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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
The primary theme of this blog in 2003… ...had to be that the Bush Administration is a dishonest bunch of assholes. I wouldn't be surprised if they are dishonest in other areas as well but they are certainly less than truthful in terms of their "war on terror." The examples I given in posts are too numerous to count and new support for this theory regularly appears. For example, in a December 15 floridatoday.com story, John McCarthy writes: U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.Assuming Bill Nelson is telling the truth, this claim was, to state the obvious, either true or it was not. If it is true, then either the Bush Administration has secretly, and for reasons that they are most likely the only ones to know, neutralized this threat and not told anyone or they have at least publicly pretended this threat doesn't exit and in the process mislead many people. If it is not correct, the Bush Administration was either dishonest or mistaken. The latter would mean that they had bad information and analysis, which they have not been upfront about. The former means that they are guilty of deceit on matters involving war and have manipulated the public's fears in order to get a war that they wanted for one reason or another. In other words, so long as Nelson's story is correct, they don't come out looking well and have been dishonest, if only for pretending that their failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not leave open the possibility of attack and/or that their information and the primary basis for their argument for war was based on faulty information. If Nelson's story isn't correct, there is a whole lot of information that has checked out and which leads to similar conclusions. (See October 2's "Did the Bush Administration expect to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?" for example.) This is significant because democratic decision making is a charade and restraints on government action are useless if that government can be dishonest with impunity for the sake of achieving the outcome they desire. I suspect that I will continue to make this point in 2004 but I don't expect it to make any difference. buzzflash.com's suggestion that "Bush's Worst Enemy" is "the truth" is at best delusional. Digging and investigative reporting aren't what’s needed to expose this administration. Just a little bit of time critically thinking about the contents of www.dod.mil, state.gov and www.whitehouse.gov will show that they’ve been dishonest, regardless of what David Brooks would have you believe. This doesn't matter, however, because there is no political force of any significance that stands firmly against the concept of the "war on terror" and points out that the vague nature of it amounts to "war on whoever the Team in power says war should be waged on." That's unlikely to change so long as it is easier to just say "we were attacked" so we can do whatever we want in the name of "protecting ourselves" or "Bush is stupid." If I had the ability to lethally inject Bush, my opposition to the death penalty would be tested greatly. |