The Debate Is Settled

One of the great questions of the day is whether Dubya and his minions are evil or just stupid. I haven't commented much on Dubya's administration's antics of late, because it seems as though no more can be said, but after what I heard on NPR this morning, I just had to say this:

They definitely are clueless, if not outright stupid. True evil is in general not so bumbling.

What did I hear, you ask? A recounting of Dubya's trip to India, wherein he said in his own words that India is "a great democracy where people of different religions live side by side in peace and harmony."

All I could think of was, "Oh, so that explains Kashmir."

But then again, I tolerate irony better than a lot of people.

Dubya went on to talk about how the outsourcing of US jobs to India is good for trade, thus good for us. I'd like to see him go into an American town and say that to the workers who've lost their jobs due to outsourcing. Or to those of us who have suffered through nearly incomprehensible customer service calls routed to an Indian telephone center. Between bad phone connections and too heavily-accented speech, such calls are not worth the time they take and the frustration they cause. Let's face it: Indians who speak English well and clearly are in professions, such as law or medicine. They are not slaving away at a cubicle in some sweatshop call center.

And don't even get me started on the putative UAE-company-[read "UAE," as the company is owned by the government--Ed.]-managing-the-the-US-ports deal. This is truly delicious for those of us who enjoy the taste of irony. Dubya may very well be right on this one, but he has handled it so-ham-fistedly that he's turned it into yet another strike against the competency of his administration. And for him to be complaining about people judging others based on racial/ethnic/religious stereotypes after some of the things he's said and done is entirely ludicrous.

If I weren't so afraid for my country and its future, I'd be ROFLOL.

I am quite sure that Dubya stopped paying attention to American history after he learned that Calvin Coolidge said that "the business of America is business." Someone needs to remind Dubya that just because a president said it doesn't make it right. Or true.

That same person also ought to remind Dubya that just because a president did it doesn't make it right. I do dearly wish Dubya's defenders would stop pointing to Abraham Lincoln's abuse of civil liberties in the North during the Civil War as justification for Dubya's illegal NSA wiretaps and whatnot. Lincoln is criticized to this day, and rightly so, even though he had much more justification than Dubya could ever muster for his excesses in the name of the "War on 'Terra.'" [Thank you, Molly Ivins. Not only did you capture the essence of the accent, you made a multilingual pun that accurately describes what Dubya and his gang are really doing.--Ed.] After all, Lincoln's governmental capital was located in essentially hostile territory. Not to mention all the other differences others have rightly elucidated.

But Dubya's belief seems to be that all is OK if pursued in the name of Free Trade. Thus his continued insistance on tax cuts for the rich in the face of truly ridiculous budget deficits--run up by him and his minions, to boot. All I can say is that anyone who clears less than $75,000 a year who buys into that is delusional. Don't kid yourselves, folks. The economic class divide in the USA is real, and widening. And if we get more and more "concealed carry" gun laws passed, the economic war may turn into a shooting one . . . on ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves.

That most definitively is NOT what Lincoln was thinking about when he wrote the Gettysburg Address.