I envied my parent’s generation.  Their generation’s war was WWII; they were called upon to fight genuine evil.  It was horrible, it was an awful waste, but there was no doubting who the enemy was, who was in the wrong or what had to be done and why.  Vietnam was my generation’s war.  Why were we there at all?  What were we dying for?  Everyone just knew that no heroes came back from that war.  Don’t believe me?  Show me even one ticker-tape parade.  Now this generation after mine is in that first position again, but it’s an even worse nightmare, one my parents could not have imagined, would not have believed:  This time it’s our leader!  This time we’re the torturers, the invaders, the destroyers!  This time we attacked first on a faked-up pretext and murdered, at the least, tens of thousands of innocent people, and all for the greed and fanaticism of a few.

I am angry, yes, but more than that, I am heartbroken. 

To paraphrase Stephen R. Donaldson: “When evil arises in it’s full might, it can wear the guise of good without fear of discovery.”  So it has indeed proved.  George Walker Bush says all the right words if you happen to be a rabid Christian or a Christian who doesn’t have more than three brain cells to rub together.  For the latter, you really should know that appearing to pray, going to church, and paying his debts by appointing other fanatics who don’t care about anyone but themselves and other rich people, doesn’t mean that George Bush is a good Christian, or even good at all.  He isn’t, believe me.

In the following essay I make a lot of statements, or call them accusations – they are.  Were I to include a bibliography, it would multiply the size of this essay to book length.  I am aware that George W. Bush has not been convicted of anything as of now.  If it were up to me, he would long since have found himself in front of a firing squad or something similar, so don’t blame me for his not having been convicted.  I am not a judge (not an official one, anyway), nor am I on a jury, but I am also not stupid or so blinded by wishing or religion or whatever that I cannot think.  The evidence is out there so thick on the ground that if you cannot find it, you do not want to find it.  If you do want to verify any of this, do what I did: go out and look!  I would suggest that you find an Internet source rather than any of the corporate media you find on television.  They are pretty much owned and operated by the Right, as in GOP TV.  Meanwhile, this is what is happening.   

He calls himself a “compassionate moderate”, for instance.  He is neither.  He has cut funding for every single program for children and the poor that he could.  In fact, he’s cut funding for every social program he could get his hands on.  Instead of fighting for the people as he should be, he is fighting to keep tax cuts for the richest one percent of the population.  His loyalty, what he has of it, is reserved for those who agree with him, back him, give him gifts of money, power, or both. 

When he made the decision to go into Iraq, which he did long before 9-11, long before even his election (which he stole, but more on that momentarily), he did so for reasons of profit and distraction, knowing full well that thousands would die, and tens of thousands would be maimed for life.  They did not and do not matter to him – they are the children of the poor, of the working poor (whom he has made even poorer), of the racial ‘Others’.  They are easily spent. 

He clearly – with faked evidence to back it up – lied to the people of this country in order to get us into an unending war that he wanted.  He lied through his teeth.  His reasons?  Control of Iraq’s oil was part of it, certainly, but not all.  It also makes a perfect distraction while he grabs up power, does away with civil rights, turns the middle class into the working poor, and hands over every dollar he can to corporations and rich friends and investors (which he calls campaign contributors). 

When he was Governor of Texas, he murdered more people using the death penalty than any other governor of any other state.  He had a tame lawyer to give him ‘legal interpretations’ that allowed him to feel good about setting aside international law as well as state and federal law in order to do so.  He saw to it that even exculpatory evidence was set aside so these people – always people of ‘another race’, always poor people – could be executed, making him look ‘tough on crime’.  He was used to killing people when he took – literally – the office of President of the United States. 

George Walker Bush lies constantly.  he has gone back on every promise he ever made, publicly at least.  He has enacted or otherwise enabled legislation to remove the rights and benefits of gays, women, working people, Muslims, Latinos, blacks, children, young people, old people – he is an equal opportunity thief.  He has also taken what is essentially Imperial power.  He does not wish to be a president – he wants to be a King.   And he almost is.  Laws he and his cannot pass aboveboard, they sneak in by stealth as hidden riders in last-minute, must pass bills, or Bush makes into law by fiat, called an Executive Order – or he simply ignores current law and does what he pleases.

He has suppressed or ordered suppressed reports that show how badly we are harming the environment, reports on trouble with the oil industry, on the economy, on the efficiency of the agencies that were designed to protect those things and us, on anything and everything that could not serve his purpose with the truth.  His faked reports on the so-called benefits of ‘abstinence only’ sex education, coupled with lessened availability of contraception and other medical care, have made our children far more vulnerable to AIDS and teen pregnancy. 

He has appointed incompetent cronies to head some agencies, very competent cronies to head others that they then proceed to render useless to anyone but the propaganda agencies, which are also illegal but operating with huge budgets nonetheless.  He has removed many of the benefits that were promised to them from veterans and active duty military, including some of the things that would have saved the lives and in many cases the health and wholeness of our people.  He has removed funding from all levels of our educational system.  He has encouraged the gas-guzzling vehicles that are most expensive and least safe, and done everything else he could to keep America dependent on oil, at the same time making certain that when the oil industry tanks soon – there is only so much oil in the world – that it will be a deadly disaster instead of the manageable crisis it could have been.

Hospital care is much less available to all but the wealthiest Americans.  He has legislated ‘relief’ for the wealthy and for corporations so that they can get out of paying the pensions and other benefits they promised employees, while making it almost impossible for ordinary people caught in personal disasters to file bankruptcy.  It is also now also all but impossible to file a class-action lawsuit – more protection for corporations. 

In the worst of his transgressions, he has made of us, the United States of America, torturers of men, women, children and the aged; this includes rape of all of them without regard to gender or age, and sometimes they die.  Again, these are people who don’t count.  They aren’t Americans (some who were have had their citizenship removed), they aren’t rich, they aren’t white, they aren’t Christians.  Apparently, to him and his, they aren’t human.          &nbs p;

Our international credibility and trust is all but gone.  We are now feared as the rogue state we are.  Having gone into the Middle East to remove a dictator who was suspected of having and using weapons of mass destruction, our own armed forces and those of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – in truth, a fast-disintegrating coalition of the bribed and threatened – have been using weapons of mass destruction that are killing and making our own people ill!  They will continue poisoning the people of those lands for centuries.  In addition to spreading ‘spent’ uranium over Iraq and Kuwait, they have also used white phosphorus, an internationally banned weapon, as is the napalm which we alone in the ‘civilized’ world now use.  Add to that another illegal weapon: cluster bombs; and we leave mines lying around to continue killing and maiming long after we are gone.

George Bush stole both elections that brought him to office with a combination of scams by corporations, lies spread throughout television and the Internet, gerrymandering, illegally disenfranchising felons and ordinary people whose names were similar to those of felons, throwing out non-Republican voter registrations, volunteers who lied to those at the polls and rendered their votes uncountable, simply throwing out votes,  and much other underhandedness, some of it foul indeed. 

He has fired every competent expert in the government who could help in the crises he has precipitated, and has replaced them with people like himself who will not listen to those who actually understand the situation.  He has intimidated or subverted most of the media who are supposed to be our watchdogs; those who do try to warn us are destroyed one way or another.  Those who dare tell a truth Bush does not want to be heard are labeled traitors, and if they cannot be prosecuted, they are persecuted.

George Walker Bush does not understand what America is about, what the value of personal freedom and liberty are, and he wants to get rid of them.  He does not agree with democracy or with the Constitution of the United States of America, and he is slowly but surely perverting and getting rid of both.  We have a Police State in many ways and in many places around the U.S. now.  In just a little longer we will have a true Police State, one in which free speech, in which we have a say in our own government, in which we have a right to choose our own lives for ourselves are all illegal.  All of these things are often punished already.

more than two million of our own citizens are already in prison for non-violent ‘crimes’ that caused no one harm, with many, many more anticipated.  Now, not only do we fight ‘pre-emptive’ wars, we make pre-emptive arrests of protestors and other dissenters, calling them traitors, when in truth they are true patriots!  Closer to seven million are caught in the justice system one way or another.  There are more of both in America than in any other country on Earth.  There should be no such thing as a ‘crime’ with no victim!  Such a thing is legislated religion, nothing else.  So much, then, for freedom of religion, free speech and separation of church and state.   Soon we can look forward to the deaths of our daughters from back-alley abortions after pregnancies that could have been avoided had they been properly educated and given proper medical care in the first place.  Our own people will continue being tortured and killed by diseases that stem cell medicine could treat or cure, as it will be doing in Europe and other places – but not here, because our government believes that God doesn’t like it.

There is only one description for all of this: this man and those who back him and rule with him are evil.  Period. 

In a country that has been used to following the law, in which the rule of law is a vitally important part of the foundation of what this country was and is, a man like George W. Bush who follows no rules except “Win!”, who believes in nothing but power, who is willing to lie, to twist and pervert any principle, to harm anyone to any extent he can get away with in order to get what he wants, the law has actually been made into a handicap.  While we faithfully follow the rules, he ignores them.  It is like trying to win a race with a man who cuts across the grass, ignoring the track, then lies and has others back his lie, saying he followed the track like everyone else.  He uses our very honesty and our willingness to believe in the honesty of others against us.

A Special Prosecutor might be our last chance to take America back by legal means before it is destroyed completely.  Either we do take back the government as the Constitution and the law of the land allows for, or we lose everything.  Even if the proper legal entities and procedures decide that he must be removed, I have no doubt that if he could keep a few around him who would still defend him, the attempt would be met by deadly force, and given the chance, he would authorize poison gas, spent uranium, plain old rifle bullets – whatever it took, against our own citizens. Having called himself a ‘healer, a communicator’, he has divided us steadily, and would divide us in another civil war if that were what was required in order for him to retain power.  After all, it would only cost the lives of peons.

George W. Bush is a divider, a destroyer, a mass murderer,  a liar, a war criminal, a thief of position and of trust, and he must be impeached!  Our survival as a country, the survival of our children, of the environment in which we came to be and need in order to continue, and of the very principles that made us great once are all at stake.

I was born just after the tag-end of WWII to the sounds of reveille and departing jackboots.  Mom had served in Germany, and my step-father, lifer military, had grown up in Brooklyn with a German last name and a father who wept when the National Anthem was played.  (Interesting note: Dad was called a “baby killer” as a teen growing up in Brooklyn; in the military many years later during Vietnam, so was I).  Dad remembered German POWs at the fence being allowed to accept German dishes from immigrants from the Fatherland that they had prepared for these poor, deluded German boys; they were good boys, really, who had been lied to, that’s all.  Patriotism and generosity were the themes of life then, and everyone in the military was a hero.  Even in the cartoons I grew up watching, the bad guy almost always had a German accent, (unless it was Russian).  I remember thinking that if Hitler had been an American, he would never have gotten so far; ordinary citizens would have pulled him bodily out of the White House if necessary, and the Secret Service and Army would have let them, I was sure, assuming he’s managed to lie his way that far.  It seems I was wrong.

I understand Germany a little better now.  I can only hope that Europe and the rest of the world will be as understanding and forgiving of us as we were of them when that time comes.  Hopefully, when it does come – and it will – we will not have been as thoroughly ruined as Germany was, but that one is a slim hope.

When did we as a people, and especially our ‘representatives’, lose the discernment with which we once knew evil when we saw it?  Like all corruption, it happened a little at a time.  We’ve been warned about it time and again, starting with Ben Franklin, through Eisenhower to Noam Chomsky to the veritable horde who are now shouting, screaming, writing and doing all they can to get the information out past the neocon filters in the media and elsewhere.  How, when and whom matters little now, though; the fact remains: we’ve been taken over by demagogues, by fanatics – well, you’ve seen the list of adjectives – who will destroy us if we fail to act.  As for me, I will never kneel to a king, whether he is called President, Leader-for-Life or whatever, nor will I support laws that drain this country , it’s people, it’s resources and it’s future to a dry husk.  I will not go quietly.

Will you?  Veteran or no, I can only hope not, and disabled and all, I will fight as I can.  If all of us will, we still have a chance, but it is dwindling even as you read this.  Keep it in mind, for all our sakes.

Sincerely,

Ian MacLeod

Veteran, USN Hospital Corps

Disabled

Oregon