- President Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled
Congress for lying about sex. President George W. Bush and aides lied the
United States into a stupid, unnecessary colonial war that has so far killed
more than 305 Americans and seriously wounded more than 1,400. It has also
cost many thousands of Iraqi dead, and $1 billion US weekly.
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- Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the
nation into war apparently is not.
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- I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any
day over Bush's Mussolini-like strutting. Sen. Edward Kennedy is absolutely
correct when he calls Bush's Iraq war a "fraud" concocted to
win the next elections.
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- A fraud and an epic blunder.
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- Last week, Bush received a glacial and scornful reception
at the United Nations that symbolized the world's contempt and disgust
for his administration. Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on
the speaker's rostrum has a major leader so embarrassed himself and his
nation before the world body.
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- In his UN speech, Bush again claimed Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction and "ties" to terrorism. Days later, U.S.
intelligence teams that scoured Iraq for four months reported no traces
of weapons or terrorism links - the pretext used by Bush and his neo-conservative
handlers for unprovoked war against Saddam Hussein.
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- The White House was left choking on its own grotesque
lies.
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- Incredibly, VP Dick Cheney, a prime architect of the
Iraq war, actually claimed recently that Iraq still had mobile germ labs,
though U.S. and British inspectors debunked this claim last June. The "special"
intelligence network created by neo-conservatives is still apparently feeding
disinformation to America's leadership.
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- This latest humiliation came only days after Bush finally
admitted Iraq was not, as most Americans were misled into believing, behind
the 9/11 attacks.
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- No wonder world leaders gave Bush the cold shoulder,
and even usually timid UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned against "dangerous
acts of unilateralism" - a pointed reference to the bellicose Bush
administration.
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- Unfortunately, many Americans still do not understand
how gravely the Bush White House has damaged and sullied their nation's
once noble reputation.
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- Dangerous Aggressor
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- Recent polls show that even among traditional friends
abroad, America is no longer regarded as a champion of freedom, democracy
and human rights, but increasingly as a dangerous aggressor bent on imperial
domination and exploitation.
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- America's most precious and proudest asset, its moral
reputation, has been gravely damaged by the Bush White House. The only
positive note: rising anti-Americanism is largely associated in the eyes
of non-Americans with the persona of George Bush, a man who projects almost
all the negative stereotypes foreigners hold of Americans.
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- Bush's blinkered core supporters in middle America simply
don't understand or don't care what the rest of the world thinks of their
nation, which, since 9/11, has wrapped itself in a cocoon of xenophobia
and self-righteous rage.
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- The White House's mouthpiece media, led by Fox News,
have simply blanked out world opinion and endlessly chorused administration
war propaganda.
-
- A fascinating March study of network TV news by New York's
Fairness and Accuracy in Media shows how Americans were misled into war
by outrageously biased programming on Iraq.
-
- The analysis found: a) 76% of all commentators about
Iraq on TV were present or former government officials; b) only 6% of commentators
expressed skepticism regarding the need for war - when 61% of the public
supported more time for diplomacy and inspections; c) on the four TV networks,
less than 1% of sources were identified with anti-war groups.
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- And more than two-thirds of commentators were from the
U.S., 75% either present or former government or military officials. The
small number of foreign commentators mostly came from nations like Britain
and Israel which were backing Bush's war policy.
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- In short, the major networks, under White House prompting,
beat the war drums and blatantly excluded commentators with contrary views,
giving Americans a badly warped view of world events.
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- No wonder so few Americans understand what is going on
abroad, how the outside world really sees them, or why America has so many
enemies overseas. Small wonder many Americans are turning for balanced
news to the CBC, BBC and the Internet.
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- Citizens of the old Soviet Union suffered the same information
isolation. Like Americans since 9/11, they were force-fed agitprop and
patriotic pap disguised as news, and deprived of all knowledge of the real
world around them.
-
- Back to reality. Bush's UN speech was another attempt
to mislead Americans into believing the horrid mess in Iraq - entirely
the creation of Bush and the neo-cons - is somehow the fault of the UN.
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- French President Jacques Chirac proposed the U.S. hand
Iraq over to UN control. But Bush, still lusting for Iraqi oil and fearful
his family foe, Saddam Hussein, would return to thumb his nose at him,
foolishly scorned this wise proposal.
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- Bush is praying his hit teams will assassinate Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein before next year's elections. But even that
may not save him from the growing anger of defrauded Americans who are
slowly realizing that his Iraq war was a political version of the giant
Enron swindle.
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- http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_sep28.html
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