George W.
Bush Is Still Our Enemy
By David
Salyer
George W. Bush, America's first court-appointed
president, is still stupid. It was easy to forget that
fact in the aftermath of those horrific September 11
events. After that day, the nation's journalists and
pundits seemed reluctant to criticize or question the
actions of this president or his administration. It's
a good thing to support our president in times of
chaos, but it's folly to forget that this particular
president is both insidiously manipulative and
breathtakingly dumb.
I keep reading articles about how George W. Bush sounds
all presidential and statesmanlike since September 11.
No, he does not. Take his September 16, 2001 speech
for instance: "We've been warned there are evil
people in this world. We've been warned so
vividly," followed by, "And we'll be alert.
Your government is alert. The governors and mayors are
alert that evil folks still lurk out there." I'm
sure, like you, I had forgotten that evil folks are
still lurking out there, wherever there is. I
had forgotten all about slavery, the decimation of
Native Americans and that whole ugly Holocaust thing.
Now just in case you didn't get his point the first
time, he added, "My administration has a job to
do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of
the evil-doers." Am I the only person who
thinks this is the all-time most bogus, swaggering,
absurdly over-the-top political promise in the history
of American politics? "Rid the world of
evildoers?" He sounds like those gaudy,
money-sucking evangelists with bad hair on cable
television.
Look, I don't doubt that George W. Bush takes his
job seriously. It's just hard for me to take him
seriously when he speaks to the nation as if we're all
seven years old with learning disabilities. We know
someone else writes all those speeches he delivers
earnestly with a furrowed brow. When he does stray
from the carefully scripted reassurances and is forced
to utter spontaneous sounds, he resorts to
embarrassing good guy/bad guy clichés -- like when he
announced that he wanted to capture Osama bin Laden
"dead or alive." I guess that sounds
presidential…if you were president in 1842.
Last October, George W. offered his personal
reflections on the terrorist attacks of September 11.
He said, "I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is
such misunderstanding of what our country is about,
that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most
Americans, I just can't believe it. Because I know how
good we are…" This president doesn't really
want to examine the "misunderstanding." He
certainly does not want you to reflect upon why
other citizens of the world might hate us. He just
wants you to be afraid, and he will use your fear,
diverting your attention away from significant
domestic problems neither he nor his administration
has the will or mental capacity to tackle.
Sure, there's a reason George W.'s job approval
poll numbers are above 80 percent -- because it's
not okay to criticize this man who has vowed to rid
the world of its evildoers. On some deep, primal
level a whopping majority of us just want some kind of
revenge on those terrorist bastards…and George W.
Bush knows that, too. That's why he's declared a
"war on terrorism" and continues to remind
us that "we're at war." This president, in
all his nonintellectual glory, is way too eager to
declare his war, something that will likely last for
years and cost billions of dollars. Not unlike our
so-called "War on Drugs." Remember when
America had that sordid drug problem and so we
declared a war on drugs and spent billions of dollars
and now no one is addicted to drugs anymore and you
can't even buy them on the streets anywhere? Uh huh,
the new war is going to be just like that. No more
evildoers!
Perhaps by the end of January you were starting to
feel less afraid. Maybe you were beginning to stop
thinking about lurking evildoers and focus on other
things like the Enron corporate scandal, the
recession, unemployment or even the Super Bowl. Maybe
you were getting on with your life…until George W.
delivered his State of the Union Address on January
29, reminding us "as we gather tonight, our
nation is at war" and "our war against
terror is only beginning." Afghanistan is no
longer a threat -- we've blown that country to
smithereens and we'll spend billions to rebuild it -- now
he says we need to fear Iran, Iraq and North Korea, an
"Axis of Evil."
It costs a lot of money to rid the world of
evildoers; 30 million dollars a day and over a billion
dollars a month since September 11. For 2003, this
president proposes a $379 billion Pentagon budget,
roughly 48 billion more dollars for military and
defense spending than last year. In this case, he's
not stupid, just manipulative. He knows that without
creating conflict through chest-beating speeches, eye
for an eye belligerence and Wild West rhetoric, his
presidency is hollow, made only occasionally memorable
by events like choking on a pretzel.
Now I know I've been really harsh about George W.
Bush. Well, I'm not finished. See, in ten years I
believe with all my heart that the only thing we'll
have to show for his war on terrorism is a huge
national debt and the increased hatred of the rest of
the world. I'd like to be more optimistic, but he's stupid.
And you know what else? If you're a person living with
HIV or AIDS, he doesn't give a rat's ass about you.
There's no time for you or me in his
all-war-all-the-time agenda. The only way he's going
to get his war bucks is by gutting or jeopardizing all
kinds of domestic programs, like public housing
projects, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the
Ryan White CARE Act -- programs routinely accessed by
people living with HIV.
Worse, his administration is already threatening to
slash funds for AIDS education and prevention efforts,
characterizing them as "obscene" simply
because educators sometimes use graphic language or
materials when appealing to specific populations.
George W.'s solution is to fund sexual abstinence
programs that forbid discussion of birth control or
condoms as effective ways to prevent pregnancy and
sexually transmitted diseases. Oh, never mind that not
one shred of scientific research supports the efficacy
of abstinence-only programs. He just doesn't want you
to know how to protect yourself. He doesn't want you
or your children to know you have options. He doesn't
want you to be educated about your choices. He wants
you to wallow in sexual ignorance and just say no to
sex outside the confines of a traditional heterosexual
marriage. Your ignorance, his bliss. Period.
Then, to drive that point home and further
undermine HIV and sexual health education, George W.
appoints conservative Republican ex-congressman Tom
Coburn co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council
on HIV/AIDS. Coburn, an obstetrician from Muskogee,
Oklahoma, fiercely opposes a woman's right to choose
and supports teaching sexual abstinence excluding all
discussion of birth control. Even though he was
instrumental in securing Ryan White CARE Act funding
while serving in the House of Representatives, he has
also publicly and regularly criticized the
effectiveness of condoms and flatly opposes needle
exchange programs -- his theory being that since they
don't work all the time, we should stop
presenting them as options anytime.
Tom Coburn has said that his personal views would
not dictate the work of the Presidential Advisory
Council on HIV/AIDS, but this is a guy who proudly
aligns himself with ultraconservative, abstinence-only
groups like Focus on the Family and American Family
Association. His personal views are public record and
I'll bet this big fat liar is slobbering over the
opportunity George W. has given him to push an
ill-conceived conservative HIV policy agenda. Let me
add a pathetic footnote here: Coburn condemns
homosexuality as an immoral lifestyle, so it's all the
more bizarre that the openly gay director of the
Office of National AIDS Policy, Scott Evertz, advised
Bush to appoint Coburn. In other words, the very first
high profile, open homosexual with direct access to
the president basically said, "Pick the guy who
thinks I'm immoral." As self-loathing goes,
that's a fairly spectacular example.
Ultimately, I think my biggest fear is that
whatever progress we've made during the last twenty
years of AIDS -- testing, research, education,
prevention, funding, treatment, legal protections --
will be undermined and mitigated by a stupid white guy
and his stupid white cronies, not one of whom appears
to have the depth of character to rise above
constipated, simple-minded political posturing long
enough to address the American epidemic and global
pandemic of AIDS. Only stupid people defiantly
incognizant of human nature and sexuality would think
we can stop the most devastating scourge since the
European Black Plague of the 1300s by telling the
entire population to just say no to sex outside a
"traditional" monogamous marriage.
The fact that I think President George W. Bush is
stupid, and that I'm willing to say so, will probably
make a lot of people angry. I don't care. I know it's
possible to be pro-America without being pro-Bush. I
can love my country and still be embarrassed by its
leader -- an arrogant, unbridled warmonger who wants
us to believe that patriotism means subservience.
Right now, I'm a lot more terrified by this guy than
all those lurking evildoers.
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