last days of the republic

too bad

2004.Jun.29 16:59

It really pisses me off when people tell me that I'm just swallowing the mainstream liberal line. Let me tell you, as a guy who voted for Nader in 2000 (and you can't blame me for what happened in that debacle because my state went decisively to the Democrats anyway, and all I wanted to do was get the Green Party's 3% so that they could get some federal matching funds in 2004 and make things a little interesting), I'm not your average hippie, pot-smoking liberal.

Conservatives like to play off this backlash against the neocons as being based on some irrational hatred of George W Bush. This is presumptious and is quite revealing how narrow-minded these people are.

I've got plenty of rational reasons to hate George W Bush.

Fact of the matter is that W is actively screwing people I care about and people whom I identify with. As a person-of-color working in service of minority, poor populations, many of the policies that W and his Republican cronies have enacted have made my job harder and have made the lives of the people I serve harder.

Consider that my family is not in the top tier of income earned. This means that we are more sensitive to the rise and fall of the economy, and while tax cuts are nice, they're pretty useless when you aren't paying taxes anyways, and even more useless if you haven't got a job. The $400 we got from the tax cut basically helped out for like a week.

And lest you believe that W has nothing to do with how the economy is tanking, just consider that a lot of the business we are losing is due to the fact that a lot of people in the world either hate us right now or feel that doing business with Americans is highly risky.

Those job numbers? Cooked up bullshit. Ask any of my friends who are desperately trying to go back to school because they can't find a job that doesn't involve flipping hamburgers, despite being perfectly intelligent people with bachelor degrees from pretty good universities. People who have quit looking for a job aren't counted in those unemployment counts. If you're a Republican with a nice, secure job with benefits and you're trying to tell us that we're just lazy and need to get motivated, well, in the immortal words of good ol' Dick Cheney, you can go fuck yourself. I'd like to see you on the pavement, hustling after those shady leads, trying to figure out where next month's rent is coming from.

And it's interesting how a lot of those guys who got killed in Iraq have Hispanic or Middle Eastern last names. Still, it's no surprise. I think most people-of-color recognize just exactly who gets shot first when there's a war on. Note that it is usually not rich, white people.

Am I really safer these days, now that W decided to poke the hornet's nest with a stick? The recruitment rate for Al Qaeda is probably at an all-time high. Most Iraqis would have probably shunned bin Laden, but now that Abu Ghraib has come up, we are doing a lot of Al Qaeda's recruitment work. (Although, what's new, considering that Reagan helped train these guys!)

And you know what, if another September 11-like event happened tomorrow, W's administration ought to take the blame. For not figuring out a system to protect us since two-years ago. For weakening our intelligence agencies by having them track down false leads (like the Niger-Iraqi yellowcake connection) and outing undercover agents (like Valerie Plame). For not listening to our intelligence agencies when they're shouting at the top of their lungs with specific details about what's going to go down. The whole point of the government is to protect its people, and if another September 11-like event occurs, W will have clearly failed.

So, again, there are plenty of rational reasons to hate W, and plenty of rational reasons for wanting a regime change now, despite the indubitable increased instability of the world these days. We shouldn't be stupid and just let the useless rock known as the Republican Party drag us down into the abyss of "staying the course."

If we're going to fight theocratic, oppressive regimes, we need to start at home. We need to restore the Constitution (which the Supreme Court is finally attempting to uphold) and we need to reestablish the checks and balances. The President is not a King, and when he lets us down, he needs to go, plain and simple. The government works for us, otherwise, they're out of there. And remember that our government was founded by men who preferred freedom over security.

If we are going to fight the War on Terror, we need to go into it as a free people, in the spirit of our Constitution. We really need to remember the Cold War, and how (regardless of reality) Reagan played up the idea that freedom is stronger than oppression. We must lead by example, show our enemies that we are seriously committed to a better, freer world. This means upholding our Constitution and respecting civil liberties. Anything short of this is surrendering to the terrorists.