HOME
|
MEA CULPA |
GIVE THE GOP A LANDSLIDE VICTORY |
THE ELEPHANT, THE ROOM, AND THE
PEOPLE
PART II |
THE ELEPHANT, THE ROOM, AND THE PEOPLE
PART I |
MONEY GRUBBING FEMALES, UNITE! |
WE AREN’T ELECTING A HOMECOMING QUEEN |
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN |
THE TOOTSIE ISSUE |
Toddlers 4 President! |
CRYING BABIES AND OTHER PRESSING
MATTERS OF STATE |
Democratic Convention 2016: How It
Might Have Been |
I’D LIKE TO FEEL THE BERN,
ONLY…
|
AN UNFORTUNATE REMEMBRANCE
OF THINGS PAST
|
On Matters of the Lie, the
War, and Judgment |
EGO, POLITICS, AND THE
PRESIDENCY |
On Getting What We Deserve |
HOW JANUARY 2017 WILL LOOK |
Return
to Main Website |
|
|
On Matters of the Lie, the
War, and Judgment
Americans sometimes seem to have short memories. This can be both
good and bad. The good of it means that our citizenry can be a
forgiving people, setting aside past grievances and getting on with
life. The bad of it is that lack of memory can lead our people to an
acceptance of statements, situations, and conditions that might not
reflect the historical truth. For example, years ago the war in
Vietnam sliced the US into opponents and proponents. Anti-war
demonstrations in the street were counterbalanced by flag waving and
by bumper stickers proclaiming “My Country Right or Wrong” and
“America: Love it or Leave It.” Yet twenty years after the war
ended, people seemed to forget how divisive it had been, and as a
result how Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton had behaved during the
time of the war became an enormous issue in his run for the
Presidency. For it was revealed that he had done whatever he could
to avoid going to Vietnam, and what everyone decided to forget or
could not remember was that millions upon millions of young men had
done the very same thing. Then, twelve years after Clinton’s
difficulty concerning Vietnam, what Senator John Kerry did or did
not do on a gun boat there became critical to his campaign. What no
one wanted to mention was that Vietnam consisted of a hugely
unpopular war that cost tens of thousands of lives and gained no one
a single thing. And yet….there it was: How one did or did not behave
during the nation’s most divisive war—excluding the Civil War, of
course—was crucial in a bid for the Presidency.
Today, in the Presidential Election, the wars in the Middle East
seem to be assuming a similar importance in one respect: how Hillary
Clinton voted in the lead-up to one of the wars has become, in the
estimation of Bernie Sanders and others, equivalent to her ability
to make a judgment based upon information given to her. What has
been swept under the carpet in this current election is what led up
to Hillary Clinton’s vote in support of that war. This is what I
call the Lie.
As you probably remember, prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the IAEC
(International Atomic Energy Commission) had sent inspectors into
Iraq to investigate what weaponry was and was not there, and the
IAEC had come up with nothing. As you probably also remember, the
United Nations met to discuss the situation because the US was
declaring that, despite the IAEC’s investigation, Saddam Hussein was
producing and stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction.” In response
to the US allegations, Saddam was declaring that he had no weapons
of mass destruction, although he was admittedly not to be trusted.
And because Saddam was a person not to be trusted, the US had for a
time been photographing Iraq from spy planes and from satellites.
After acquiring a suitable number of photos, the Bush administration
sent the Secretary of State—the greatly admired Colin Powell—to the
UN. He took with him a collection of these aforementioned
photographs. No one knew for certain what the photographs actually
depicted but Colin Powell—who had, of course, been one of the
leaders of George H.W. Bush’s successful 100 Day War to liberate
Kuwait years earlier —said that what was shown in the shadowy
elongated buildings were the storage facilities and the factories in
which one might find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Of course,
to find them was going to require an invasion, which was going to
require a vote in Congress to keep everything on the up and up.
The reason I remember all this fairly well is that I never once
believed there were weapons of mass destruction because from the
first I believed that Vice President Dick Cheney was not only behind
this but also that Vice President Dick Cheney was and is an evil
man. In the cause of amassing a fortune for himself and his cronies,
I believed Dick Cheney would do just about anything. Lie, cheat,
steal, deceive the public, send hundreds of thousands of individuals
to their deaths? No problem. It could all be explained away by
declaring it a search to eliminate those Weapons of Mass
Destruction.
Having Colin Powell declare in front of the UN that he had in his
possession the “proof” of those weapons’ existence was a master
stroke along the lines of “But Brutus says that Caesar was
ambitious….” Colin Powell was a man of honor. As a soldier first and
Secretary of State second, it was inconceivable that he would lie.
It didn’t appear to occur to anyone at the time that Colin Powell
might be lying in the first place without knowing he was lying at
all. No one seemed to consider that he’d been lied to, thus making
him as much a dupe as were the delegates to the UN, most of the
members of Congress, and the vast majority of the American public.
Hillary Clinton cast her vote in support of going to war based upon
this lie. She saw the same photographs that everyone else saw and,
doubtless, she was also given more information than the public had.
There was, according to the Bush administration, a clear and present
danger depicted in those photos. Ignoring the pictures and the
“evidence” they contained would be placing the entire world at risk.
Sitting in my home in Huntington Beach at the time, I found it
extremely easy to say that the entire Bush gang constituted a pack
of liars, knaves, and thieves. No skin off my nose if I was wrong,
after all. But no member of the Senate had that luxury. They voted
based on the “facts” they’d been given. The disastrous war began,
Dick Cheney and Halliburton made a fortune, and the rest is and
continues to be history.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, took the easy route. Knowing from
discussions in Congress which way the vote was going to go, he voted
against the war. From that moment onward, he would be a winner. If
the war turned out to be a disaster, he would be able to say that he
never voted for it in the first place. If the war turned out to be a
rip-roaring success, the fact that he had voted against it would
actually be no big deal since no one would recall that later and it
would be insignificant in his future. For what reasonable person
would ever excoriate someone for refusing to authorize an entire
war, no matter its conclusion? This would only be a problem if
Bernie had led a vigorous opposition to the war, achieving success
in the form of gathering a majority vote against the war….only to
discover by means of a horrific event orchestrated by Iraq that he’d
been entirely wrong.
For months now, Bernie Sanders has been banging on about Hillary
Clinton’s vote on the war. Most recently, he has used this to
declare her “unqualified to be President of the United States.” He
has done this in reaction to what he has openly referred to as her
calling him unqualified. The fact that she did not do this (merely
stating that he “had not done his homework” prior to his disastrous
and revealing interview with the editors of the New York Daily News)
is something that Bernie has neither mentioned nor clarified. He has
also not mentioned Hillary Clinton’s admission that her vote for the
war was a mistake. He has also not mentioned her apology for having
believed the lie she was told—the lie that the entire American
public was told—in advance of voting for the war.
What Democrats are now left with is a decision that we must make
regarding these two candidates and their qualifications to assume
the role of President of the United States. For the Democratic party
it comes down to choosing between the visionary socialist who has so
far not revealed a single plan to bring to fruition any one of his
ideas and the pragmatic democrat who has learned from experience how
difficult it is to change the course of the ship of state. From the
Oval Office, the President cannot wave a magic wand and make things
different. Wishing they were and declaring they ought to be will not
make them so. Having a list of dreams and repeating that list ad
nauseum for months on end does not equate to political acumen. What
is required in a President is knowledge of the law and its
limitations, expertise in team-building, and willingness to
compromise when all signs indicate that compromise is the only route
to getting something done.
I don’t know Senator Bernie Sanders. Despite his speechifying
without specifics and in spite of his extremely disturbing stands
vis vis gun control, he’s probably a decent and well-meaning man.
But nothing he has said since declaring his candidacy has been
enough to convince me that he could manage to get a single thing
accomplished were he elected President. The Presidency is not an
office for dreamers. It is an office for doers who can build the
coalitions necessary to pass legislation that will, over time, bring
about change.
- Elizabeth George
Whidbey Island
Washington State
|
|