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Danny |
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Vice President Dick Cheney sat on a stool in the
middle of a town hall “meeting-in-the-round” last week in Des
Moines, Iowa, wearing his trademarked red-white-and-blue tights and
Superman-style cape, bald pate shining in the klieg lights, with the
doting “little woman” at his side- -no, not Jo March- -his wife,
Lynne, hanging on his every word. Maybe
he couldn’t do The Twist back in 1962, but he had mastered that Walter
Pigeonesque “Dr Morbius” voice of doom.
“A vote for John Kerry is a vote for the terrorists” he
intoned in his holier-than-thou baritone, and reminded us all he could
not be responsible for the results, which, according to all
probabilities, would end up much as had the Belerephon Expedition.
What Cheney actually said, holding a hand mic
like a lounge-lizard crooner, according to the AP, was “It's
absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the
right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is
that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be
devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”
Be afraid. Be very,
very afraid. Vote for us
who keep you safe. He went on to say that if Kerry were elected,
the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that
terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach.
Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists
where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor
terrorists, and was in addition basically very offensive. Okay- -let’s think about this. If Bush is reelected the terrorists won’t strike? Is that right? How could he possibly know this unless he is in league with the terrorists himself. And what is this “pre-9/11 mind-set”?
Does that mean that no matter how loud terrorism experts who work
for our own State and Defense Departments scream that we must prepare for al Qaeda, nothing is done?
Ignore anything done on Clinton’s watch? After a look back at Bush’s first nine
months in office and the parallel stories of select FBI and CIA
personnel, as well as White House staffers themselves who were ignored,
what Alice-In-Wonderland logic is it to assume that President Kerry
would return to a time when Presidents vacationed in Crawford, Texas,
while presidential daily briefing papers were entitled “Osama bin
Laden Determined to Beat the Crap out of the US”?
Isn’t it just the other way around?
If Bush is reelected, the terrorists strike again at will,
because Bush is their best recruiting poster and he has encouraged more
potential terrorists to enlist in Allah’s Army.
Terrorist leadership realizes that we are just as vulnerable as
we were before 9/11. For
all the flag-waving and speeches about how safe we are, we aren’t
really any safer than before 9/11.
Be afraid. Be very
afraid.
We should be working in concert with every
civilized, and some not so civilized, nations on the planet to shut this
down once and for all. But
Bush has so alienated most of those from whom we need help, most of whom
also have their own terrorism problems, it may not be possible without
regime change in Washington. What
if we worked together with other countries?
What a concept. George’s
Folly is one of the all-time stupidest acts. We need the Germans, home of Mohammed Atta and
friends, and the Spanish, home of the Madrid bombing before their
election last year, the French, home of the “Head Scarf” controversy
that got some of their journalists captured in Iraq, and the
Philippines, who lost some truck drivers and pulled out of Iraq, and
Indonesia and Pakistan, both of whom have their own terrorist problems,
and Singapore, India and El Salvador. Also the Italians, who are dealing
with their own Libyan illegal-immigration problem.
Egypt is a possible voice of reason in the Middle East.
Morocco and Turkey have moderate Muslim populations, and on and
on. George Bush has
angered these all and just about anyone else you can think of.
Heck, even the Canadians are against us.
Bush isn’t going to turn this around.
It will just be more of the same.
It only turns around when he’s booted out. John Kerry has already been to European,
African, and oh yes, South East Asian countries in the course of his
lifetime. He says he will
put the pieces back together that Bush has split asunder.
We’ve got to start somewhere.
More of the same isn’t working. The other day North Korea exploded something
that seemed from a distance that it could be nuclear, given the size of
the explosion and the two-mile wide mushroom cloud seen even from
satellites. Kim Jung Il has
long been known to be foolish and egotistical enough to do this, as has
his Minister of Defense, his cousin, Mental-Lee Il. Senator John Kerry on Sunday accused Bush of
being a Girlie-Man by letting "a nuclear nightmare" develop
with North Korea by refusing to deal with North Korea when Bush first
came to office. Mr Kerry
insisted that the fact that North Korea was threatening such an action
was a sign of failed diplomacy. "I think that this is one of the
most serious failures and challenges to the security of the United
States, and it really underscores the way in which George Bush talks the
game but doesn't deliver," he said. Bush mouthpieces appeared on the Sunday chat
shows to rebut Kerry, but it’s a fact that North Korea makes nothing
except weapons and feeds its starving population by selling to whoever
wants them- -rockets, missiles, big bombs, land mines- -step right up-
-although watch your step with the land mines- -anything that explodes. As usual, the Bush spokesmen try to compare
Kerry’s policies with what they call the “failed policies” of the
Clinton administration. They
don’t tell you that Reagan never retaliated for the Beirut Marine
barracks bombing, or the Pan Am flight blown up over Lockerbie, or Bush
the First’s failed conclusion to Gulf War I.
If Reagan had blown those early terrorists to smithereens, the
present ones wouldn’t be so emboldened.
Instead he traded arms for hostages and then said he didn’t.
And he let them eat cake--with a file in it, and inscribed a
Bible to the Ayatollah- -I’m sure just what he wanted. We have one chance to get it right and G W
Dunce and his Porky Sidekick are not it. You think about it some more. I’m bushed. |
