I usually don’t comment on politics here on this blog, but I thought the recent commentary by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was a clear, powerful, accurate and compelling viewpoint on the current political firestorm our President, George Bush, has created by commuting the sentence of Vice President Dick Cheney’s advisor, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who had committed one of the most egregious crimes against his country–the United States–by outing CIA agent, Valerie Plame, after her husband, the former ambassador Joe Wilson, criticized the Bush administration for the use of faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Today, over 70% of Americans want this war ended now. Despite what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and other right wing media outlets report, the war has gone horribly wrong and the recent troop surge is making little impact. The United States needs leadership to solve this war, to curtail Wall Street profiteering at the expense of the average American, and to solve the health care crisis in this country that sees some 40 million of its people without basic coverage.
Our government is beholden to corporate interests, graft and corruption and its time for change.
In this MSNBC segment, Olbermann makes an extraordinary statement about the Bush administration’s willful manipulation and disregard for the American public, our law, due process and any sense of reason. As a United States citizen, I am sharing this so you too can be equally as outraged as I am about what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Republican party are doing to this country. They have complete and utter disregard for the wishes of the American public. The same American public who recently elected a Democratic House and Senate in a sweeping mandate for reform and a change in the direction of the United States of America. At no time in my 40-years of life have I ever lived through such an era, where an administration came to power only to enrich their cronies and party members while destroying the political capital and good the United States had built up coming into the 21st century.
Despite what people say about Bill Clinton, he put this country on the track to grow into a new world order. People believed in Clinton, and he left office with one of the highest approval ratings of any two term President. Today, that vision has been severely impaired. What Bush, Cheney and the Republican party have done to the United States is shameful. If you speak out, they call you “un-American” and accuse you of “siding with the terrorists.” As Rosie O’Donneel pointed out, “who are the terrorists? Are they the Islamic fundamentalists who have set out to harm us, or could they be politicians who use a policy of fear to emotionally freeze a nation that is lulled into a false sense of security and believes its being protected? But, are we?
Now, I don’t necessarily agree with everything Rosie says, but she does do one thing–her speaking out makes you think about the issues. At the very least, it makes you question what you’re being told by the right-controlled media. Is what they’re telling us correct, or are they using disinformation to lull us into a false sense of security for their own political purposes? How do we, as collective nation, rise up and make our voice heard. Whether it be a general strike, a work slowdown or writing your Senators and Congress men and women, Americans need to do something, and they need to do something now. Calling for the resignation of George W. Bush is certainly a good start.
Who profits from the war on terror? I know, I don’t. Nor do the families and loved ones of those killed on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Haliburton has the no-bid reconstruction contract, simply because they say no one else has the experience to do the job. The stress on oil reserves and refineries to fuel the military complex fighting the war has caused high prices and record profits for the oil companies. The longer this war goes on, the longer American tax dollars are siphoned away from progress on education, health care and solving our poverty crisis. The longer those in power with special interests profit, the longer the United States loses it standing in the world.
Not that I had any faith left in this President and his administration, but this act wholeheartedly destroyed any support I might have mustered up in a crisis. George W. Bush does not care about what the American people want or what they voted for. Bush & Cheney have torn to shreds the United States Constitution. Everyone I know believes Libby should serve time for outing a CIA agent, one of the most despicable and egregious crimes against the United States one can perpetrate. Libby put the lives of Valerie Plame, her husband, other CIA agents and all Americans at risk when he leaked Plame’s name to the press. Who knows what the real extent of Libby’s crime was? We’ll never know, because the administration has covered it up. And now, the administration is giving Libby a pass after taking one for the team–the Republican party.
Libby should be in jail. Bush and Cheney and should resign. Here, watch and judge for yourself.
7/7/07: Correction: I. Lewis Libby was convicted of Obstruction of Justice. Although he is suspected of outing Plame, he was never charged. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby
