Iraq

George W. Bush: His Worst Moment Was Failure To Privatize Social Security? :(

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Former President George W. Bush is about to publish his memoirs, and he claims that his worst moment and greatest failure was his inability to privatize Social Security in 2005!

Can one imagine that? This is Bush’s worst moment? Is Bush delusional? This, if it had happened, would have been a true disaster, particularly considering the stock market collapse in 2007-2008!

But somehow, Bush has conveniently forgotten his real moments of failure:

1. Choosing Dick Cheney to be Vice President for eight years.
2. Failing to be aware through intelligence that was available of the impending attack of September 11, 2001.
3. Choosing to avoid a full commitment to the war in Afghanistan, including the seizure of Osama Bin Laden.
4. Engaging in an unnecessary war in Iraq based on manufactured evidence, and in so doing, strengthening the influence of Iran.
5. Having a slow and inadequate reaction to Hurricane Katrina, leading to the flooding of New Orleans and large areas of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
6. Violating civil liberties at home, and engaging in war crimes in Iraq, and justifying all of it.
7. Causing through lack of regulation the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and nearly causing the total melting down of the American economy, its effects to be on us for the next decade at the least, and burdening President Barack Obama with trying to resolve the mess that Bush left him!

This memoir is just further proof of the total disaster that George W. Bush was in office, and only adds to the feeling that this country was pushed into mediocrity by the corrupt vote count and the intervention of the Supreme Court in the 2000 Presidential election, which denied us Vice President Al Gore as our President!

Imagine This Scenario: The McCain-Palin Administration After 20 Months! :(

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Let’s just imagine that Senator John McCain had become the President and Governor Sarah Palin had become the Vice President in January 2009!

How would a McCain Presidency have been different than an Obama Presidency?

1. There would have been no bailout of the banking industry, and the financial collapse ensuing would have likely created unemployment and foreclosures twice the rate that they have been!
2. The domestic auto industry would have disappeared completely, and with it, hundreds of thousands of jobs in allied industries, as well as the auto workers!
3. There would have been no economic stimulus, and America would be in Great Depression Number Two, rather than a severe recession!
4. Health care reform would have not occurred, and health care rates would be much worse than they are, and millions more Americans would be denied health care, because of loss of jobs and homes!
5. The Great Depression Number Two would have created more instability in the world economy than this recession has caused!
6. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, police officers, fire fighters, librarians, and other local and state workers would have been dismissed, creating a breakdown of state and local governments on a scale unimaginable!
7. When the BP Oil Spill occurred, the McCain Administration would not have pushed BP to do anything to provide aid to the victims or pay for the cleanup!
8. There would have been no financial reform legislation, no credit card legislation, no student loan legislation, no action on the environment, no movement on gay rights in any form, a sharper crackdown on illegal immigration, and a continuation of tax cuts to the wealthy despite its tremendous burden on the national debt!
9. McCain would have chosen two strong conservatives to the Supreme Court!
10. A lot of Bush II appointees would have ended up working for McCain, and it is likely that former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, one of the major architects of the home mortgage crisis, would have been Secretary of the Treasury!
11. It is likely that neoconservatives who brought us into Iraq would be in power, and the war in Iraq would be further escalated, at a cost of American lives and treasure!
12. The war in Afghanistan would be further escalated beyond what President Obama has promoted!
13. It is likely that McCain would have been building up toward a war against Iran, and possibly North Korea, at the same time, again part of the neoconservative influence!
14. America’s relationship with the world would be much more antagonistic, similar to Bush II, and tension with the Muslim world would be far worse! We would be less safe from the threat of terrorism!
15. Finally, Sarah Palin would be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, and no one could sleep at night without worrying about John McCain’s health! 🙁

It is certain, upon further reflection, that one could come up with other ideas as to how McCain would have influenced the history of the past 20 months, but the list above is more than enough to say to any reasonable person: Thank God Barack Obama is President of the United States!

The Continuing Insanity Of War In Iraq And Afghanistan! Enough Sacrifice Of Our Courageous Military!

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President Obama has proclaimed that our involvement in Iraq is ending, and that only 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq after the end of August. Also, the remaining troops will be out by the end of 2011, except for those to provide security for our embassy.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is in basic paralysis, and the idea that violence has ended and the country is stable seems a mirage!

Meanwhile, Obama has escalated our war in Afghanistan, and the number of casualties of our troops has reached an all time high, with no prospect of success anytime soon, if ever!

We have lost more than 5,000 men and women in the two nations, and close to 40,000 wounded, many severely! Many soldiers have served multiple tours, averaging at four to six, but one having TEN tours of duty over the past nine years!

Meanwhile, suicides have escalated, with 160 in the year ending September 30, 2009, and 32 suicides this past June, an all time record!

Physical and psychological wounds have been horrific, and the response to our veterans’ needs has been wanting, to say the least!

Afghanistan and Iraq have become the longest wars in US history, but neither war can be said to have been won or even being winnable in the future! This is not fighting Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, or even the Soviet Union of old!

These two wars have been conducted in a horrific manner by both the Bush and Obama Administrations, and trillions of dollars have been squandered, with 99 percent of Americans not suffering at all from the wars, in the sense of being taxed for them. or even really paying attention and caring about the valor of our soldiers! The concept of shared sacrifice we had in World War II is lacking in this era!

Instead of wasting billions on war every month, we need to bring the troops home immediately and deal with the domestic crises in our nation, the worst since the 1930s! Rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, and spend necessary defense money on espionage and technology needed to fight terrorism!

We must not sacrifice our young men and women any longer! The time for withdrawal is NOW! 🙁

Joe Biden’s Growing Influence Evident In Obama Administration!

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The growing role and influence of Vice President Joe Biden is becoming evident.

The replacement of General Stanley McChrystal by General David Petraeus was due a lot to the disrespect that McChrystal demonstrated toward Biden in his published comments in Rolling Stone Magazine!

Biden is the skeptic on the inside of the Obama Administration who has the expertise and experience that Obama does not have, and Obama greatly respects him!

But Biden is also the loyal supporter of the President in public, and he goes behind the scenes on many undisclosed missions to help promote the foreign policy of the the administration!

An example of his influence is his surprise trip to Iraq , to celebrate the Fourth of July, and to work with the Iraqi government on moving ahead on setting up a stable government and constitution. He went with his wife, which was a first for a top government leader, and he informed the Iraqi government that compromise was necessary, just as with the Constitutional Convention and the Founding Fathers in 1787!

Biden is also the link between the administration and the US Senate, as Biden spent more years in that body than all but a small number historically! He may not be able to vote in the Senate anymore, but as its constitutional officer, Biden still wields influence over his former colleagues!

The Truth About Pork Projects And Foreign Aid: Not The Villains Creating Our Budget Deficits!

Ronald 1 Comment

We see over the years a constant attack on foreign aid and pork projects (earmarks) as the major problems preventing a balancing of the federal budget and causing our tremendous deficits.

This is as far from the truth as one can get, as President Obama indicated in a Town Hall meeting on Tuesday. An investigation proves that only one percent of the budget is foreign aid, and earmarks, despite all the complaints and publicity about them, only add up to three tenths of one percent of the federal budget!

Demagogues on the right love to complain about earmarks, and yet it is both parties and all politicians who come to Washington with the intention of accomplishing improvements for their districts and states. But even with that reality, it is less than one third of one percent of the budget, so neither that nor foreign aid to support stability in foreign nations come anywhere near solving or dealing with our national budgetary crisis.

However, fighting two wars at once, neither one of which really makes for national security and kills off so many young men and women, is the real villain in our budgetary crisis! Will we ever learn that what we are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq is not accomplishing anything, except to antagonize that part of the world and bleed us dry, both in manpower and in finances? 🙁

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ View Of His “Boss”, Barack Obama

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a carryover from the Bush Administration and a Republican who served in the CIA under six Presidents, has come out in fulsome praise of his “boss”, President Obama.

He said he enjoyed working for him, saw him as very analytical, and desirous of learning everything he can about a situation or issue. Basically, he is saying that Obama is very smart, a nice change from the previous President.

While he did not say this, it is obvious that Obama is very different from his predecessor, George W. Bush. Gates did say that Afghanistan had been a “holding action” under Bush because of the war in Iraq.

It should be pointed out that Gates was not the Secretary of Defense when decisions were made about both Afghanistan and Iraq. Had he been there, instead of Donald Rumsfeld, maybe the history of the involvement in both countries would have been different, and we would not now be faced with the crisis we face, not only in Afghanistan, but the growing threat of Iran, which was only emboldened by US involvement in Iraq.

It is ironic that right wing critics attack Obama, but refuse to recognize that it was Bush who put us in the mess we are now in, which Obama needs to extricate us from as soon as possible!