← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 19970 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2005-09-03
2005-09-03 11:14 | User Profile
Impeach Bush Now
by Paul Craig Roberts
The raison dââ¬â¢Ãªtre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure Americaââ¬â¢s oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically.
Bushââ¬â¢s single-minded focus on the "war against terrorism" has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of Americaââ¬â¢s most historic cities is under water.
If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.
Prior to 911, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) in order to protect the strategic port, the refineries, and the large population.
However, after 2003 the flow of funds to SELA were diverted to the war in Iraq. During 2004 and 2005 the New Orleans Times-Picayune published nine articles citing New Orleansââ¬â¢ loss of hurricane protection to the war in Iraq.
Every expert and newspapers as distant as Texas saw the New Orleans catastrophe coming. But President Bush and his insane government preferred war in Iraq to protecting Americans at home.
Bushââ¬â¢s war left the Corps of Engineers only 20% of the funding to protect New Orleans from flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. On June 18, 2004, the Corpsââ¬â¢ project manager, Al Naomi, told the Times-Picayune: "the levees are sinking. If we donââ¬â¢t get the money to raise them, we canââ¬â¢t stay ahead of the settlement."
Despite the dire warnings delivered by the 2004 hurricane season, the Bush administration made deep budget cuts for flood control and hurricane funding for New Orleans. The US Senate, alarmed at the Bush administrationââ¬â¢s insanity, was planning to restore the funding for 2006. But now it is too late. Many multiples of the funding that would have saved the city now have to be spent to rescue it.
Not content with leaving New Orleans unprotected, it took the Bush administration five days to get the remnants of the National Guard not serving in Iraq, along with desperately needed food and water, to devastated New Orleans. This is the slowest emergency response by the US government in modern times. By the time the Bush administration could organize any resources for New Orleans, many more people had died and the city was in total chaos.
Despite the most dismal performance on record, Bushââ¬â¢s Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, said on Thursday that the Bush administration has done a "magnificent job."
The on-the-scene mayor of New Orleans sees it differently: "Theyââ¬â¢re feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying."
"Theyââ¬â¢re thinking small man, and this is a major, major deal."
It is a major deal, one that will affect Americans far beyond New Orleans. According to reports, 25% of our oil and gasoline comes through the New Orleans port and refineries, all out of commission. Needed goods cannot be imported, and exports will plummet, worsening an already disastrous deficit in the balance of trade.
The increased cost of gasoline will soak up consumersââ¬â¢ disposable incomes, with dire effects on consumer spending. US economic growth will be siphoned off into higher energy costs. American lives far from New Orleans will be adversely affected.
The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport ââ¬â and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population. Bushââ¬â¢s pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe.
The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost Americaââ¬â¢s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost Americaââ¬â¢s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply. Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed Americaââ¬â¢s interests to their insane agenda.
The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now they must he held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted.
What will it take for Americans to reestablish accountability in their government? Bush has got away with lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers, and now with the destruction of New Orleans.
What disaster will next spring from Bushââ¬â¢s incompetence?
September 3, 2005
Copyright é 2005 Creators Syndicate [url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts120.html[/url] ====================== Impeach, convict, and try as a war criminal, among other things. I'm not sure America can survive 31/2 more years of this stupid, incompetent, jackass.
2005-09-03 11:44 | User Profile
[url="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/imperial.icon/rulers/"]http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/imperial.icon/rulers/[/url]
"...Since the founding of the People's Republic, China's leaders have launched numerous campaigns against superstition. For some Chinese, however, ancient traditions die hard. One such tradition dating to dynastic times is that **natural disasters are harbingers of political change. **
"Every peasant believed in the umbilical relationship between man and nature, and therefore between natural disasters and human calamities," noted the late historian John Fairbank in his book, "China: A New History."
...
A Chinese emperor ruled under the auspices of the "Mandate of Heaven" -- the heaven-sent right to rule, similar to the "divine right of kings" in Western civilization. Confucian practitioners in dynastic China were taught that the mandate could be taken away from immoral or tyrannical leaders. Emperors who had apparently lost heaven's mandate were considered ripe for ouster. ..."
2005-09-03 11:50 | User Profile
E,
That's interesting. It would be nice if this latest disaster was the beginning of the end of the Judeo-plutocracy.
2005-09-03 13:54 | User Profile
Roberts adds his voice to a steadily-growing chorus.
You know what's truly unnerving? Most times, when serious discussion of impeaching a President takes place, it's because his actions have offended our moral sense, or our sense of propriety. He's either become an embarrassment, or an aggravating, maddening embarrassment, to the punditry and the citizenry. He's [I]angered [/I] us somehow. Even when the left shrilled that Nixon was submarining and imperilling the Constitution, you understood that they were overstating the case out of their zeal to hoist him on his own petard.
But this guy [B]frightens [/B] me. If you're not a moron living in a fog of John Wayne movies - if you've watched him, and heard him, and done the math, you ought to be very very afraid of what 3 1/2 more years of this man might wreak upon our country, our way of life and even the relative stability of the larger world around us.
We've had disasters - preventable ones - befall us on his watch like friggin' clockwork. He's presided over the freefall of the dollar - nearly 45% in just three years! His simpleminded, shortsighted policies, his contempt for diplomacy, his obscene loyalty to his plutocrat string-pullers are singlehandedly Bataan-marching the American way of life into dhimmitude and impoverishment.
Whenever he opens his mouth to speak, inanities flow out in a halting, bumbling manner that clearly indicate his handlers are so worried about his delivery they don't [I]dare[/I] entrust him with anything resembling content. When Bush addresses the nation in a crisis moment like a squinting, pugnacious prep-school bully whose daddy's checks are keeping his grades hoisted above sea level, you come away from it thinking desperately compensating thoughts, like for instance, "OK, [I]that [/I] was less than useless - but I'm [I]sure [/I] there are plenty of people behind the scenes who have a firm grasp on the problem."
As Anti-Yuppie so accurately wrote yesterday:
There have been Presidents who have equalled Arbusto's ineptitude and incompetence on the domestic front (Carter), his destructive foreign policy (Wilson), his betrayal of white Americans in favor of foreigners and minorities (Johnson, Clinton), his corrupt cronyism (Grant, Harding, Nixon, Clinton again), his "let them eat cake" attitude (Cleveland, Hoover) his disregard for Fourth Amendment Rights (Lincoln), and his below-average intelligence (Ford), but there hasn't been a single President to combine so many vices in a single bobbing simian head.
I'm no longer angry at George Bush for his transparent hucksterism, his lethal ineptitude, or his susceptibility to the agenda of our dual-citizens - now I'm afraid: of irreversible damage; of impending disaster; of chickens coming home to roost, and for good. I'm afraid of what's next, and I'm not alone. We've [B]never[/B] had a President who's made us feel like that.
2005-09-03 15:34 | User Profile
IR - I think your fears are justified. Are you making plans to get the HELL out of NYC?
It wouldn't take much at this point to seriously interrupt the "just-in-time" supply of food and gas. Just a few days and any city would resemble New Orleans. It's becoming easier to imagine a sudden spasm of violence wiping out a chunk of a disarmed, under-stocked populace.
2005-09-03 17:01 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]We've [B]never[/B] had a President who's made us feel like that.[/QUOTE]
Speak for yourself.
Bush, Jr. is a veritable statesman compared to the likes of a Clinton or a Carter.
2005-09-03 17:22 | User Profile
So in other words, we're better off now than we were in 1979...or 99?
Stronger, freer, more prosperous?
You could've fooled me.
2005-09-03 17:50 | User Profile
A majority portion of what we are dealing with today is a direct result of the traitorous and incompetent Clinton administration. Which of course carried-on the malaise and incompetency of the Carter administration.
2005-09-05 06:49 | User Profile
*Someone posted this hard-hitting piece on LibertyForum, and I thought it should be here, too.
PCR definitely isn't pulling punches. He obviously understands the magnitude of the danger America is in thanks to its treasonous government and media propaganda infrastructure, and it shows in his essays.*
[url]http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09032005.html[/url]
September 3 / 4, 2005 Failure on Every Front Impeach Bush Now, Before More Die
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The raison d'etre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America's oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically. [email]paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com[/email]*
2005-09-05 12:30 | User Profile
Angler, why don’t you and PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS jump in a lake with the leftists scum? :biggrin:
2005-09-05 14:05 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]E,
That's interesting. It would be nice if this latest disaster was the beginning of the end of the Judeo-plutocracy.[/QUOTE] Most politicians are in hiding now...but...if you happen to find one...don't pull any punches...:bash:
Listen to this: [url="http://www.nationalvanguard.org/printer.php?id=5987"]http://www.nationalvanguard.org/printer.php?id=5987[/url]
One of Kevin Storms better programs---too bad he has the strange futhark symbol tied around his neck.
Btw, the Pierce coin on National Vanguard News Org sure makes the old boy look like the Wizard of Oz. The "National Vanguardists" (that's a silly enough moniker) really need to pay more attention to symbolim in advertising...:wallbash:
2005-09-06 07:13 | User Profile
Oops, I didn't see that this essay was already posted. Thanks for taking care of it, Sert.
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]Bush, Jr. is a veritable statesman compared to the likes of a Clinton or a Carter.[/QUOTE]Carter was a buffoon and Clinton a "jackbooted liberal," but can you really see them as worse than Emperor Bush the Younger? The latter deceived this nation into an out-and-out war and long-term occupation for the sake of Israel. I don't see how anything Clinton or Carter did can come close to surpassing such a crime.
2005-09-06 10:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]A majority portion of what we are dealing with today is a direct result of the traitorous and incompetent Clinton administration. Which of course carried-on the malaise and incompetency of the Carter administration.[/QUOTE]
Amen!
2005-09-06 11:05 | User Profile
which came first, the chicken or the egg???
Since Jefferson Davis, er make that :dung: Ape Lincoln, our Masters in Imperial Washington have been a unending series of un-mitigated disasters to the WASP People under their "leadership"...
:wallbash: