Imperial Angst

Seven years of mendacity and mediocrity. That's what we have suffered under the Bush regime. I speak not from an institutional platform but from my personal web log. I speak only for myself as a concerned and disappointed citizen. Our inarticulate, unreflective, theocratic, autocratic, and (for his first term) unelected president has proven to be perhaps the worst leader in US history, certainly the worst president in my lifetime.

George W. Bush has done more to threaten civil liberties than any outside foe could. He has done more to redistribute wealth from the middle and lower classes to the most privileged in society than any president ever. He has proven himself an enemy of the environment and he has played the part of bumbling buffoon to our embarrassment in the community of nations. The economy continues to turn against those who work the hardest for the least reward. And yet, as reprehensible a record as he leaves us, perhaps the most grievous sin of his administration is the occupation of Iraq.

Saddam Hussein has been toppled and executed and his country starved by sanctions and torn apart by war. No one on the planet suggests Hussein was anything other than a monstrous thug, but he was a monstrous thug who apparently lacked the weapons of mass destruction he was accused of harboring and he was a monstrous thug who did not attack our country.

Hussein has been executed and his people have been killed by American weapons. Americans, too, have been needlessly killed. The so called "War on terror" has been a murderous assault launched with arrogance and defended with lies, and though we are told all of this is meant to make us safer, one wonders how playing the senseless bully will possibly endear us to the world or protect us from our enemies. In fact, I bet we have more enemies today than we did 7 years ago.

I'm tired of hearing about people losing their homes.
I'm tired of outrageous gas prices.
I'm tired of an immoral and seemingly endless war.
I'm tired of Christian Fundamentalists telling us that preemptive violence is the only way we can be safe from Islamic Fundamentalists.
I'm tired of the poor getting poorer.
I'm tired of the planet being strangled to death.
I'm tired of the insanity.

We could have voted George the Terrible out of office in 2004...we did not.
We could have impeached him for his unethical and dishonest war...we did not.
Somehow, we were too hopeless or too lazy or too self-loathing to demand a competent leader with wisdom and intelligence; and we allowed a self-righteous, war mongering, intellectually deficient puppet of the Religious and Political Extreme Right to exhaust our resources, our hope, and our souls.

Will we finally demand better? Will we finally vote for peace and prosperity and liberty and justice for all? Or will we choose (or allow the powerful elite to choose for us) another priest in the cult of mediocrity to lead our country backward and downward to incurable despair? I don't know who will be the next president, but I pray that it will finally be a person who will value peace and fairness and inclusion. If not, our country will collapse under the weight of its own angst and the American Empire will deservedly be in its last days; and we will have little say in which nation takes our place as the new global bully. God help us...