The only hope Bush gives me, is hoping my vote gets counted.
http://www.allhatnocattle.net/9-16-03-bush_low_employment.htm
Tuesday,
September 16, 2003
Bush: All hat and no cattle
By MAUREEN DOWD
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/139705_dowd16.html
WASHINGTON -- This is how bad things are for George W. Bush:
He's back in a dead heat with Al Gore.
(And this is how bad things are for Al Gore:
He's back in a dead heat with George W. Bush.)
One terrorist attack, two wars, three tax cuts, four months of
guerrilla mayhem in Iraq, five silly colors on a terror alert chart,
nine nattering Democratic candidates, 10 Iraqi cops killed by Americans,
$87 billion in Pentagon illusions, a gazillion boastful Osama tapes,
zero Saddam and zilch WMD have left America split evenly between
the president and the former vice president.
"More than two and a half years after the 2000 election,
and we are back where we started," marveled John Zogby,
who conducted the poll.
It's plus ca change all over again. We are learning once more,
as we did on 9/11, that all the fantastic technology in the world
will not save us. The undigitalized human will is able to
frustrate our most elaborate schemes and lofty policies.
What unleashed Shock and Awe and the most extravagant display of
U.S. military prowess ever was a bunch of theologically deranged
Arabs with box cutters.
The Bush administration thought it could use scientific superiority to
impose its will on alien tribal cultures. But we're spending hundreds
of billions subduing two backward countries without subduing them.
After the president celebrated victory in our high-tech war in Iraq,
our enemies came back to rattle us with a diabolically ingenious
low-tech war, a homemade bomb in a truck obliterating the U.N. offices,
and improvised explosive devices hidden in soda cans, plastic bags and
dead animals blowing up our soldiers. Afghanistan has mirror chaos,
with reconstruction sabotaged by Taliban assaults on U.S. forces, the
Afghan police and aid workers.
The Pentagon blithely says that we have 56,000 Iraqi police and security
officers and that we will soon have more. But it may be hard to keep and
recruit Iraqi cops; the job pays OK, but it might end very suddenly,
given the rate at which Americans and guerrillas are mowing them down.
"This shows the Americans are completely out of control," 1st Lt. Mazen
Hamid, an Iraqi policeman, said Friday after angry demonstrators gathered
in Falluja to demand the victims' bodies.
Secretary Pangloss at Defense and Wolfie the Naif are terminally enchanted
by their own descriptions of the world. They know how to use their minds,
but it's not clear they know how to use their eyes.
"They are like people in Plato's cave," observed one military analyst.
"They've been staring at the shadows on the wall for so long, they
think they're forms."
Our high-tech impotence is making our low-tech colony sullen.
"It's 125 degrees there and they have no electricity and no water and
it doesn't make for a very happy population," said Sen. John McCain,
R-Ariz., who recently toured Iraq. "We're in a race to provide the
services and security for people so the Iraqis will support us
rather than turn against us. It's up for grabs."
McCain says that "the bad guys" are reminding Iraqis that the
United States "propped up Saddam Hussein in the '80s,
sided with Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war,
told the people in Basra in '91 we'd help them get rid of Saddam and didn't,
and put economic sanctions on them in the '90s."
He says we have to woo them, even though we are pouring
$87 billion -- double the amount designated for homeland
security -- into the Iraqi infrastructure when our own
electrical grid, and port and airport security, need upgrading.
"If anyone thinks the French and Germans are going to help us readily and
rapidly," he says, "they're smoking something very strong."
Mocking all our high-priced, know-nothing intelligence, Osama is back in the
studio making his rock videos.
The cadaverous caveman has gone more primitive to avoid electronic detection,
operating via notes passed by couriers.
We haven't forgotten all Bush's bullhorn, dead-or-alive pledges.
But he's like a kid singing with fingers in his ears, avoiding mentioning
Saddam or bin Laden, or pressing the Pakistanis who must be protecting
Osama up in no man's land and letting the Taliban reconstitute
(even though we bribed Pakistan with a billion in aid).
He doesn't dwell on nailing Saddam either.
His gunsmoke has gone up in smoke.
Maureen Dowd is a columnist with The New York Times.
Bush starting to question advice from some top aides
By John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Sep. 18, 2003
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/6806674.htm
WASHINGTON - Faced with rising costs, sinking polls, unsympathetic allies,
an increasingly skeptical Congress and potential splits in his political party,
President Bush has begun to question the hard-line Iraq policies long
championed
by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
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