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Wasteland of the Free |
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| WHY BOTHER? | FASCISM | WAR | RACISM | MYTHS | LETTERS |
| HYPOCRISY | COVERUPS | ENVIRONMENT | SPORTS |
| PSYCHOPATHIC SADISTS IN GOVERNMENT |
| CONSEQUENCES OF ATOMIC WAR |
| RAYS OF HOPE |
Letters - especially those the media wouldn't printLetter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 9/10/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
Here we are, three years after the horrific events of 9/11/01, and we as a nation have yet to deal appropriately with it.
Osama bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people on that fateful day, but no matter how many buildings he might attack or people he might kill, he could never destroy our fundamental values and freedoms. Only Americans, through poor choices of leadership, can destroy American freedoms and liberties by allowing them to be chipped away through such travesties as the 'Patriot' Act and its various planned upgrades. In that light the present Bush administration seems to be well on its way toward finishing the job of destroying America that bin Laden could only dream of, and I for one do not consider that an appropriate response to terrorism.
As a nation we ought to have been able by now to view terrorism in a larger perspective. For example, we routinely accept death rates from tobacco that are at least a hundred times greater (300,000+) than the worst Osama bin Laden can do, each and every year. We tolerate with barely a whimper such callous corporate greed that does far worse damage than bin Laden, with no suggestion of giving up our precious freedoms and liberties to solve the greater problem. Our priorities are completely backward and wrong.
George Bush Junior was probably right when he recently said that terrorism would never be eliminated (although he quickly flip-flopped on that issue for obvious political reasons and reversed himself by maintaining that he would indeed win the war on terrorism). Europe has dealt rationally with terrorism for years without sacrificing fundamental liberties and freedoms, and so could America if we chose to. But moving in the direction of a police state is not a rational response, it is a fearful response, a response to fear that appears to have been carefully stage-managed for political purposes to allow for the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive branch. Trust us and America will be safer, they say! I say the current administration will destroy the very heart and soul of our great land if we allow them to continue as they have, since America appears to be headed full speed toward a police state.
Finally it has not seemed to reach the American consciousness yet that the root cause of Islamic terrorism, religious fanaticism, is nearly as bad in our own country. We have mirror-image counterpart extremists who believe that God is on our side and supports the killing of Muslims in foreign lands. We have a religious nut President who proclaims his belief that God chose him for the job. We have no shortage of religious extremists who want to use government to impose their twisted views on everyone, and many with such extreme motivations hold positions of power in Washington. One would think that after such a demonstration of evil on 9/11/01 in the name of religion, that Americans would rightly react as the Founders intended by expunging every last vestige of religious influence that has crept into our own government. But that has not happened, and the War on Terrorism has become a kind of Holy War in some quarters, such as among the evangelicals who have swarmed to Iraq to make converts there. We ought to have learned from the events of 9/11/01 that this great country's founders had the right vision for America, and we should react appropriately to terrorism by reaffirming our root values and making them even stronger instead of responding inappropriately to fear and consequently eroding American values and freedoms. Instead we as a country have sunk to the low moral level of the terrorists themselves by invading Iraq under false pretenses, and by allowing fear and religion to justify hateful actions and erode fundamental American freedoms we as a nation have corrupted ourselves and become our own worst enemy. Osama bin Laden is a trivial threat to America in comparison to the wrong direction our country's leaders have been taking us lately. We should be engaging in a national dialogue about how to make ourselves better and stronger as a country with the values and principles that are our birthright, and never allow those values and principles to be compromised through fear tactics. But it's been three years now, and irrational fear still dominates. America deserves better.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 7/10/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
It's another sad day for America when our precious freedoms and liberties so hard won by the blood of patriots are lessened, rather than increased, by Congress (LA Times 7/9/04, 'House GOP Leaders Kill Effort to Limit Patriot Act'). I just hope that when election time comes, the majority of Americans will be smart enough to recognize that the fearmongering by Bush and the rest of the Republican Party is just a ploy to garner political support, and they'll vote the deceiving manipulator out of the Oval Office. Otherwise, if we continue down the slippery slope we're now on and fall into a police state, it's going to be very difficult to win our freedoms back again, and the shining light of liberty that was America may even be extinguished forever.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 7/3/03 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
Michael Ramirez' June 3 cartoon displayed unusual insight compared to his usual reality-challenged, right-wing, knee-jerk reaction pieces. It showed a pipe of 'terrorism' being fed by a bigger pipe of 'extremism' above it which in turn was being fed by an even bigger pipe labelled 'Saudi Arabia'. The pipes are all drawn to resemble oil pipes and the work very dramatically and effectively illustrates an indisputable truth. I would go so far as to say I believe it almost deserves a prize for excellence in the art of political cartooning, if there is such a thing. There's just some minor improvement I would like to suggest for Mr. Ramirez to increase his chances of professional recognition through such insightful art, and that is by increasing the level of insightfulness just a notch or two by adding to the artwork another larger pipe feeding 'Saudi Arabia', labelled 'Big Oil'. Then above 'Big Oil' should come a larger pipe feeding it labelled 'Bush Administration'. Finally there should be one last and biggest pipe above 'Bush Administration', labelled simply with a questionmark. Those three extra pipes would complete the logical chain of indisputable inferences that Mr. Ramirez' insight partially revealed in his first draft of June 3, and I daresay if he were to construct such a fully insightful piece of political art, he would and should be hailed as a true genius of his craft.
What do you think, Mr. Ramirez, does your vision extend that far?
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 5/26/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
It appears that the father was smarter than the son. This is from George Bush Senior, in A World Transformed, 1998:
"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 5/5/04 (PRINTED!):
Dear Editor,
It's almost comical to watch Bush and his co-conspirators expressing their regrets over the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners only now, when they apparently knew about it months ago; where was their remorse then?
It makes me wonder what else they're hiding from us, hoping we don't discover.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 3/28/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
All that's really necessary is to imagine that the Pledge says 'under Allah' (or 'under Krishna' or anybody else's god besides your own) and all the reasons the Founders desired a separation of church and state in this nation's affairs become abundantly clear.
Religion and government cannot mix any better in the United States than they do in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, etc. Freedom OF religion also means freedom FROM religion, and America being a supposedly free country means that religion should have no official place in our government, including the Pledge of Allegiance.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 2/2/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
While it is true that Democrats will happily spend the taxpayer's money, Republicans prefer to spend more of the taxpayer's children's money, the children being the ones that will have to pay off today's deficits.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 1/6/04 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
Re: "Don't Have a Cow" by Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute, 1/2/04: Mr. Milloy's dismissive article about Mad Cow Disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) and its human versions Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) or "variant" CJD (vCJD) attempts to lull people into believing that the beef supply is entirely safe, even going as far as the distortion "there is as of now no demonstrable causal link between mad cows and human health problems". This is misinformation, apparently politically inspired, and definitely not based on any scientific belief or consensus. In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control (www.cdc.gov) are honest about it: "There has never been a case of vCJD that did not have a history of exposure within a country where this cattle disease, BSE, was occurring. It is believed that the persons who have developed vCJD became infected through their consumption of cattle products contaminated with the agent of BSE."
The L.A. Times has done a great disservice to its readers by publishing a misleading political puff piece designed to allay fears about a real health problem. Instead of burying our heads in the sand as Mr. Milloy would have us do while this disease becomes a human epidemic (as it already is in the Midwest's wild deer population) it would be far wiser to face it head-on before it spreads further. For example the Japanese are doing the right thing by testing every single cow or steer slaughtered for human consumption, and America should do the same immediately. It is not necessary to precisely understand every mechanism in the causal links between BSE and CJD before taking responsible precautions on the basis of what is known already. This disease is always fatal, there is no cure, and the infectious agent cannot be neutralized by cooking or by any chemical treatment of meat before consumption. Somehow the disease has managed to spread itself widely even in a vegetarian deer population, so it obviously takes less than consumption of brain or spinal cord tissue to become infected, unless deer are really brain-eating cannibals and nobody knows it. It is already known that the infectious prions (apparently misfolded proteins) are found in the eyes, intestines, and bone marrow of infected animals. On the basis of these facts and the strong likelihood that infectious prions will eventually be found in other tissues and organs of infected animals as well, it is very irresponsible to make the best-case assumption that public safety is somehow ensured by keeping bovine brains and spinal cords out of the food supply.
Please, instead of publishing such biased and politically-motivated puff pieces about urgent matters of public health and safety, can't you find reputable doctors and scientists to better inform the public about such issues?
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 12/3/03 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
We have an Iraqi war quagmire with vanishing international credibility and moral leadership, jobs lost and environmental rollbacks at home, scandalous corporate rapacity we only see the tip of, outright treason in the White House gone unprosecuted, massive deficit spending to subsidize tax cuts for the rich, Cheney's still-concealed energy agenda, "Patriot" Act undermining of civil liberties and privacy, American concentration camps operating at Guantanamo and in the mideast -- the sad direction our nation is going does not look very promising under the misguidance of George Bush, President of Mass Destruction.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 9/17/03 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
How deliciously ironic it is to see the Republicans stymied in their rush to stampede the electorate into recalling Governor Davis by the very legal principle that they used to hijack the Presidency in 2000. This time however, 'equal protection' is not what they are howling about, but 'the will of the people'. But if the 'will of the people' had prevailed in 2000, we'd probably still have strong national and California economies and Dick Cheney's buddies at the energy companies probably wouldn't have felt empowered to game the California power grid with the consequences that the Republicans are now claiming was Gray Davis' fault. Right-wing hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 7/3/03 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
Thanks to George Bush Junior, the world now views America as a bunch of arrogant provincial bullies with nuclear weapons of mass destruction that we are actually threatening to use against anyone who may sufficiently piss us off. They see us abandoning our own principles of liberty and justice for all that we once held almost sacred and they see us violating the sovereignty and murdering the citizens of weak little countries for reasons that turn out to be based on either paranoia or lies, take your pick. You wouldn't think that one bad apple of a president could do so much damage in just two and a half years, but there it is, and it isn't anything to be proud of. If we don't manage to turn the situation around it will only become worse as we abandon more of our core values and become ever more threatening to the rest of the world. Continuing down this path can only bring us more terrorism and cause us to become more and more economically isolated from the rest of the world, and we will all suffer greatly as a result. In that case the rest of the world will rush to build more nukes to protect themselves from what they will rightly perceive as the American threat, and with nuclear proliferation will come their more likely use and our perceived need for protection from them. Star Wars antimissle systems will not actually protect us very much, but building them will drain our economy to the tune of trillions at the expense of health care, education, highways and other infrastructure, etc. That is not the kind of America I want to see my children grow up in, and that is not the kind of world I want to see my children grow up in either. I am deeply ashamed of the direction that my country is going under its present poor leadership, and I want to see it turned around before it's too late so that America can again be a country that exemplifies the best of what humanity can achieve, and a country to be proud of.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 6/15/03 (not printed):
Dear Editor,
The Bush administration is attempting to deflect blame onto the CIA for misleading the American public about the supposed imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, but in Texan terms, that dog won't hunt.
Either George Bush intentionally lied to the American people and to the rest of the world, or else he is incompetent. In either case the remedy is the same: impeachment.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 5/21/03 (not printed):
Dear editor,
The Bush administration wants to restart the nuclear arms race by developing more and more nuclear bombs, do they? Haven't they thought through the logical consequences that such aggressive war preparations will be perceived around the world as a threat that must be matched? Just as it was starting to look like the threat of catastrophic global nuclear war had diminished, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld decide to become cheerleaders for World War Three.
I am deeply ashamed of the direction my country's Strangelovian leadership is taking us, and concerned that they may get a lot of Americans killed if we don't get rid of them in next year's election. Mr. Nader, please stay out of the race this time around!
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 5/12/03 (this one WAS printed on 5/19/03!)
Dear Editor,
Have you been to your doctor lately? Mine has asked me to read and sign a multipage form detailing the privacy surrounding my medical records. It's presented in such a fashion as to make it appear that our privacy is increasing, but a close read says that private medical information may now be released to law enforcement if it might help them locate suspects and solve crimes. It used to be that the police needed a court order to look at your medical records, but no longer, so this is less privacy than before, not more.
Can you spell p-o-l-i-c-e s-t-a-t-e?
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 4/28/03 (not printed):
Dear editor,
What, no weapons of mass destruction have been found after all? Mr. Bush shouldn't let details like that be of any concern. All he needs to do is have his puppets on the Supreme Court declare that Saddam does indeed have the votes, er, weapons, and then Mr. Bush's attack on Iraq will have all the legitimacy of his Presidency.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 3/13/03 (not printed):
Dear editor,
George Bush said any country 'that isn't for us, is against us', so if France and other countries fail to support our war plans in the UN, perhaps the White House will decide to bomb and invade them too.
The sad fact is that there are plenty of people who would support any kind of war for any reason, no matter how stupid and senseless. Take for example the present plans to use weapons of mass destruction-- nuclear weapons no less-- on Iraq to impress the world with our low tolerance for anyone else even thinking about such atrocities, and the big masquerade to link Saddam with Al Quaeda. No better plan could be devised for unifying the Arab world in their hatred against us and inciting endless future attacks, but look at all the cheerleaders for Mr. Bush's preemptive unprovoked war. It is really amazing to see such madness firsthand, just as it must have been to see flag-waving Japanese cheer their nation's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor or observe the blood lust of Germans who supported Hitler's preemptive war plans. I fear history will judge us no less harshly, and I am ashamed of my country's leadership for aspiring to the mass murder of innocents.
Rather than being our adversaries, I feel that France, Germany and Russia are in fact our best friends for their efforts at the U.N. to prevent Mr. Bush's aggression. Thank you Mr. Chirac, Mr. Schroeder, and Mr. Putin.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 2/6/03 (not printed):
Dear editor,
Connect the dots: George Bush Junior says he knows for certain that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, but he doesn't want to tell us how he can be so certain. But wait! It turns out that Saddam was once our friend and our government supported him in his war against Iran, because back then the Iranians were our biggest enemies in the Arab world. And lo and behold, it was the Reagan-Bush team that first supplied Saddam with chemical and biological weapons so that they could be used against the Iranians if need be! So of course George Junior knows that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, because it was his own daddy who helped in providing them to Saddam. Naturally George Junior wouldn't want to emphasize that fact, would he? It would reveal him to be a flaming hypocrite and his daddy and Reagan as worse than incompetent.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 12/14/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
I used to live in Mississippi, and I know from my own experience that Trent Lott's deepest and darkest desires and beliefs still resonate strongly there. He was elected Senator by a majority of voters, after all. Unfortunately the same dark side of human nature resonates strongly outside Mississippi as well, one proof of that being California's Proposition 187.
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 12/14/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
Trent Lott should not resign, he should retain his position so that the American public can never forget that the darkest forces of our past that would return us to the days of segregation and illegal abortion and forced school prayer and prohibition of alcohol and drugs -- oops, we're still afflicted by that one -- remain to this day well represented at the highest levels of our government.
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 12/14/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
Trent Lott epitomizes everything that the Republican Party stands for.
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 11/19/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
Mr. Hoffer from Simi Valley in his 11/16/02 letter says we are too comfortable in America and take our rights for granted, and I agree with him. In the headlong rush to the right this country is taking, maybe the best thing that could be done is to "Give the people what they voted for and let them face the consequences of that vote" as Mr. Hoffer also suggests, the implication being that the consequences will become so repugnant that the citizenry will rise up and impose a domestic regime change. We would hope so, and peacefully if possible but it seems likely that a right-wing regime would use its warmaking powers against a citizen revolt. If so it would be a painful civil war, American citizens against the most powerful military-backed government the world has ever known. Worst of all, the government might win. Jonathan Turley's Nov. 17 LA Times commentary ("George Bush's Big Brother") on the planned Orwellian database tracking of every single American's business is especially chilling in this context because of the immense power it will give the government. Apparently to be funded with the pending Homeland Security bill, the new "Information Awareness Office" will track all credit card and bank transactions, travel reservations, medical attention, and most common business transactions, of everyone. Everyone below a certain privileged access status anyway, as the spooks will still need to move money around clandestinely.
If this massive data collection and citizen-tracking capability was only going to be used to catch terrorists that would be one thing, but we know that it obviously won't happen that way. Mr. Hoffer, I think your idea is brilliant but that it is still better to try to stop the right-wing juggernaut at the ballot box instead of later having to fight an armed insurrection against the American military machine to regain our civil liberties. We'll have to hurry though because ballot boxes don't necessarily count for what they used to any more and the American tradition of personal freedom is fading fast into the sunset.
Regards,
Name withheld by request
Wow, was I wrong with this one. My gut feeling that Bush was being deceptive was correct, but I sure got the direction wrong. He wasn't concealing knowledge of Saddam's nukes, he was fabricating lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction!
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 9/1/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
There seems to have been a lot of hoopla recently in the press and from the White House about Saddam Hussein 'developing' nuclear weapons. There seems to be no question that he would like to get his hands on them, and it's probably a reasonable assumption that he would like to do that very much. But that doesn't mean he has to develop them himself, because there are hundreds if not thousands of 'lost' Russian nukes, many of which must have become available on the international black market by now. All he has to do is find the sellers, and chances are some of them would be sending out feelers to him anyway so it shouldn't be too difficult for them to get together and do the transaction. Most of the missing Russian nukes are said to be smaller ones, and that probably makes sense because it's got to be much easier to steal a backpackable version or one made to be shot from a cannon than to take one off a missile or unload a bomber. Backpackable Russian nukes even if just a few tens of kilotons yield would be the most reliable and effective method for bringing nuclear destruction to America that Saddam could possibly attain, and if you think about it the man probably already has one or more of them by now. At least that seems a lot more plausible assumption to me than the extremely slim likelihood that Saddam has turned down every offer to buy a Russian nuke that he must have received by now. And you'd have to be some kind of idiot to think that Saddam is not proactively out there looking to buy them.
Our government is well aware of the problem of lost Russian nukes but we rarely hear about the topic anymore in the media. Well we're certainly going to hear about lost Russian nukes if and when one goes off somewhere, and the way things are going it looks a lot more like a question of when and where than if. Why is our government failing to warn us about this imminent danger and failing to help us prepare for it? And why aren't the media even asking the basic questions they should be asking? I can't decide if they're all in denial, part of a conspiracy, or just not doing their jobs intelligently. I remember reading a tiny article in the Los Angeles Times which mentioned that the government received a credible threat of a nuclear strike on New York City shortly after September 11th. But they didn't want to cause a panic so they didn't warn anybody. While it turned out that they guessed right that time, the incident does suggest that we're probably not going to get any warning after the next credible threat either. So we can't even expect our own government to warn us if they have advance warning themselves. I'd like to know how many White House staffers and intelligence agents called friends and relatives in New York though, suggesting they leave town for a few days.
Okay, we have a clear and present danger that our own government isn't inclined to warn the masses of even in the face of a direct and credible threat, and they don't seem to be talking about it in the context of invading Iraq either. The expressed worry you see reported in the media is that Saddam will be 'developing them very soon if he hasn't already', more or less. The implication seems to be that maybe he's got one or two, sure, but he hasn't even tested them yet so we shouldn't worry because they're probably gonna fizzle anyway. So relax, there's time left if you just let us do things our way. But that's got to be a red herring because a far more likely scenario is that Saddam could easily have a dozen or more high quality Russian-manufactured nukes already scattered throughout Europe, the Mideast, and the United States, waiting to use them when he chooses to. There has been plenty of time since these nukes were initially lost for them to have traveled anywhere on the planet. There is no need for missiles or bombers when a cargo container will deliver one just as well to its target. Does anyone believe that Saddam Hussein might not be thinking along these lines?
I just can't believe that every one of Mr. Bush's advisors is so stupid and timid as to fail to explain to him the possible consequences presented by the strong likelihood of so many lost Russian nukes possibly being in Saddam Hussein's control by now. No, I think there must be a deliberate plan to suppress the issue at its base and just never bring it up in public. Nothing else makes any sense. There almost has to be a well-orchestrated coverup of this topic because otherwise the whole entire administration is obviously and completely incompetent for ignoring it, even worse so than their worst critics now believe. But why would they not want the masses thinking and talking about this issue? So as not to cause a panic, as in the NYC nuclear threat? So that people will think they're safe because Saddam is probably only 'close to' developing them all by himself, and that's something the administration is going to change real soon? Maybe the mere fact of there being so many lost nukes so powerfully invalidates the Mutual Assured Destruction politico-nuclear strategy of the United States and the former Soviet Union for the last 50 years, that our government fears its populace might revolt in righteous indignation? Whatever the answers are they must wait to become known, because we surely are not being told, and the media are not even asking the questions yet. As before, the explanation for this apparent incompetence on all fronts has to be either denial, conspiracy, or else they just can't do their jobs right.
The bottom line is that Saddam almost certainly has Russian nuclear weapons in his possession by now, and he has had plenty of time to place them at or near their targets. If he were to set one off without pretty severe provocation first he would become an international pariah and a monster in the history books, and presumably he knows that. If the United States declares war on Iraq and starts bombing Baghdad again, that indeed constitutes pretty severe provocation. If Saddam were to flatten New York City or Los Angeles or both in retaliation, he would not become a pariah but instead he would be seen as great hero to most of the Islamic world. If you have read anything about Saddam, you know that he aspires to be recognized as exactly that: the great leader who will unite all of Islam. Mr. Bush is playing directly into Saddam's hands because as soon as one or more American cities is nuked, Saddam wins the war. America will be terrified of more destruction and so we'll stop bombing Iraq. It won't do any good for us to respond by bombing Iraq with our nukes because Saddam will be hiding somewhere deep underground and very safe. Saddam may at that point decide to blackmail America, Europe, and maybe some Middle Eastern countries with the rest of his nuclear arsenal, and one can only imagine with horror what his demands might be. If Saddam is really pissed at America he might decide he'll nuke Washington D.C. to destroy our entire government in one shot, and then he'd really be able to blackmail us. He would become the hero of Islam he aspires to be and he might even decide that the whole world should become Islamic. Or else. What do you think people would do in that case? They'd start praying to Mecca five times a day, that's what they'd do.
George W. Bush, by rashly starting a war with Iraq without considering the likely consequences, might just become the catalyst for America becoming an Islamic nation for the next millennium or more. Think about that for a minute, what a legacy to leave behind. As if it isn't already bad enough that he wants his rich business buddies to be able to rape the environment while the rest of us get taxed to pay for the consequences.
Or maybe it will never get that bad and we'll only lose New York and Los Angeles. Or maybe one of them will be Miami. Or Washington, who knows? It's nuclear roulette! We've been warned for years that the nuclear genie could only get away from us once we invited him into our world, and so he has. Many have warned, but few have listened to the likes of Physicians for Social Responsibility and others who have seen this turn of events coming for a long time. No, they were painted as 'liberals' and 'extremists' and 'tree huggers' by the machine, and so they were seen. But not any more, the genie is out now just like they said he would be. We should be wise enough to start taking their advice now and do all we can to repair the situation.
Unfortunately our very slim chances to remedy this situation are fading quickly. We must not provoke a nuclear war with Iraq, because Bush's plan for aggression will fail us worse than we can even imagine now. Something needs to change, and fast. If Mr. Bush doesn't declare peace with Iraq, the most likely retaliation we can expect is millions of Americans dying in a blinding flash, or in blast waves which compress air to the density of steel, or by burns, smashed by flying debris, caught in fires, or by being irradiated to death. The death toll from the September 11th attacks would be lost as a tiny drop in the bucket of nuclear megadeath that Mr. Bush seems determined to invite unto us.
Name withheld by request
Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times on 7/2/02 (not printed):
Dear editor,
Mr. Scheer hit the nail on the head again in his July 2 commentary titled "God's Got Nothing to Do With the Pledge of Allegiance Furor". The Taliban have recently made crystal clear for us yet again what the founders of this great country understood and codified in our Constitution: that there should be a complete separation between church and state. It was no accident that the First Amendment begins with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...". Any arguments that loyalty pledges to one's country should include references to God, Allah, Krishna, et cetera, are equally repugnant and contrary to the basic principles upon which the United States of America was founded.
Name withheld by request
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