Michael Carmichael
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archived: 12 - 18 Nov, 2006 Back Next UPDATED: NOVEMBER 12, 2006 ALL THE KING’S HORSES The voters came. The voters saw. The voters conquered. The resounding defeat of the neoconservative Republican tide came as a shock to the American body politic. George Bush, Dick Cheney and all the king’s horses they rode in on were rebuked in one fell swoop of an election. Republican candidates were doomed. Democrats returned to the driving seats of political power in both houses of Congress. During the previous 70 years, Democrats have controlled the majorities of both houses for over 50 years. The short, sharp period of Republican ideological domination of American politics has ended – abruptly. While many predicted a fourth in the lengthening string of stolen US federal elections, the Republicans’ much-feared election-rigging prowess dissolved in a puff of smoke. Karl Rove has been tossed into the rubbish pit of American history, his fate sealed for all time as a fixer, a rigger, a hacker and a stealer of federal elections. Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., Greg Palast and Mike Whitney provided the research and the arguments for a forensic examination of the electoral and voting mechanisms that underpin our democracy. Fearing a fourth straight electoral coup d’etat, Dr. Steve Jonas warned of a Grand Theft Election that would seal America’s fate to the disturbingly fascist tendencies of the neoconservatives. While it might seem all too tempting to ridicule these admonitions as preposterous conspiracy theories – I want to praise them. Without their warnings, these dire predictions - these political prophecies of a fourth Grand Theft Election - could well have taken place. Without the blogosphere, the Republican election-stealing machine could have gone into overdrive to deprive American citizens of their right to self-determination. There is no doubt that voter suppression and other forms of election-defilement did take place in the United States during the midterms, but it was not successful in manufacturing another Republican Congress. The Democrats are now fully ascendant. While the elected officials from Congress basked in the limelight on our television screens to take credit for the victory, the prime architect of this political triumph was clearly the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Governor Howard Dean. When Dean rose to national prominence during his insurgent campaign for the presidential nomination in 2003-04, he became a master of political messaging, targeting, organizing and fund-raising. When he became the Chairman of the DNC, Dean opted for a totally new and refreshing strategy of reinvigorating the grassroots of the party through a fifty state campaign – a concept that flew in the face of the group that he deemed to be the root of all Democratic party failures. Dean dubbed them, the “aristocracy of consultants” referring to the centrist school of political pollsters who have driven Democratic messages steadily to the right over the past two decades. With a return to Democratic Party control of the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a much-needed sense of balance has been restored to the tripartite system of government in America. Now, in the aftermath, we must ask ourselves - Where does the burden lie? When the 110th Congress takes up its task in January, the answer to that question will be obvious. The burden lies with the Democratic Party. The Democrats have been elected on a wave of popular dissatisfaction with the rogue presidency of George Bush and his deeply unpopular War on Terror. In January, the Democrats will have to deliver on their promises. We must not allow the Republicans and their covert agents in the Democratic Party to convince us that we can only “win” in Iraq by escalating the conflict and sending more troops and treasure into the midst of their raging civil war. We must not be seduced into believing the Republican pleas for political support for the unilateral bombing of Iran and North Korea. We must not allow their arguments in support of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-Emptive War to beguile us into passive acquiescence to more ill-conceived and cockamamie military interventions that deliver us nothing but hatred, scorn, ridicule and misery. Those grand mistakes we must not make, but what we must do is to bring the troops home, negotiate with Iran, Syria and North Korea while demanding real progress in peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians – whether either side likes it or not. Those policies are the remnants not only of the Clinton Era, but of the much more important Democratic legacy of multilateralist foreign policy that owes so much to the brilliant work of a frequetly overlooked and underestimated former president. Jimmy Carter never ordered American forces into combat, but he achieved the virtually miraculous Camp David Accords between Menachim Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt. The Congresses dominated by Newt Gingrich drove Bill Clinton’s foreign policy too far to the right. Clinton’s failure to achieve lasting success in the Middle East was a product of an unrealistic and essentially Islamophobic strategy demanded by those radical Republicans led by Gingrich and his ilk who wanted to limit his chances for success. Much of this failed dialogue was coerced by the group that is now freely called, “The Israel Lobby.” There will be many challenges in 2007. There is already a new war brewing between Israel and Hizbullah incubating in Tel Aviv in the office of Avigdor Lieberman. Bush and Cheney will still play their weakened hands in that coming conflict, but this time they are likely to be handcuffed by James Baker, Colin Powell and Lee Hamilton. There will be a cacophony of calls – which began on the morning after the election on the Fox News Channel in the strident remarks of Shepard Smith – to escalate the war in Iraq by sending more troops - many more - into the combat zone in one last desperate attempt to “win” one for their benighted, “Gipper,” – George W. Bush. Dreams die hard, Shep, very hard, but this one is deader than the proverbial doornails in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As Americans, we must be vigilant and demand non-collaboration with the deluded fantasies of the rogue presidency that has been harshly brought to heel by an enflamed people through their vote of “No Confidence” in his dangerous policies. This is a new game, and there is everything to play for: peace, prosperity and justice. Now, we are holding a much better hand in that grand game of chance driven by the winds of probability that our founding fathers called - “democracy.” The Bush Era reaped a hellish whirlwind in the Middle East – and in Old New Orleans. In the aftermath of the North Korean explosion of a small nuclear device, it has come to light that six more powers in the Middle East are now seeking their own independent forms of nuclear technology. The nuclear ambitions of these nations are understandable, given the large arsenal of nuclear weapons held by Israel – a nation seen by its regional neighbors as a security threat largely because she has refused to sign either the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This spreading nuclearization of the Middle East and North Korea is the most massive failure of the Bush-Cheney White House and their neoconservative ideology to date. The rank and file military are fed up to their eye-teeth with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld. Now that he has been sacked, the Democratic Congress must settle for no less than a full-scale overhaul of US foreign policy – especially the ill-conceived war in Iraq. While the military are completely disaffected from Donald Rumsfeld, the United Nations is sick to death of Ambassador John Bolton. The man is a walking-talking disaster for American interests. He must go, and I predict that he will soon follow Rumsfeld into a new phase of his career. Perhaps, he can join the myriads of hate-filled, right-wing crazies on talk radio. Even the neocons themselves, are now condemning the Bush-Cheney White House and the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld. But, they still represent the greatest threat to the American constitution since the war of 1812. Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams and many others are despondent that their efforts to foment war with Iran have hit a political snag. During the next two years, these deluded extremists will be attempting to incite us into wars against Iran, Syria and North Korea. These insidious machinations must be thwarted, and they must be seen to be thwarted by the Democratic Congress. Today, the British people – the strongest and most faithful allies of the United States of America – regard George Bush as a greater threat to international security than either Kim Jong-Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Only Osama Bin Laden is more reviled – and that is in US-friendly Britain! In other nations around the globe, George W. Bush has pride of place in the pantheon of most-hated heads of state of modern times – the sole remaining category where his supremacy is secure. Now is the hour to reorder the political universe – to undo the baleful deeds done by the neoconservatives – in the names of the American people and their allies. Now significantly deflated, Bush’s power is verging towards political impotence. The people have spoken volumes to the Bush-Cheney White House and the neoconservative era they spearheaded.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Visibly despondent and, yes, hurt during his press conference, George W. Bush has finally collided with the reality that he has been forcing so aggressively on others for his entire political life. Now fallen to earth, Bush’s presidency lies shattered and broken - a chaos of shambolic disintegration. His world destroyed. His legacy secure as the worst president in the entire history of the United States of America. References Six Arab states
join rush to go nuclear
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