Four more years ...

The country has spoken -- not as loudly as a certain president would have us believe -- but we're stuck with him. And already we're being told the opposition is welcome into the fold -- as long as they agree with the policies du jour. I find myself thinking this great nation has peaked out and is now entering a phase which may be the beginning of the end. We wouldn't be the first world power to fade after a few centuries.

Amidst all the ranting and raving about values, 52% of the country appears to have forgotten that social justice and stewardship of natural resources is part of morality. Most of the current push is aimed at controlling private, personal behavior. Societal ills like poverty and the slow destruction of the middle class are of no particular concern; high profits are more important than protecting the purity of our air and water.

There is one silver lining in this massive cloud. GWB is now stuck with his own mess, and it's going to be tough to blame Bill Clinton for Iraq.

The following was written in May:

The items I listed below about Why do our neighbors hate us pale next to the insanity billed as the War on Terrorism. Things were already more than bad enough, and now we're hearing verified accounts of gross violations of military conduct code, and of the Geneva Conventions, in prisons in Iraq. We've already made a mess out of that country by failing to plan for security and rebuilding prior to the invasion, and now we're compounding our problems by antagonizing what few sympathizers we may have had over there.

I still believe we, the public, were lied to about the reasons for going into Iraq; it was about oil. We have spent somewhere near 200 billion dollars, of money we don't have, making a mess and upsetting our allies as well as stirring up our our enemies -- this is a foreign policy? Already the number of innocent Iraqi civilians killed exceeds the number of innocent Americans killed on 9/11 by a factor of two to five, depending on whose numbers you believe. And to this writer, the end is nowhere near in sight.

The whole matter of terrorism is an issue of criminal behavior, not declared action between states. As such, the use of the word "war," and the heavy-handed military posturing is totally wrong. Our persistent refusal to build a consensus and work within a UN framework is destined to keep us struggling with terrorists forever.

D. W. Thomas 03 May 2004, Additional comments 18 December 2004