t work when it came from the public, and it didn’t work when it came from the media. Constructive criticism didn’t work when it came from the CIA or the FBI, it didn’t work when it came from his military, and it didn’t even work when it came from within his own cabinet.

Bush’s office and supporters have spent the last four years feeding us disinformation, through a despicably willing mainstream press, using a media machine that’s been honed for decades. They’ve repeatedly lied about tax cuts, the environment, the war, the Patriot Act, handling of Iraqi prisoners, big breaks for big-business, tax cuts for the rich, foreign outsorcing of jobs and record job loss, the worst environmental record in recent memory, non-handling of nuclear proliferation, an abysmal execution of the war in Iraq, a failed economic policy, record budget deficits and more.

It’s hard for me to imagine a President acting with more disdain for truth and science, or more disregard for the wellbeing of the American public. The Bush administration’s total refusal to admit any mistakes or take any blame begs the question: When will these guys be held accountable for their actions?

We have a civic duty to hold these guys accountable. They must be taken to task. How we’re going to make this happen should be the central question on our minds, not what we’re going to do to ‘support the President’, and not giving him a second (or Nth) chance to prove himself worthy of the job. Hello? He’s not worthy of the job!

With any luck, the mainstream news media may now be more sympathetic to criticism of Bush, since the end of his administration is in sight in 2008. But even without their help, we may have the tools at our disposal to bring the truth to light. Are we willing to use them?

We Democrats and Liberals need to debunk the wimp factor. We need to enlist the help of all our senior statesmen, the media — mainstream and otherwise, former candidates, people who have left government in protest or been fired by Bush, whistleblowers in the military, bloggers and campaign volunteers. We need to support truth-finding organizations who will help us to investigate the criminal behavior that this administration has perpetrated on our own people, and on peoples around the world — and I don’t use the word ‘criminal’ lightly.

We must not allow what has happened to our government and to our conntry to continue to happen, either during the next four years, or after.

Let’s get to work.

Be First to Comment

Post a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.