From Big Blue Box Blog

The Polls Are In: 40% of Americans Are Blind.
By Winston Smith

The polls are in and, for the Bush Administration, they tell a story that would make Stephen King shudder in fear. A recent Pew Poll confirms the Zogby and ABC Polls- the President’s approval rating is in the low forties, and still free-falling. Pew finds that Bush and his Republican Party have only one arena- the war on terror- in which they are seen as more competent than the Democrats. The bad news is that Fear of Terrorism is no longer of primary importance to most Americans. More and more, it’s the pocketbook issues that are returning to the forefront. The question for most Americans today is: how come 40% of their fellow citizens are still blind?

When Bush took office in 2001 he inherited a budget surplus. He inherited a nation in which the middle class was steadily expanding, and the poverty rate had declined for nearly 7 years. It was a nation that had seen the rebirth of small entrepreneurial businesses, then witnessed many of those businesses grow into exciting and innovative engines of national growth. It had fought three wars in the previous decade, two of which had no casualty losses of any kind. Water and air pollution had dropped significantly in spite of the increase in commerce and its attendant infrastructure, making it obvious that commerce and conservation could live in the same world.

How is it that 40% of our population are unable to acknowledge that Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld has so badly bungled our invasion of Iraq. Is it not obvious that, when the Sunni Iraqis defeat the new constitution at the polls next month, the leaders of the insurgency will be able to declare victory and move ahead with their agenda: fomenting a civil war? He is so incompetent that he has ceded control of whole sections of Iraq to a ragtag guerilla army of 20,000. Their force of 20,000 has killed, maimed, or otherwise disabled 20,000 of our finest soldiers. They have no helicopters, tanks, or aircraft; nothing but old rusty sedans and pick-up trucks, yet they seem to maneuver in and out of battle zones with impunity. They have no sophisticated command and control; they have nothing much beyond hand carried messages and cell phones, yet they are able to make sophisticated multiple strikes on several distant targets at will. He has thus taken the greatest, most professional armed force in the world and, in less than three years, broken it to the point that his own general staff believes we should begin withdrawing these forces just to keep them viable. His flippant remark, “You go to war with the army you’ve got” belies the facts that he could have waited to assemble the army necessary, or that we didn’t have to go to war in the first place.

How can it be that 40% of Americans today are unable to see the quantitative plunge? How can it be ‘good government’ that, since January of 2001, 7 million people have entered the ranks of the impoverished? How is America a better place because 12 million more Americans are without health insurance than in 2001? As of today, more than 1900 American men and women have died, and another 18,000 wounded, in a war that has drained an estimated $300 billion from our coffers. Our President and his Republican-dominated Congress have squandered the surpluses of 2001 and added an additional $700 billion in debt, giving huge portions of the total to the richest 1% of America’s elite- a net change of nearly $1 TRILLION; he accomplished all of this in only 5 years. In order to give this money to his friends, he has cut services to the quick, and not just social services to the needy, but to the commercial infrastructure as well.

It is the winds of Katrina that have blown away the façade of conservatism so carefully manicured by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party over the last two decades, exposing the dark, rank fascism within. Levees ignored because of greed flooded a city full of those impoverished American who had also been ignored because of greed. Because of the greed embodied in the current Administration and its lock-step Congress, a problem that might have cost several billion dollars over the last several decades will force our children, their children, and their children’s children to pay several hundreds of billions over the century. The service of one year’s interest on the debt we will be incurring to rebuild New Orleans could have repaired the entire levee system. Instead, we must now rebuild a city, even crippled as we are by the greed of our current Republican-led government, the misadventures of their war, and the ineptitude of those leaders who have brought all of this about.

Evil, Bill Maher recently observed, is not an individual event or person; it is a chain. It is a chain around our ankles, and one that must be broken quickly lest we sink in the mire of our own creation.

May I distribute this via email if I give you proper credit ?

Nicely done.

Excellent! Same request as Pie -- I would like to send this to my e-mail circle.

Anyone who wants to use this for non-commercial purposes is welcome to do so, with proper source citation.

(Or you can send me a couple of grand and I'll tell the world you wrote it! )