I Love My Country - I Hate My President
By James C. Moore
BuzzFlash.com
9-11-3
When President Nixon died, I was assigned to travel to California and report on the funeral for a group of television stations. Although Yorba Linda is beautiful, with the kind of appeal that has drawn millions to Southern California, I was not interested in being a journalist at the funeral. Sure, this was history, but I despised Richard Nixon. His lust for power, and his absolute distrust of the public, nearly destroyed our country’s Constitution.
I think God even had some feelings about Nixon. For the first time in Yorba Lindaís recorded history, hail fell, a half a foot in a few minutes, just before the eulogies were to begin. After our satellite trucks had been rattled, and our rental cars dented, the historical revisionists began to march to podium to try to find good things to say. Every man, of course, should have friends to speak of him at his passing. But they should speak the truth. Let the opinions of his enemies also be heard. None of Nixon’s was spoken for, and they were many and manifest, all across America.
Another reporter, knowing that I had come of age during the Vietnam and Watergate eras, asked me what I thought about the former president being gone. I tried to remain ambivalent. But it wasn’t easy.
"It’s not a good thing to be happy about someone else’s death," I told her. "But I certainly will not miss him. Nor do I think will our country. And I know a lot of very patriotic people who, if they were here, would ask to open the casket so they could drive a stake through his heart to make certain he was dead."
I gave into dark, tasteless humor. But it was true. Nixon had scared and angered people in a way no president before him ever had. I was not certain my country was going to survive his lies until I heard the reassuring timbre in Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s voice as she said, "My faith in the Constitution is whole."
But I only despised Richard Nixon. I never hated him. I have never known what it is like to hate anyone. Until now.
Until George W. Bush became president.
I hate Mr. Bush and what he is doing to my country. I cannot believe the range of duplicities involved in his administration; the gratuitous lying to serve profit and political purpose. As the president lies about Iraq, lies about the economy, lies about the environment, lies about his tax cut, lies about the education bill, lies about the budget, lies about his real interests in Africa, lies about Halliburton; he is destroying the American public’s faith in the democratic process.
Mr. Bush has done things in my name, and yours, which repulse me. I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein’s two sons needed to be brought to justice. But I was disgusted that my country gave sponsor to the notion of showing their dead faces on television, as though that might reassure the Iraqis. This was the modern international equivalent of brutal tribes placing their conquered foes heads on a spike in the town square. I despise the way Mr. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and all of the neo-cons, had developed a military plan that sent our brave soldiers to secure oil fields, rather than protecting the people of Iraq, the institutions of their culture and commerce, which Saddam Hussein had been misusing for decades.
The president, and his cynic-in-chief, Karl Rove, are using a manufactured war to keep Americans scared. And it is working. But I am ashamed that the president of my country would go back to the United Nations, the very organization he ignored when he launched the war, to ask for help in securing Iraq. Mr. Bush grew up in West Texas, where billboards dot the Permian Basin landscape with the message: "U.S. out of U.N." And because Rove wants to keep the fundamentalist right happy, Mr. Bush made clear that he would act without the imprimatur of the U.N. And now he has the audacity to seek its help.
I am repulsed by my president. He allowed the drums of war to get hammered over aluminum tubes, which were never meant for anything more deadly than the making of rockets. The whole notion of the tubes being part of the construction of a centrifuge had been refuted by several international organizations, including America's own Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, fourteen months before the story was leaked to a compliant, lazy U.S. media. The tubes were for the construction of Medusa 81 rockets, an Italian-designed weapon. Everybody in the intelligence community knew it, and Rove and the White House Iraq Group sent down orders that government intelligence experts were to keep their mouths shut about dissenting information.
I am ashamed of the actions that my president has allowed to take place in our democracy. Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife have spent most of their lives in service to our country. When he was asked by the State Department to check on claims that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger, Ambassador Wilson came back to report the documentation was completely fake. The White House ignored his intelligence and the president put the claim in his speech. Wilson, who has devoted his life to the truth, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times, and not too many weeks later, discovered that columnist Robert Novak was revealing his wife’s name and her undercover responsibilities for the CIA. Novak has long been Karl Rove’s favorite leak.
During the presidential campaign, when reporters began talking about Mr. Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard, Rove suggested, "You guys shouldn’t make too much of a few missed meetings." A few days later, during a discussion of the issue on "CNN’s Crossfire," Novak told other commentators they were getting carried away over "a few missed meetings." He is Rove’s conservative hand puppet. By leaking Ambassador Wilson’s wife’s name to Novak, and by Novak writing a column about her, Karl Rove has committed treason, violated the National Security Act, and should be brought to justice, as surely and swiftly as Osama bin Laden ought to be. All of the undercover operatives Mrs. Wilson dealt with during her career overseas, many of them Americans, are now at risk of being killed by the arms dealers, who thought they were something other than CIA agents.
There are too many lies, too many transgressions to list. Richard Nixon, in a less cynical era, told only one. And we were all supremely affronted by what he did to our democracy.
George W. Bush, and Karl Rove, has told dozens, each one of them more damaging than lying about a break-in of a political headquarters. And yes, Bill Clinton lied. But nobody died. He told an all too common male lie about consensual sex. But he did not send the sons and daughters of America marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told lie.
George W. Bush’s one term will mark a low point in our countryís history. But if we all pay closer attention, and vote, we can recover.
I love my country. But I hate my president.
- James C. Moore is co-author of 'Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W.Bush Presidential'
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