Richard A. Stitt: McCain-Bush, Confused, Unwise To The Extreme

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Richard A. Stitt

In early 2001, former Prime Minister of China Jiang Zemin described G. W. Bush upon meeting him for the first time as, "Logically unsound, confused, unprincipled, and unwise to the extreme!" It is clear that Zemin's observation turned out to be uncannily prescient.
 
Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Shiite government recently joined Syria in condemning the U.S. raid that killed civilians, some of them children, in that country on October 26. Is this a prelude to the "October surprise" that many have predicted? Is this yet another one of the White House-backed GOP's bag of tricks they are trotting out in an to attempt to weaken Barack Obama and build up John McCain's commander-in-chief bona fides?
 
We know when Bush took sides in the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd war in Iraq, he opened up a Pandora's Box with far more problems than the previous Baathist Suuni regime under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. By siding with the Shiites in the sectarian war in Iraq, G. W. Bush created an even larger Islamic state, which now has closer ties to Iran's militant Islamic Shiite government in Teheran and its bellicose leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. We know John McCain's policies will mimic Bush's -- threats and force and diplomacy be damned.
 
One huge problem for the next administration, whether Obama's or McCain's, is how do we deal with an increasingly anti-U.S. Iraqi government while our U. S. military still occupies that country? How will the next president ask the U.S. Congress and the American people to increase U.S. troop strength and resources to wage a broader war in Afghanistan, the economy of which depends almost exclusively on the opium trade and the war that Bush abandoned in 2002?
 
Yes indeed, poppies grow in Afghan fields, between the crosses, row on row.
 
What will happen in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, challenged almost daily by the Turkish government that believes the terrorist group, Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), has established safe havens there? The Kurds are edging closer to complete autonomy and independence from Maliki's so-called centralized government in Baghdad.
 
There is little chance that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani will cede control of the Kirkuk oil fields that Talabani claims is Kurdish territory. The Kurdish people and their semi-autonomous state speak a different language from most of Iraqis, fly their own national flag and have signed oil and trade contracts with other countries independent of Maliki who is demanding shared oil revenues with the rest of Iraq.
 
Keep in mind a startling, but totally ignored truth that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his entire anti-Semitic parliament stood en masse and denounced Israel during the Lebanon-Israeli conflict in 2006 while they gave their support to the terrorist group, Hezbollah. That is an absolute fact, one which nobody mentioned -- not even once -- during all the primary or presidential debates. Yet, in spite of the "surge is a success" mantra, U.S. military continue to fight and die in the Iraq hellhole to the cost of $10 billion per month, nearly 4,200 dead and 31,000 wounded, many disabled for life.
 
The hoodwinking of the American public over the past 8 years of Bush's vanity war in Iraq has been magnified by the capitulation of the Democratic Party controlled U.S. Congress to address the growing danger that our voting process is seriously flawed and open to widespread tampering. They have had two years to act yet little or nothing has been done to protect the voters with the inaptly named Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The prospects for voter fraud and manipulation of the Republican-owned and operated Diebold computer voting machines are as great, maybe greater, and more frightening today as they were in 2000 and 2004.
 
Whether by hook or crook, the McCain-Palin ticket may still worm their way into the White House on November 4. With a weak, spineless Democratic Party control of Congress led by Pelosi-Reid and a U.S. Supreme Court increasingly hostile to democracy, it is not only likely, but also certain, with a McCain-Palin regime, we will see four more years of Bush policies hell-bent on shredding our U.S. Constitutional protections of individual rights and liberties.
 
McCain-Palin and now Joe the Plumber continue to spew out the mushroom cloud mantra that if Obama is elected, he will turn our country into a socialist state and "redistribute wealth." Yet under the Bush McCain Republican Party, we have practically nationalized our entire banking and financial institutions and are on the brink of subsidizing the auto industry.
 
The Bush mob, aided and abetted by a cowed and timorous U.S. Congress, handed out "free" money via Feeding Chairman Ben Bernanke's lowering of the interest rates, expected to be about 1%, that the Ponzi Scheme Wall Street fat cats can borrow while they wallow in credit swaps, hedge funds, and derivatives all of which have only perfunctory regulation or oversight.
 
What's a little more debt piled on top of a $13.6 trillion consumer household credit debt and a $10.6 trillion national debt and a record $482 billion 2008 national deficit (that's without adding the cost of Bush's ongoing wars)?
 
Did I use the wrong word -- debt? Maybe so. G. W. Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, called it "illiquid assets." Now, if we could just get the public's insurmountable credit card debt, aka illiquid assets, wiped off the books as the $700 billion bailout has done for Lehman Brothers, Wachovia Bank, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, IndyMac, Merrill Lynch, and others such as AIG who were deemed too big to fail, maybe we can wipe the books clean and start all over.
 
We know for sure, eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court-decreed appointment of George W. Bush to the White House, that Zemin's observation is as accurate today as it was eight years ago. The question voters will have the chance to answer on November 4 is, "Do the majority of Americans want four more years of the same?"

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

Richard A. Stitt
Austin, TX

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