September 12, 2007.
What we have is a president who has tried to protect our nation from a danger: the threat of right-wing religious nuts of the Muslim faith who are trying to take over our nation.
They aspire to make it an Islamic theocracy by going to war (rightly so, in Afghanistan and questionably in Iraq), and it isn’t going to matter to history if the reasons given for invading Iraq were valid. The danger to us is clear.
But he and his administration have been a part of the danger to our nation from right-wing religious nuts of the Christian faith, similarly trying to take over our nation and making it a Christian theocracy. And the method has been as dangerous as the threat from the Islamic Taliban. He has put people in places of power who either used laws to push a religious agenda, or violated laws — as has been shown in the Justice Department, etc. His “Monica” is a greater threat to our nation than Clinton’s “Monica” ever was. There is no possible justification for loading a department with hundreds of graduates of one religious oriented law school (Pat Robertson’s Regent University) and then have that department fire competent and ethical people who did not follow their political agenda. And that is not even to consider the incompetence of Alberto Gonzalez.
If George W. Bush is truly religious, then he must be judged as a failure since under his stewardship our nation has been made a less safe nation to live in, and he has threatened our civil liberties unnecessarily (which it was clear he would do when he was willing to threaten the civil liberties of homosexual citizens to gain political favor with bigots in order to win elections).
It is ironical that his administration has violated the military’s policy on homosexual personnel, don’t ask, don’t tell, and kicked out valuable people needed to fight the war in Iraq, so we have, in theory, only heterosexual men and women fighting a war that is important to homosexual people since if we lose the “war” the Muslims will follow their book and laws and kill us.
In addition to his own sins that history will judge him for, his party has so much sleaze and hypocrisy that that alone would lead “history” to say his time in office was a terrible time. As many people have said, no work of fiction would be believed if it covered the many acts of hypocrisy that has come from Republicans, who claimed they would lead our nation back to dignity and morality. How do you explain that the very people who tried to pass laws against sex acts have been convicted of seeking and performing those very acts? How do you explain former Republicans now in jail for stealing from the taxpayers? How do you explain law enforcement agents who violated the laws they were hired to enforce, going into a hospital and trying to coerce an attorney general to allow them to violate the law?
When they were willing to violate the rights of one minority, homosexuals, that should have been a warning to intelligent Americans that they would be willing to violate any and all citizens’ rights if it benefited their agenda. And if a term said it was wrong, they would change the term, as Karl Rove was so good at doing.
At the end of his time, we are worse off in every way than when he came into power, and that includes the radical right-wingers he let dictate to the rest of us. They did get special rights, as did corporations, and the rich rich, as they falsely accused homosexuals and others of seeking. As science has shown, when someone accuses you of something, you can be sure it is they who are guilty of it.
The next election will tell us whether or not Americans have learned to judge a party and person by their actions, not their sermons. We will know if they have learned what is really important for our government to be doing to and for us, whether it is keeping homosexuals from marrying and from fighting for the country in the Armed Forces or keeping religious bigots from dictating what we have to believe. Do we want to fight a war based on what some people think their Bible, or Koran says about how the world will end or when a “savior” will return, using another nation’s existence as a tool?
History will judge American citizens too, as will future generations — if they are still free.
