Bush to America: Go To Hell

George Bush refuses to accept the will of the American people. Despite polls showing overwhelming support for a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq, the President and his embattled, scandal-scarred inner circle continue to defend the course of their grotesquely mismanaged war by implying that their fellow citizens are traitors.

Every day, whether from the floor of Congress or TV talk-shows, the few remaining Bush dead-enders continue to question the patriotism of the Democrat’s plan, including anyone who supports it, labeling the entire enterprise “defeatist” while claiming it impossible to support both the troops and withdrawal. But the divisiveness of this tactic smacks of McCarthyism and its logic seems blatantly disingenuous.

It’s a plain fact that soldiers who disagree with our mission in Iraq—or aren’t even sure what the real mission is nowadays—feel supported knowing that their fellow citizens are trying to bring them home. In the view of many, a timetable for withdrawal is supporting our troops.

And calling withdrawal “defeatist” ignores another sad fact. We have already been defeated. Not just by bombs or terrorists, but by the historic blunders of our own civilian leadership. By ignoring the cultural realities of Iraq and invading without a robust plan to secure the country, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others all but ensured the outcome we now face. Their ignorance and incompetence let the Chaos Genie out of the bottle, and an extra twenty thousand troops won’t come close to putting it back.

We may never know what it would take to restore order in Baghdad because we have never been able to maintain order in Baghdad. If securing Baghdad has been the objective, we have been failing almost from day one. And Americans understand this. They understand that asking a few hundred thousand soldiers who don’t speak the language and don’t understand the customs or culture to police an entire nation is a recipe for failure, especially when that “nation” is actually an artificial fusion of three radically different tribal communities with long-standing hatreds and grievances.

A new zenith of Presidential arrogance and defiance will occur this evening when George Bush vetoes broadly supported legislation that ties further Iraq war funding to a phased withdrawal. His administration’s bruised but stubborn ego will continue to cling to a failed policy, even if he has to tell the vast majority of voting citizens, including our soldiers, to go to hell.

- JT Compton

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Reject Guns

Want to get death threats?? It’s easy. Write something negative about guns or gun ownership.

Several years ago I urged individuals to pledge not to own guns and received several angry emails including a threatening note from a gun fan calling himself—surprise, surprise—Wotanbornprince.

But my attitude toward guns hasn’t changed and this week’s massacre at Virginia Tech only confirms what many Americans already understand.

Guns are an abomination.

So said Richard Nixon in a rare flash of clearheaded brilliance. The debate about whether guns kill or people kill is an irrelevant dodge. Guns are, quite fundamentally, instruments of death. They fascinate the powerless. They attract the weak. They seduce the frightened.

Guns are a necessary evil, but necessary only insofar as they are critical to the conduct of the military and law enforcement.

It’s no coincidence that the more insecure, fearful and paranoid, the more likely a person is to own a gun. We often see images of children and teens wielding guns, playing soldier or gangster—because they often feel afraid and powerless in the face of a complex and intimidating adult world.

But it’s safe to say that a secure, emotionally mature person lacking the need to kill animals has no reason to own a tool designed solely to produce death. Indeed, such a person would understand that the presence of a gun in their household increases the risk of death by gun accident. The number of people who successfully defend themselves with a gun from a gun-wielding attacker is insignificant compared to the thirty-thousand or so gun-related deaths each year in America.

Forgetting that the Constitution only addresses gun ownership within the context of a well regulated state militia (which is why supremacist hate groups call themselves militias—to ensure they can safely own guns), the laws of any given state still have no bearing on the notion that guns are an abomination. After all, laws fail to restrict plenty of things that are wrong. It’s not against the law to hate, but that doesn’t make hating right.

Since virtually none of our citizens need to hunt to stay alive, why do people still hunt? In the vast majority of cases, people hunt to satisfy an urge to feel powerful, to feel a certain rush and vitality lacking in their lives. How sad. And how unsportsmanlike. It’s virtually impossible to respect hunting with a gun. Any child can pull a trigger and kill something. And while it may take skill to track an animal and aim well, killing it with a gun is antithetical to sport—it’s no contest, just a one-sided slaughter.

So the question begs itself: How many gun hunters are emotional children trying to feel big and macho by killing things? More broadly, how many gun owners are compensating for a lack of something?

Which brings me back to death threats. When you take toys away from children, they often go into a rage and throw a tantrum. And likewise, gun people are often so insecure that any threat to their unfettered access to guns fills them with rage and fear. They lack the maturity, intelligence or character to navigate the perils of life without deadly weapons nearby.

In the hate mail I received, gun nuts consistently portrayed themselves as strong and tough versus the weak, “limp-wristed” liberals opposing their guns. How ironic that gun fanatics who strive to project a macho façade are actually fueled by fear and inadequacy. By using slurs like “limp-wristed” and worse, they tell the world a lot about themselves.

And by owning a gun, they tell the world they feel scared, insecure and impotent. By owning a gun, they demonstrate immaturity, bad judgment and/or malignant priorities.

Regardless of what our laws allow, in modern-day America there is simply no good reason to own a gun. Though gun ownership will likely remain legal, until more citizens take a personal stand and reject gun ownership, until more of us reject the childish glorification of gun culture, we will continue to live in a nation plagued by gun violence.

- JT Compton

Bush Screwed Us Again

Just when you thought the Bush Administration couldn’t do any worse, just when their approval rating hit an all-time low, just when it made the most sense for them to reach out to Congress and mend fences, what does the President do? He uses a recess appointment to make a Swift Boat supporter Ambassador to Belgium. In other words, he told Congress to go to hell.

And thus, he told the American people to go to hell.

When Sam Fox appeared at a confirmation hearing before Congress, it became clear that he was either being dishonest or had remarkably poor judgment when it came to his rationale for giving $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a smear group that spread malicious lies about Presidential hopeful John Kerry.

Fox’s performance at the hearing was so dreadful and embarrassing that the Bush Administration withdrew his candidacy. A few days later, when Congress broke for Easter recess, Bush appointed Fox to the ambassadorship using a recess appointment, meant to allow the President to appoint crucial operatives under emergency circumstances when Congress was unable to convene.

But there was no emergency. Bush used the recess appointment to blatantly thwart the will of Congress, and by direct extension, the will of the people.

It marked another low point in the worst Presidency in our nation’s history. Bush is so isolated, so insecure and yet so arrogant, he can only appoint his own cronies, no matter how inept or incompetent, to ensure they don’t turn against him down the road. Because when your presidency is wildly incompetent and operates on lies, secrecy, deception and dirty tricks, you run the risk that minions will become disgusted with your so-called “values” and go public.

It has happened many times to the Bush regime, and each time the turncoat is deemed a lunatic or an opportunist by Karl Rove and other Bush spinmeisters. But the public is no longer fooled by their accusations and stale rhetoric.

And in this case, we all have reason to be outraged. Our government, yet again, is being staffed by a person who paid big money to get Dubya elected—often through unethical means—but who offers little to his post. “Heck of a job, Brownie.”

How much damage can this loser of a President and his pompous, bumbling team do to our nation before their disastrous term ends? Sadly, more will be revealed.

I’m on vacation next week. Happy Easter…

- JT Compton

Unwise And Inappropriate

Responding today to Congressional legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney said "Democrats think they can impose unwise and inappropriate restrictions on our commanders."

It was a moment of breathtaking, almost laughable hypocrisy.

No elected leader in recent memory has been so utterly wrong on any number of judgments and predictions than Cheney, and no administration in the past hundred years has made more "unwise and inappropriate" decisions than the Bush team.

But don’t take my word for it. Matthew Dowd, a former advisor to President Bush, ripped his ex-boss in an interview this weekend in the New York Times. Dowd left the White House disillusioned by the handling of the Iraq war and claimed Bush was increasingly out of touch with average Americans.

But recent examples of glaring incompetence extend far beyond Bush and Company. Senator McCain visited Baghdad hoping to confirm troop surge "progress", but was instead confronted by hostile journalists wondering if he had been living in an alternate universe. Despite whines and moans from conservative pundits, the journalistic disdain was justified and well within the bounds of a critical media. Past heroism doesn’t absolve McCain from painting a picture of Iraq that amounts to a lie. Though the weekly civilian death toll falling from 100 to 99 might be technically termed "progress" it amounts to little more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. Of note, McCain never took a lone, leisurely stroll outside the green zone. He would likely have been killed.

And let’s not overlook the smack-down given by the Supreme Court today to the EPA. By failing to enforce the law under the Clean Air Act, said the Supremes, the EPA failed to do its job. Why would the EPA drag its feet on something as important as enforcing environmental law? To help the energy industry, which gave mountains of money to the candidacy of George Bush. His cronies at the agency were the foxes in the proverbial hen-house, helping the EPA to sprinkle glaring incompetence with sleaze.

The media isn’t immune from blunders, either. They’ve been reporting all day about the implications of huge first-quarter money raised by the 2008 Presidential candidates. But they have entirely missed a major point: the Democrats out-raised the Republicans. In past years the GOP had a substantial fundraising edge thanks to ties with big business. But that paradigm has changed, in part because of the ineptitude of the Bush regime and in part because of the Internet’s ability to reach grass-roots activists who were relegated to the sidelines in years past.

Finally, we were reminded this week of the most audacious of the glaringly incompetent—Middle Eastern Governments. The seizure of 15 British sailors by Iran underscores the need by theocrats to obscure their own incompetence by demonizing the West, in this ridiculous case by forcing prisoners to parrot incriminating statements to reporters. Without an enemy to blame for their problems, states like Iran, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would have to explain to citizens why their unemployment rates are obscenely high, why their economies have been left behind by the rest of the world, why their societies are hopelessly stratified and filled with inequality, and why their cultures remain brutally tribal, stale and myopic.

If only our own leaders understood this dynamic enough to avoid playing into it. But alas, elite-sissy-turned-wannabe-tough-guys like Dick Cheney are convinced that bullying and threats succeed while diplomacy fails. We’ll still be paying for this misjudgment generations from now.

- JT Compton