The DavidCyrus Blog of Wisdom

Bush-Lovers Seizing Their Opportunity
All manner of crazy Rightists proclaim how well their mission's been accomplished

They're coming out of their backwoods military compounds and survival shelters to coronate their cowboy king. His brilliant and righteous strategies have led them to victory, and along the way, planted the seeds of world peace now blossoming throughout the Mid-East. But true colors are shining through their celebratory amnesia; the emphasis isn't so much on how right they believe Bush is, but how wrong they've "proven" the Left to be.

Charles Krauthammer writes in the "Washington Post" that the entire international Left has suddenly been shamed into acknowledging that their view of Arabs was not only incorrect, but "...morally bankrupt".

What an article! In it, Krauthammer attempts to twist reality to argue that the Left: (1) supports the notion that Arabs love slavery, (2) supported Saddam Hussein's sovereignty and all manner of his dictatorial rule, and (3) uses their concern for human rights as, "...nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism."

The Left has never supported slavery, nor regimes that practice it, and most definitely would never argue that Arabs love it. We might argue that a majority of Arabs love Allah (a concept so befuddling to Rightists that it is often dismissed as paganism) but justifying slavery by implying that the slaves love it is a Rightist, Ku Klux Clan tactic, not a progressive Left principle.

Furthermore, the Left never supported Hussein's rule. That, too, was strictly a characteristic of Reagan-era Rightists, who generously supplied him with the weapons they swore he still had in 2003. It was the UN weapons inspectors and world-wide sanctions that disarmed Saddam, not Bush. He simply walked in when the job was complete.

How fervently the Rightists want to forget the facts of Bush's nation-building. We have now occupied Iraq for over two years, and neither Osama Bin-laden nor any weapons of mass destruction have been corralled. We have replaced Saddam's rule with an occupation that itself has killed over ten thousand Iraqi civilians. Allegations of torture, murder, and indiscriminate denial of civil liberties are drowning the notion that our forces represent freedom. Our 130,000 troops will not be withdrawn or even reduced in 2005, as planned earlier, and may remain in Iraq indefinitely, according to Bush.

Is this money well spent? How selective are we with our military machine? According to calculations based on the DOD's International Institute for Strategic Studies, we lead the world in military spending. This seems obvious, of course, but ponder this; we also spend more on our military than the rest of the top 20 spending countries do, combined.

Maybe it's time to lay our budget out on the table to critically review what we're really getting for all this money and effort, and stop praising false accomplishments as justifications for our nation-building. The true shame should be cast upon the war-mongering elitists who trumpet approval for the havoc we wreak, not upon those who question that myopic imperialist mindset.