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NO ROSE GARDEN,
BUSH IS NOW RUNNING SCARED The evidence is in, and it is overwhelming. George Bush is frightened, and he is becoming desperate. Britain’s centrist tabloid, The Independent, put it thus, “Separately, the Bush camp was shaken by new polls showing that the President's Democratic challenger leading by 7 per cent in Florida and New Hampshire, swing states narrowly carried by Mr Bush four years ago. So close is the race that Mr Bush has been forced to all but abandon his August holiday, as well as any hope he might be able to conduct the "Rose Garden" strategy of incumbents past, who preferred to portray themselves as "presidential", handling great affairs of state at the White House, rather than stooping to the campaign trail. But this incumbent no longer has that luxury.” The Independent The writing is on the walls, and it is clear for everyone to read: George Bush is terrified that he will be defeated at the polls on the second of November. Bush has become so desperate that he is even lying in televised press conferences. Lying in public Bush’s latest acts of sheer desperation include a string of lies to the conference of minority journalists in Washington, DC. His performance at the minority journalists’ press conference was televised, and on satellite it reached a global audience. When asked about the sad American history of interning foreign nationals in WWII, Bush told his minority audience that there would be no internment camp for minorities during the war on terror. It would be generous to believe that he had merely forgotten about Camp Delta and Camp X-Ray on Guantanamo, the infamous military camps wherein the prisoners have no constitutional rights, no access to counsel, no privileges and no charges filed against them. Bush blatantly lied to the minority journalists when he told them that racial minorities would not be singled out for political repression. Forgetful as he is, Bush may not realize that racial profiling is universally practiced in America, and it targets Arabic and all Middle Eastern peoples as stereotypical terrorists. Further, he may have forgotten that his official campaign for president produced and broadcast an advertisement touting his leadership in the war on terror that featured a young Arabic male depicted as a suspicious looking terrorist. Either Bush has developed a severe case of selective amnesia, or he lied. When Bush was questioned about the potential political abuse of the terror alert system, he lied again. He stated that it was the responsibility of government to inform the public when they had information about terrorist plots. In using this explanation, Bush forgot to mention that he received over three dozen official briefings from January to September, 2001 warning him of eminent terrorist threats to America, but he did nothing to warn the people who were in harm’s way. Bush has been having a lot of politically convenient lapses of memory recently. At his inauguration in 2000, Bill Clinton handed him a piece of paper with the five top terrorists listed from Osama Bin Laden in the top slot and Saddam Hussein at the bottom. Bush handed it back to Clinton saying that the top and the bottom should be reversed then he took the oath of office as president. One of his very first official acts as president was to demote Richard Clarke, who had been Clinton’s top expert on counter-terrorism. Bush was so bored by all the talk of al Qua’ida that he decided to remove Clarke from the National Security Council. The rest is history. Abusing minorities When the minority journalists questioned him about affirmative action, Bush reverted to his neoconservative mantra about the injustice of quotas. On this point, Bush is in perfect agreement with one John Hart, his fellow Republican candidate in Tennessee (see below), but he was badly out of step with the minority journalists. Realizing his predicament, he hastily mentioned his appointment of Condoleezza Rice, describing her as a “brilliant person”. He cited Colin Powell. This ploy is pure tokenism, and this cynical practice is despised by all minorities. Worse, in Bush’s case, it reeks. Bush has a record of appointing willing Afro-Americans to jobs that will attract criticism. He has a long history of using Afro-Americans as his political lightning rods. When he was governor of Texas, Bush presided over more executions than any governor in American history. Each death penalty case generates appeals, and Texas has the busiest appellate courts in America. During Bush’s governorship, an Afro-American spokesman for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was required to read the denials of the appeals of the innocent, the mentally ill and the children who were being executed at a phenomenal clip. That the majority of the victims of this draconian system were Afro-Americans made the selection of an Afro-American official who would be forced to publicly deny the final appeals of prisoners was a cynical act of political tokenism of the rankest order. Tokens in the White House Upon gaining the keys to the White House and the West Wing, Bush swiftly moved to appoint two Afro-Americans to positions that he knew would become the hottest seats in his administration: Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Advisor and Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. Neither Rice nor Powell ever makes policy, but both have to defend the indefensible policies flooding out Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle. In February of 2003, Colin Powell was forced to argue the fictitious case for Saddam’s WMDs in a highly publicized session of the UN General Assembly. Powell’s performance created an international firestorm of controversy that went unreported in America. Nobody believed him, and everyone remembers his role in covering up the My Lai massacre in the early 1970s. This year, Condoleezza Rice was compelled to defend herself from charges of professional incompetence and dereliction of duty when she appeared before the 9/11 commission’s televised hearings to explain why she had done absolutely nothing after receiving a continuous stream of reports on the imminent danger to America from a suicidal attack by al Qua’ida using hijacked airliners as missiles against major urban targets in New York and Washington. Her performance was hailed by the right-wing media in America, but it was impaled as transparently self-serving throughout the rest of the world. Afro-American lightning rods on the Bush White House His record is crystal clear, Bush uses and abuses Afro-Americans as his fall guys and patsies to carry the can and do all of his dirtiest political work. That is now a well-established fact. His latest attempt to abuse the Afro-American community came through his appointment of DeForest “Buster” Soaries as head of the Election Assistance Commission that was quietly drawing up official government regulations to cancel this year’s presidential election. Buster Soaries was actually in the process of obtaining official guidelines from Condoleezza Rice and Tom Ridge when his plan to cancel the election leaked into the mainstream media recently – which defused that bureaucratic time bomb for the present at least. Bush lied openly and repeatedly to the minority journalists, but they were too polite to ask him the obvious follow up hardball questions. Their format of asking only one question per journalist allowed him to utter his string of lies with virtual impunity. That said, there can be little doubt that the minority journalists will connect the dots arising from Bush’s pitiful performance to the facts of his failed presidency: America operates a brutal concentration camp at Guantanamo which is filled with racially profiled suspects isolated from their constitutional rights; Bush did nothing to warn America about 9/11 although he knew that the danger of terrorism was escalating throughout his first eight months in the Oval Office, but now that he is facing political defeat, he is issuing terror alerts two days after the Democratic Convention nominates John Kerry; Bush has approved commercials for his campaign that feature racial profiling of minority groups, and Bush is a lifelong opponent of civil rights, affirmative action and the rights of women. In his televised press conference, Bush lied to the minority journalists, and then he lied again and again and again. His performance was so self-serving and so transparent that he will undoubtedly receive a very poor response from all minority communities on Election Day. Actually, Bush should be frightened for his political life, and there is a mounting stream of evidence that proves that he is most definitely horrified by the turn of events in this turbulent campaign. Desperate and cornered Pitiful and transparent as Bush’s televised press conference on Friday the 6th of August was worse is yet to come, for he has authorized a covert political operation to disinform the American people in a vain attempt to discredit John Kerry’s military record. Feeling cornered and humiliated by the polls that reveal that he is now trailing John Kerry among US military personnel and their families, Bush made a furtive telephone call to activate his most shameful campaign ploy yet. Feeling isolated, Bush and his coterie of neoconservative sycophants recruited their most faithful political funders, Doylene and Bob Perry of Dallas, Texas. The Perrys are super-rich. They have amassed their huge fortune by building shoddy houses for poor Texans. A citizens group called Homeowners for Better Building have fought against Doylene and Bob Perry who refuse to repair the shoddy workmanship of their gimcrack houses. – Homeowners for Better Building Bush’s latest assignment for Doylene and Bob Perry was to pay for a huge buy of bogus television commercials falsely criticising John Kerry’s military record. But, this desperate ploy backfired almost immediately. The television attack was defused by FactCheck, who demolished it in a humiliating point-by-point analysis. – Fact Check Iraq erupts While Bush was lying to the minority journalists, Iraq erupted in flames. With Ali al-Sistani, the imam of the Shia, flown to London for medical treatment, Moqtada al Sadr, the defender of the sacred mosque of Ali ibn Ali Talib in Najaf, the holiest shrine in Iraq, has become defiant. Troops loyal to Sadr have launched the most aggressive attack since the ceasefire was declared in June. Reports in the international press indicate that American forces claim to have killed hundreds of Sadr’s troops, while the Iraqis say that they have lost one tenth of that figure. Both sides agree that the fighting has broken out once again between the Iraqis and the American forces in the city of Najaf. Elsewhere in Iraq, the Sunnis are battling against American forces near Samarrah. The Shia are battling the Italian troops in Nasiriyah, and Basra is teetering on a knife edge where five Shias have been killed by British troops. The situation will worsen between today and the election. – Independent Bush desperate Several weeks ago, the story leaked that the Bush White House was manipulating the war on terror for political purposes. Sources in Pakistan revealed that the Bush White House was placing pressure on General Musharraf to arrest major al Qua’ida figures in the run up to the party conventions. Like clockwork, in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic Convention, swathes of arrests have taken place in Pakistan and the UK of a motley crew of al Qua’ida suspects. This timely wave of arrests confirms the original allegations of Bush’s politicization of the war on terror. The race card In Tennessee, an admitted racist, John Hart has won the Republican nomination for Congress. On Election Day, the racist Hart will stand on the same platform as Bush. This year, Bush and Rove have played the race card and replayed the race card, and they are doing it again. Hart is an unabashed supporter of Eugenics, a racist paradigm. His win in the Republican primary is getting widespread international press and media coverage confirming, as it does, that America is governed by a party that includes card-carrying racists. The jobs crisis The international financial press is aghast that Bush created a very meagre 32,000 jobs last month. In June, the official Wall Street forecast was that 240,000 new jobs would be created I n July, but that was wildly optimistic. From the global perspective, it now seems as if the mighty American engine is winding down, and a depression is looming. The windows of Wall Street are opening and a new generation of investors are revising their economic predictions sharply downward. With the price of crude oil near all time highs, the incentive to invest in America is withering away, and John Kerry’s plan to invest heavily into new sources of energy is beginning to win converts on Wall Street. Wall Street the mood is deeply depressing The Dow Jones dropped over 200 points this week, and it is now trading well below 10,000. The Standard & Poors index and NASDAQ are both at their yearly lows. In recent weeks, major business magnates began flocking to support John Kerry with the defection of Warren Buffett and Lee Iacocca. Now, the pressure is on Bush, and the leakage from Wall Street to the Kerry campaign is threatening to turn into a flood. Cornered and terrified Bush’s moves in the past two weeks prove beyond any shadow of doubt that he is running scared. That is not necessarily a good thing. A frightened president might just do something desperate. What that might be, and when it might occur remain to be seen. We know one thing for certain: it will not be pretty.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
