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An Appeal To The American Conscience By Timothy V. Gatto 02 July, 2008 I have never helped to elect a president, not by voting anyway. Every vote I that I’ve cast has been for the loser. This is one reason why I don’t gamble. This election will be no different, and that’s why I won’t cast a vote for president. I don’t want to insure a McCain victory by voting for Obama or anyone else. I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about impeachment. Many Democrats have claimed that impeachment could jeopardize their chances of putting a Democrat in office. If you look at recent history however, impeachment has been a very good thing for an opposition party. When Nixon was facing impeachment and resigned instead, the Democrats were able to get Carter elected. When Clinton was impeached the Republicans were able to elect Bush. That particular argument just won’t wash. Impeachment has been a good thing for the political party that introduces it. The Democrats have actually come out against impeachment because this president has such a short time left on his term. I wonder if they have ever considered this to be a reason to impeach. There are many reasons to expect that Bush and Cheney will decide to attack Iran before they leave office. The idea that they would be under indictment could be seen as a way to take the wind out of their sails. The article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker this week illustrates exactly how serious this administration takes the idea of regime change in Iran. It is a foregone conclusion that war with Iran is one of the top objectives that Bush & Co would like to accomplish before another president takes office. The idea that Bush would like to take on Iran if it appears that Obama will succeed hi has already been voiced by Bill Kristol and other Neo-Con cheerleaders. Why the Democrats still refuse to support Rep. Kucinich and his 35 Articles of Impeachment is a mystery. This refusal to impeach has left this country with a situation where we actually have only two branches of government, the executive branch and the Supreme Court. This has been the case since September 11, 2001. This Global War on Terror effectively silenced Congress as far as acting as a check on the executive branch. The Democrats were handed what amounted to charte blanche when they captured Congress in 2006. It was totally unexpected when the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, took impeachment “off the table” as soon as she took office. Since that time the Democrat controlled Congress has become a virtual rubber stamp for the executive branch. There are so many Democrats in the House and Senate that march in lockstep with the Executive Branch; it is very hard to tell the Democrats from the Republicans if you attempt to do so by their voting records. It’s no wonder at all why so many Americans have become disenchanted with government. The very idea that the United States is funding groups that are attempting to achieve regime change in Iran by force is something the American people have greeted with a shrug of their collective shoulders. It appears that we have become inured to overthrowing governments as if it was something that is perfectly acceptable, just another day at the office. It is hardly surprising that governments that are the targets of our Machiavellian schemes don’t particularly like us, yet we are surprised when they actually come out in public and tell us how fiendish they believe we are. They call us things like “The great Satan” and other choice words to describe us. When they attempt to emulate us by planning to bomb people and places, we are shocked and horrified that they would actually try to do us harm. We call them terrorists and radicals, Islamo-fascists and extremists. We have Senators like Joe Liebermann that has never seen a plan to kill and injure Islamic government officials that he didn’t like, or pre-emptive war plans that he didn’t support. We deal with terrorists by becoming worse than they are. We match their rhetoric by attacking their religion, and then wonder why our soldiers shoot their machine guns at the Koran. We are at a loss to explain why the Iraqi people didn’t welcome us with open arms when we invaded their country after blockading them by sea and air while 500,000 of their children died from starvation in the period from 1993 to 2003. We have multiple personalities in this country. On one hand we give billions in foreign aid to countries around the globe so that they can feed their people and buy medicine to heal their them. This very government that works for good in the international community then supplies weapons and chemicals to kill those that stand in their way. This nation’s biggest exports are weapons of war. We export revolution and prop up repressive regimes. We may not be as evil as some nations but that is no consolation to those left behind. We have no control over nations that export and supply those that wage war. The only government that we have any control over is our own, and everyday we have less and less control over that. The American people have little knowledge of what our leaders are doing in our name. So-called “religious leaders” support the killing of those that confront us. We sit in judgment while we watch the news in our living rooms, knowing full well that we aren’t getting half of the real story. We sit in ignorant bliss while our government provides money and weapons to insurgents that attempt to overthrow governments that don’t agree with American policy. The news we hear from the mainstream media is censored and rewritten to make it palatable, the speeches we hear from politicians are edited for consumption, and the education our children are receiving has been revised to fit the “American world view” of the period. I don’t claim that I have any answers that would fix the problems we confront. If we could in some way force the MSM to tell us the truth and not spew propaganda that would be a start. If we could provide some type of educational program to teach Americans how to empathize with people of other nations, if we could actually get our people to think about how we would feel if we were Iraqi or Iranian for just a short while, that would make a difference. If this country of ours would actually attempt to conduct its affairs according to international law that also would make a huge difference. These are concepts that the United States should be following anyway, it is not unachievable. We have no special place in the world because of our military. Empires come and go, that is a fact. We may believe that we have a “special” place in history and that we are different than all the empires that have come before, but the truth is that we are no different than any other empire, no better, no worse. The people of America should be outraged by the article in The New Yorker. I wrote an article a few weeks ago and the readers of My DD challenged me on a statement I wrote about the US trying to force regime change on Iran with subversive groups working inside of Iran. I couldn’t provide information on how I learned about it. Now that I have a source, it probably will make no difference at all. The people that commented just wanted to blow holes in my argument. It made little difference about where I came by my information. There will probably be those that will try to find a sentence, a paragraph or a word that will face scrutiny in this article. This particular article attempts to illustrate how this nation has two different set of rules; one for the United States, and one for the rest of the world.
http://www.countercurrents.org/gatto020708.htm |
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