World War III
Bush's Final Days
Sunday morning certainly wasn’t designed to be a news briefing, and the Sunday service not designed to be a classroom, but the culture we now live in demands more from the church. In the vast majority, black America is even worse informed than white America. But, white pastors are, in the aggregate, more apt to organize politically and disseminate information. Black pastors, however, remain stuck in the past, preaching meaningless Old Testament homilies and putting on a good hoop show while leaving their congregants under-fed and under-informed about the world around them.
“World War III.”
President Bush’s saber rattling against Iran continues to
escalate to frightening proportions, echoing the long drum roll
towards the Iraq war. It’s déjà vu all over again, the president
clearly trying to get it started between us and Iran before he’s
forced to load up the pickup and head home to Crawford, while
we, the American people, apparently swallow his rhetoric without
questioning it. If invading Iraq was always the president’s goal
from the day he took office—and I believe it was—expanding that
war into Iran seems just as likely a Bush ideal, which is likely
why Iran is supplying and arming the insurgents in Iraq: they
know they’re next. The president, having learned absolutely
nothing from history and still in denial about his own domestic
and foreign policy failures, continues to press on with his
dysfunctional and failed policies, even as general after general
criticizes the president’s leadership once they retire
(see sidebar).
Like a pouting four-year old, Bush continues to insist he’s
right and everyone else is wrong, despite the fact the man took
a prosperous nation at peace and spiraled it into debt and war.
With roughly a year left before the nation finally selects a new
leader, the president is anxious to prove he’s still relevant.
Actually, he’s more meddling than relevant, as his way of
proving he’s still the boss is to gum up the works and threaten
war every chance he gets. Yesterday, the House of
Representatives failed to override President Bush’s veto of a
bill to provide health insurance to 10 million children. This is
the president being relevant.
The real shame isn’t the president, though, so much as the
congress more invested in political power-grabs than in doing
what is right for the country. There is more than enough
evidence to qualify Bush for articles of impeachment, but any
talk of impeachment is routinely dismissed as fringe thinking.
Mainly because the Democrats really need Bush to remain in place
as, the bigger the mess he creates, the better their chances
next year.
Which make them just as bad, just as sadly myopic, as the
president. The Congress—both Democratic and Republican—know
there is an idiot in the White House. An unstable idiot at that.
And this idiot has cost the country untold wealth in terms of
lives lost and ruined. Yet they coldly allow him to go on with
his lunacy because it’s their best shot at grabbing power. Oh,
if we could only vote them all out.
I’m reminded of President Bill Clinton, whom Bush tried
unsuccessfully to scapegoat for his all Qaeda problems. Clinton
lied under oath about sexual encounters and the Republicans
impeached him. Brought the government to a standstill while this
circus of Republicans and Democrats chastised the president, who
narrowly escaped removal from office. Bush, on the other hand,
has committed real crimes. Not lying about sex, but violations
of laws, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act among
them. And nobody’s even talking about impeachment.
My general impression is the president will be making a real
mess over the next 14 months. The cost—both in lives and
dollars—of the president’s childish myopia may not be
measurable. Congress should have acted years ago—through censure
or impeachment—to rein in the president’s power-grab and fringe
thinking. Instead, they continue to just let the man follow his
severely wrongheaded and dangerous philosophies.
If Bush has his way, he’ll take us to war with Iran, likely in
the spring of 2008. He won’t ask Congress’ permission, but will
instead invent some phony Gulf of Tonkin-type provocation on
Iran’s part to get things started. As the conflict increases, he
will justify his military actions by claiming we were attacked.
Meanwhile, the president will continue to resort to vetoing
legislation—something he never did once in his first term, when
Congress was Republican-led and rubber-stamping his legislative
agenda. Like an obstreperous toddler, the president will
continue to whine and pout and have temper tantrums, continuing
his faux-messianic vision and accelerating his ruination of
America’s status abroad.
In his terrifying fanaticism, Bush will accelerate his
consistently-wrong agenda as he scurries to have his party
before his parents come home. Anti-intellectual almost to the
point of political autism, Bush will, much like a small child,
flail about in desperation to have his own way and force his own
agenda on a nation that has clearly and vocally rejected it.
This exposes the president as a man of neither intellect,
integrity nor insight, as he continues to act as a power-mad
monarch rather than as a leader of free people. Free people who
have so thunderously told the president that he is wrong.
The U.S. government is supposed to be of the people, by the
people and for the people. My instinct is this president, this
childish, small man, will continue to force his thinking on a
country desperate for change. That’s the level of pettiness this
man is subject to. Shame on every one of you who voted for hum.
Shame on the Congress for not reining him in.
With the president’s last year upon us, it is reasonable to look
back and look forward, to assess the second Bush legacy and
lessons learned from it. This essay, written shortly after the
Hurricane Katrina disaster, attempts to put in perspective the
president’s record, where we’ve been and where we are going in
Bush’s final days.
Christopher J. Priest
21 October 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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