Second, just so we all know where I stand, I have voted Conservative my whole life here in Canada so I can't be called a closet pinko or left leaning socialist by any stretch of the imagination!
But, what "Dub ya," Dick and the rest of the "good 'ole boys" have done to the United States of America is not only the greatest disaster to befall the country in decades, but is also way past the area of incompetence, and smack dab in the "criminal" sphere.
I would go so far as to say that some of their actions fall into the "treasonous" category.
During the eight years they ran things, they broke just about every law on the books, ran roughshod over friends and allies alike, started wars under false pretences, drove pork barrel politics to new heights, allowed corruption to creep into government from the very top to the lowly bottom, and showed a total disregard for the American people that will be talked about in history books for centuries to come!
Think I'm kidding?
Let's take a look at some stuff they did before we get into what's going on now!
The "Perspective " research department did a bit of snooping around and this is what we came up with for starters!
-Making a case for war which ignored intelligence that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
-Deriding "nation-building" during the 2000 debates, then engaging American troops in one of the most explicit instances of nation building in American history.
-Predicting Iraq would pay for its own reconstruction. Wildly underestimating the cost of the war.
-Announcing that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, below a "Mission Accomplished" banner – more U.S. soldiers have died in combat since Bush's announcement than before it.
-Awarding a multi-billion dollar contract to Halliburton in Iraq, which then repeatedly overcharged the government and served troops dirty food. (And of course we all know that the people at Haliburton are in bed with Georgie and his buddies don't we!)
-Having no real plan for the occupation of Iraq.
- Diverting $700 million into Iraq invasion planning without informing Congress.
-Thinking al Qaeda could not attack without state sponsors, and ignoring evidence of a growing threat unassociated with "rogue states" like Iraq or North Korea. Failing to pay more attention to an August 6, 2001 PDB entitled "Bin laden Determined to Attack in U.S." and then repeatedly ignoring warnings of terrorist's plans to use aircraft before 9/11. Declared a "War on Terror" and yet cut an FBI request for counter terrorism funds by two-thirds after 9/11. Not committing US ground troops to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, when he was cornered in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in November, 2001.
-Allowing opium production in Afghanistan to resume on a massive scale after the ouster of the Taliban.
-Saying: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories and trusting intelligence gathered by Vice President Cheney's and Secretary Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans."
-Spending $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons in 2007 to develop new nuclear weapons, 50% more in real dollars than the average during the cold war – while shortchanging the troops on body armor.
-Ignoring the importance of the Middle East peace process, which has deteriorated with little oversight or strategy evident in the region.
-Failing to develop a specific plan for dealing with North Korea.
-Constantly breaking International agreements on Free Trade. Instituting steel tariffs deemed illegal by the World Trade Organization – Bush repealed them 20-months later when the European Union pledged to impose retaliatory sanctions on up to $2.2 billion in exports from the United States. In May 2002, the United States imposed duties of 27 per cent on Canadian softwood lumber, arguing that Canada unfairly subsidized producers of spruce, pine and fir lumber. After repeatedly having the WTO rule against them, Canada's protracted dispute with the U.S. finally ended in April 2006 with an agreement that would require the U.S. to return about 80 per cent of the more than $5 billion in duties it had collected on lumber imports. The deal was signed in July 2006
-Promoting economic policies that failed to create new jobs.
-Running up a foreign deficit of "such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy." (We're seeing it now!) Issuing inaccurate budget forecasts accompanying proposals to reduce the deficit, omitting the continued costs of Iraq, Afghanistan and elements of Homeland Security. -Passing tax cuts weighted heavily to help the wealthy while falsely claiming "people in the 10 percent bracket" were benefiting most. and then passing successive tax cuts largely responsible for turning a projected surplus of $5 trillion into a projected deficit of $4.3 trillion. (AND THIS WAS BEFORE THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN, KIDS!)
-Under-funding the Title I Program, specifically targeted for disadvantaged kids, by $7.2 billion. then Freezing Teacher Quality State Grants, cutting off training opportunities for about 30,000 teachers, and leaving 92,000 less teachers trained than the president called for in his own No Child Left Behind bill.
- Abandoning the Kyoto Treaty without offering an alternative for reducing greenhouse effect. Counting on a voluntary program to reduce emissions of harmful gasses — so far only a tiny fraction of American companies have signed up. Gutting clean air standards for aging power plants. Weakening energy efficiency standards. relaxing dumping standards for mountaintop mining, and opening the Florida Everglades and Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest to mining. Lifting protection for more than 200 million acres of public land. Limiting public challenges to logging projects and increased logging in protected areas, including Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Weakening environmental standards for snowmobiles and other off-road vehicles while pushing for exemptions for air pollution proposals for five categories of industrial facilities. Opposing legislation that would require greater fuel efficiency for passenger cars. Reducing inspections, penalties for violations, and prosecution of environmental crimes. and drilling for oil where it should never be done!
-CUT FUNDING FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH ON PURELY RIGHT WING RELIGIOUS GROUNDS, THEREBY SLOWING DOWN PROGRESS IN ONE OF THE MOST PROMISING FIELDS OF MEDICINE SINCE THE INVENTION OF ANTIBIOTICS, and then falsely claiming the restrictions on stem cell research would not hamper medical progress. (Thank God Obama has already reversed that!)
- Cutting grants to state and local governments in FY 2005, forcing states to make massive cuts in job training, education, housing and environment.
AND FINALLY, DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT FREDDIE MAC, FANNIE MAY, AIG, THE BANKING INDUSTRY AND THE MARKETS, WHEN WARNING SIGNS WERE EVERYWHERE. THEREBY STARTING THE WORLD WIDE ECONOMIC DEPRESSION WE ARE NOW IN!
Now kids, that was a partial list of what these guys have done to your country.
BUT THE FAT LADY AIN'T SUNG YET BUNKY, NO SIR!
Less than two months into Obama's presidency, Republicans and their conservative supporters have unsheathed a new weapon in their battle against the Democrats.
They are routinely referring to the global economic downturn as the "Obama recession" while frequently accusing him of being a socialist in his efforts to jump-start the nation's economy.
As we hear from Lee-Anne Goodman of the Canadian Press, it's an epithet that has raised the hackles of the president himself.
In an interview last week with the New York Times, Obama was asked if he's a socialist. An apparently incredulous president initially laughed the question off, then called the reporters back after the interview was over."With the government's own statistics showing the economy lurching deeper into crisis by the week, the question isn't whether Obama is too radical, but not radical enough."
"It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question," Obama told the Times.
"I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn't under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks ... we've actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles, and some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can't say the same."
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, one of the few Republicans in Obama's cabinet, lashed out at the accusations in an interview with the Huffington Post this week.
If anyone's to blame for the current recession, LaHood said, it's the previous occupant of the White House, George W. Bush.
"This is not an Obama recession," LaHood said. "He inherited all of this. He inherited a US$1 trillion dollar debt. He inherited the recession. He inherited the lousy stock market. All of this was inherited."
In fact, said LaHood, the president has been hard at work trying to repair the damage done by his Republican predecessors whose refusal to regulate the country's financial institutions, in particular, contributed mightily to the recession.
"The guy has been in office a little over a month and what he has tried to do is listen to every economist he could listen to. And he put in place some opportunities to get people to work quickly through the transportation bill portion of it, to help the banks, and to help the real estate industry. And it is going to take time."
Nonetheless, Republicans are showing no signs of letting up, taking to the airwaves to press their case that Obama is leading the country down a dangerously socialist path of big government control.
Mike Pence, a Republican congressman from Indiana, had this to say this week about Obama's budget: "You look what he has in mind for health care, you look at what he has in mind in terms of an enormous increase in taxes on virtually every American, energy taxes on every homeowner and renter, a micro-management of our economy in so many different ways."
"As much as the president might bristle about the term ... it's really hard to argue that this isn't a fundamental transformation of our economy to look more like European-style socialism," Pence concluded.
If so, it's a brand of socialism Americans are behind.
Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks.
Even the socialists are scoffing at the suggestion that Obama's a socialist.
"Expanding welfare? Only a traitorous Red could be in favour of such a measure as unemployment soars to its highest level since 1982," reads a sarcastic editorial in the Socialist Worker published Wednesday.
"A government-led expansion of health care? Every patriotic American knows that if 50 million people in the U.S. lack health insurance, it's because they don't appreciate how the free-market system works."
Obama, in fact, is in danger of not going far enough to pull the economy out of its freefall, the publication argued.
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Allan; Would that color be "green with envy," "red with rage," "yellow for cowards," "purple for holding their breath during temper tantrums," or "Blue with depression!"
James C.
-Does it take the Canadian press to inspire good journalism? Perhaps so. That was an excellent and concise review of the recent political atmosphere. Now if the economy can get back on track, they won't blame the present administration. The plain truth is, besides the intervention of infrastructure projects and changes in the regulatory laws, the economy is influenced far more by the capital in the economy and the spending, saving and investment habits of the American people.
Thanks for your post.
Dan C
-Being a Canadian I find that the Canuk press seems to be less biased than the American press when dealing with political issues in the States!
Allan Janssen,
-Allan-- Many things you say are relevant, well-done and important. But you left out the number of innocent men and women in Iraq--combatants and non-combatants, not to mention our Troops--who were killed and are being killed....
John B.
-With regard to Obama, the Right, public perception, and the Meda/Press. The Right's only current weapon is its usual bombastic and sometimes-salacious rhetoric. The Right has never, and will likely never, let go of their obsession, with McCarthyism, from the 50s. Therefore, their distortion is carried over to Obama and his governmental-intervention policies, with a "new spin": They know that it alienates too many people to paste the stigma of Communism on Obama's shoulders--so they compromise and atttack him for being a, "Socialist." And their salvos fly in the face of the prior President's domestic and international policies --which were, in some distinct ways, so interventionist that these policies carried the raw concept of incredulity to even loftier heights!
Why doesn't Canada simply punish the US, by stopping its Oil Imports? [Ha. Ha.]
Brett C
-Brett I would bet good money that most Americans don't know that Canada is by far the U.S.'s biggest trading partner, supplies more oil than Saudi Arabia or anyone else, as well as most of your natural gas and WATER!
(So don't piss us off!)
Allan W Janssen
-Allan, you are showing your true clueless mindset.....
Lex Luthor
-I'm not sure I like the idea of a Canadian making determinations about the American presidents...
Barbara M
-Barbara, why not, are you so self-absorbed and self-impotant that no one else is qualified or allowed to voice an opinion? It's comments like yours that gave rise the that old expression "The Ugly American!"
Allan Janssen,
-He is just a bored Liberal with nothing to do while he waits years for his free canadian lobotomy
Lex Luthor,
- Now come on Lex, play fair. After all I don't tell people about your mother or your crazy brother so let's not get personal. And Lex.... go back to Metropolis!
Allan
-Excellent and well written as always! I love your articles Allan. I have thought Rush Limbaugh was a moron since the 90's that part made me chuckle.
Thank you;
Kimber L
Excellent article, Allan!!! Watching the "republicons" today is sort of like watching a train wreck, it's just more humorous. I see the usual fruit loops showed up here to dispute reality!
spartanâ
Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know......!) and is available as an E-Book H E R E ! and as a paperback H E R E !
Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://allans-perspective.blogspot.com
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