- Americans should realize that if they vote for President
Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war ñ
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal
of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.
-
- I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush
is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in
his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the
world of any president in my memory.
-
- It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences
like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans
should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more
fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint
press conference recently.
-
- John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who
knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex
than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers.
It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence
and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election
efforts.
-
- But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often,
when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect
what never was and never will be.
-
- People who think of themselves as conservatives will
really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting
for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well,
he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice.
-
- It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending,
to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution
and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American
jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter,
and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is
the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century.
His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.
-
- It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted
a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you
found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that
either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an
enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?
-
- This election really is important, not only for domestic
reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster.
He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race.
America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere
in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration.
Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea
and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.
-
- I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with
Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up
the world and us with it. Go to Kerry's Web site and read some of the magazine
profiles on him. You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than
the GOP attack dogs would have you believe.
-
- Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays
hockey, windsurfs, ride motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and
speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has
killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect on a man
and dispels all illusions about war.
-
- - Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist
for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics
-
- © 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese74.html
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