Trying to give Howard Stern a run for his money (and there’s lots of it) as the most ubiquitous presence on air, George W. Bush has bumped everyone’s favorite television shows so he can yet again and again try to make his point about his war and his assumption of a broad (very, very broad) range of powers to do just about anything he pleases to achieve his ends. Needless to say, his activities are unprecedented for this country.

Dick Cheney calls this “robust” leadership. Others call it something else.

It’s ironic that the very same people who have been claiming for years that we need judges on the Supreme Court and in fact on every court in the land who do not “interpret” the Constitution or “make laws from the bench” are now trying to wring every drop of interpretation from the same document to justify Bush’s breaking the both the letter and the spirit of the law.

Dick Cheney also bemoaned the loss of presidential prerogative and sway stemming from Watergate and the Vietnam War. Funny how Dick goes right to the exact times when other Presidents tried to overstep a few governmental bounds and got nailed for it. It also points out what is really up. This is a government takeover and Bush and Cheney are running it.

It just doesn’t say in the Constitution that George W. Bush has the right to wiretap everyone he feels like. It just doesn’t say it. The ease with which he could have complied with the relevant laws makes one feel that the level of hubris has gotten so great in the White House that they just didn’t feel like lifting a finger to make the effort to comply. The niceties just aren’t for them any more.

Both George and Dick like to brag about their successes. They point out that we have had no domestic terrorist attacks in The U.S. since 9/11, and that this proves that their policies are working and they are protecting us. Some people are going to buy this malarkey. But tell it to people in the London subways, on the Spanish trains, or in the Indonesian nightclubs. Tell it to all Iraqis getting blown up daily.

Security is as much a state of mind as it is a physical fact. Ask yourself: Do you feel more secure now than before?

Dick Cheney claims that if they had been breaking the law before 9/11, we could have caught some of the airplane-hijacking terrorists. Try to remember what the country was doing and where its focus was back then, and ask yourself if you really believe that. The fact is we did have the terrorists in our sights without all the new executive powers, and we just sat around. Obvious dots weren’t connected. We got our butts kicked thoroughly – for a day.

All this braggadocio about the war, and so many other issues just left languishing. The world has had three major natural disasters in the past year, and all three are still in need of healing. Environmental and health issues abound, raising the question how much borrowed time will we be allowed. We have a whole host of financial issues imperiling our country, and answers or solutions are hardly forthcoming. Partisanship and divisions are the rule of the day, and there is no end in sight to that.

Instead of being a moderator or ameliorator for all these things, Bush has been an instigator. He has buttered his own bread, and now he has to sleep in it. He left a good part of the country and most of the world out of the loop for years, and now he wants us to be patient with him.

There are just enough people left in the country willing to go along with this Macarena for him to finish his term. We may have reached a point of stasis. It takes a really big man to change direction for the sake of a nation. A “robust” man just keeps going no matter who gets hurt.

Dick Cheney says that if we pull out now we’ll be turning Iraq over to the insurgents. Let’s do the math. 11 million people voted in the recent election there. 11 million, if they had to, can’t control a few hundred or few thousand (we don’t really know how many there are) insurgents who want to keep the party going? They could just sit on them. I think the Iraqis like the fact that we are there because we do all the heavy lifting. Wouldn’t you want a few thousand people in your town just for that?

Bart Whiteman
Bartwhiteman@aol.com

* * *

Dr. Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, assured us in a radio interview that we cannot achieve victory in Iraq for the fight for democracy. He prophesied, as proved in Vietnam, that the U.S. will eventually fail; therefore, flee now, admit defeat, wave the white flag and lessen our inevitable loss.

In this regard, history is lost on Dr. Dean: After mistakes, sacrifices and government disguise, Vietnamization between 1971 and 1975 finally was working. Yet the war was later lost - mostly because of Watergate, hatred for Nixon, and a partisan anti-war Senate.

Like Dr. Dean, Kerry appears not to notice this irony. He just lost an election, in part because too many of us recalled his Vietnam-era record of trying to score cheap political points by trashing American troops in harm's way. However, he is still refering to our troops as 'terrorists' once again trying to score with cheap, treasonous remarks.

In constrast, when Lieberman returned from Iraq with an optimistic appraisal of our plan of elections, training Iraqi's and improving Iraq's economy, he was shunned by his party. Yet what we get from the National Chairman, the former Presidential candidate, and Congressman Murtha, the new star on the Left, on the verge of the third election in Iraq, is an admission that we are losing and must leave.

Dean, Kerry, and Murtha are good, honest men who rightly worry that more soldiers will die in the Middle East for a cause that they now view as hopeless. But to follow their apparently popular advice would lead to a national disaster as well as defeat for their own party. In short they will be the reason that Democrats will not support Democrats.

The Left has spent the last quarter century following Jimmy Carter and Vietnam trying to regain their lost stance on national defense which was never in question with FDR, Truman, and JFK. If Joe Lieberman cannot save the left from themselves, then maybe the brave men and women who voted on Dec. 15 in Iraq can.

Jim Arnhart
Ooltewah