There's something I really want to know from anybody who voted for George W. Bush and/or a Republican ticket during those two fateful Novembers:
Do you think that any or all of the behavior I detail below in a far from exhaustive list has been -- or even might turn out to have been-- good for the country? It would seem to me
that you either have to say "yes", or somehow produce evidence to deny the charges, all of which are a matter of public record.
Here we go then. This Administration and the Republican 'Majority', slyly or brazenly, have
1. Claimed the air at ground zero was safe after the 9/11 attack, when they possessed documentary evidence to the contrary, thus endangering the lives and health of its nominal heroes.
2. Gone to war on false pretenses, the cast of characters including at least three men who were engaged in the business of manufacturing justifications for costly bellicosity as far back as the mid-seventies.
3. Committed war crimes as a matter of course by targeting hospitals and civilian infrastructure for bombardment, using phosphorous, napalm and depleted uranium, and barring entry of emergency aid into civilian areas. In some cases the civilian leadership could qualify for the death penalty according to the War Crimes Act of 1996.
4. Become, in the words of the British Ambassador to Italy, Al Qaeda's "best Recruiting Sergeant".
5. Tortured its prisoners at home and abroad. As a matter of policy.
6. Cut real pay and benefits to our armed services personnel and their families. Something like a third of the country's homeless are veterans.
7. Deprived hundreds and maybe thousands of U.S. residents of legal rights enshrined in Western jurisprudence since the 13th century. Some were 'disappeared' for months.
8. Removed basic safety protections from the workplace lives of working people, eviscerated their chances of legal redress, and allowed one worker to be fired or discriminated against every 23 minutes for exercising his or her freedom of association on the job.
9. Begun the process of gutting Section 8 provisions for public housing, with either a new and extraordinary burden placed on cash-strapped cities or an eminently predictable swell in the numbers of homeless in our immediate future if they are not stopped.
10. Allowed health care costs to rise over 30% and millions more people to becomeuninsured.
11. Allowed government drug researchers to accept fees from the pharmaceutical industry. Tens of thousands have died from Vioxx.. Bad reactions to medications are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States
12. Hidden from public view hundreds upon hundreds of politically inconvenient or embarrassing documents on indefensible grounds of national security.
13. Taken revenge against anyone who has blown the whistle on their misdeeds, not least against a career diplomat, who had revealed inconvenient truths, by unveiling the name of his wife, a covert C.I.A. agent.
14. Abrogated or withdrawn from binding treaties on land mines and the international criminal court, to name but two.
15. Used junk science to justify its withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty and deny global warming. No serious scientist not in the employ of interested corporate parties disputes the ecological trends.
16. Rewritten environmental laws, in language dictated by their corporate backers, so as to remove protections against the plunder of our natural resources and the fouling of our air for the profit of those paymasters.
17. Rewarded those and other paymasters with fiscal give-aways from the public coffers;
18. Used national security as an excuse to throw billions of dollars at crony companies developing a missile shield that has had almost a 0% efficacy in tests and 0 usefulness after the end of the cold war.
19. Rendered impotent those regulatory agencies whose mandates are to rein in corporate abuse.
20. Squandered our nation's treasure and put us in unimaginable debt and at the mercy of China and Japan, our main creditors, should they decide some day to call it in ... or switch to the euro.
21, 22 …77, 99…
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© January 2004
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