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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Gary Locke....A#1 Baboon!
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 01-31-2003 02:23 PM
We in New York State have problems with our governor as well
But I heard Gov. Locke's rebuttle speech, and I thought he came across very well on a personal level, especially when he spoke of having attained the office of Governor only a mile from the pittifully small room his grandfather lived in, only a mile away,when he arrived as a penniless laborer from China.
On a political, or international level, I think he was rather restrained, witholding opposition fire, perhaps because of the occassion, following a constitutionally mandated State of the Union speech.
Here is an editorial written by a British writer, that contains many ideas that COULD have been included:
[LINK button removed ?] [I'd prefer to link rather than paste.]
The United States of America has gone mad
by John le CarrÈ (spy novelist for the non-readers in the group)
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is
the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay
of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for
in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have
made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The
combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once
more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square
is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he
who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be
trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the
first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich;
its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of
unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to
be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN
resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are
riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told.
The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360
billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the
pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think
they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At
what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At
what cost because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane
people in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from
bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations
conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two
Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade
Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being
browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated
neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with
the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see
Saddam's downfall just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not
under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is
perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock
on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed
America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel
to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to
mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the
enemy, and d) a terrorist.
God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are
equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers one
President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida
and the ex-Governor of Texas.
Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto
Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the
Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the
Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive
with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so
on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God's work.
In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic
Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to
kill him. The CIA believes that somebody was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr's cry:
"That man tried to kill my Daddy." But it is still not personal, this war. It
ís still necessary. It is still God's work. It is still about bringing freedom
and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.
To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and
Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and
God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won't tell us is the
truth about why we're going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of
Evil but oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on
the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him
get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't.
If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart's
content. Other leaders do it every day. Think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan,
think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none
to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, if he's still
got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America
could hurl at him at five minutes' notice. What is at stake is not an
imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of
US growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military
power to all of us, to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North
Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home,
and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair's part in all this is
that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can't.
Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the
same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can't get out.
It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself
against the ropes, neither of Britain's opposition leaders can lay a
glove on him. But that is Britain's tragedy, as it is America's: as our
Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and
looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that,
at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will
force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the
world's greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant's head
to wave at the boys?
Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us
into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there,
could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated
in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will
have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to
come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great
domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of
the ethical foreign policy.
There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN
approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.
I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s
sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are
shared by all sane men. What he can't explain is how he reconciles a global
assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war,
if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship,
to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public
hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the
altar.
"But will we win, Daddy?"
"Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient and may
decide not to vote for him."
"But will people be killed, Daddy?"
"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
"Can I watch it on television?"
"Only if Mr Bush says you can."
"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do
anything horrid any more?"
"Hush child, and go to sleep."
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local
supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.
[NOTE: I think Mr le Carre fails to appreciate that Israel, the ONLY democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its survival
---Gerard]
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