Me, too.
_________
".....Changing all this is what this war of ideas is all about, and I am so pleased you are so bad at it. As long as you let one of your top generals and your pals on the Christian right spew hate against the Prophet Muhammad, you only strengthen the will of my young people against you. And your "moderate" Arab allies are good at the police tactics to repress our angry, humiliated youth, but they have no serious strategy to give them new jobs, new ideas and new beliefs..."
Saddam to Bush in a mock-memo by Thomas Friedman
~ ~ ~
Reading today's Thomas Friedman column titled "A Letter From Tikrit", which is a mock-memo to Bush with Saddam Hussein's name attached, I got to thinking about this one point:
Bush took this nation to an unprecedented and virtually unilateral pre-emptive war without any form of electoral mandate. The social divisions in this nation could not be any more divisive..I would wager to say they are wider than pre-Civil War America. Whether we wish to admit it or not, this nation is in sorry shape as we stand today.
9-11 was not enough to unite us.
I do not fault the American people entirely.
I blame the political atmosphere which heavily influences the national media.
I particularly blame our polarizing President.
As a Democrat and a decent American citizen, I sit here today and tell you that I firmly believe, through Bush's actions, that he is no less than hostile to people of my political ilk.
Yes...not just firm in his beliefs...
Hostile to the loyal opposition.
Hostile.
This can never be a good thing..to alienate half your own nation.
If GW Bush cannot convince one solid half of his own people that this NeoCon wet-dream "War of Ideas" is:
1. --worthy of active fighting to begin with..
I'll be back..."
2. --worthy of re-activating the draft and risking more troops..
3.-- not just a Christian vs. Islam fundamentalist war (So often, Bush-lips spout it is not so,
and then the Gen. Boykins and Franklin Grahams and State Department-haters like Pat Robertsons proudly state otherwise)...
Osama's Neo-Con come-on for which Bush fell
4. --not just a war for which we have fallen into Osama Bin Laden's greatest wish..to destroy
America's international influence. (It almost seems, through Bush's easy compliance to enter war without great contemplation, has become nothing more than Osama's patsy)..
5. --not just an organized force-effort to take ultmate advantage of the natural resources of the nations we're atacking...
Gets longer every day
6. --not just a war based on lies and morbid exaggerations...
7. --going to make us any safer in a world where we lose respect, support, and influence with each passing day..
Look up...black helicopter at ten o'clock...
8. --a war about which any of us Americans can express civil dissent without fearing FBI surveillance and being labeled something less than patriotic in political attack-ads...
9. --a war which will not do irreparable damage to our precious civil liberties and our Constitution..
Dad, Pat, and the grease
10. --of tangible benefit to anyone other than the Christian Right, Halliburton and other corporate cronies of the Bush administration..
..then we'd best work on backing off in a safe way for the Iraqi people and our troops and actually getting the President for whom we VOTE next time (because this current nation-dividing President is clearly not going to change his stripes).
Once we have a humble, non-hostile, and stable President in place, we need to get the world to see us as something far less than the arrogant and greedy imperialists we're appearing to be.
A warning:
Unless we Americans (and our Representatives) can heal some of these cultural and social divisions that divide us,
I assure you that America will be weakened to a point of failure not only in Iraq, but right here at home.
I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.
Jude