Think about this question: In the 21st century what regime
is more lawless than the Bush Regime?
Everyone is entitled to his own answer. The only answer I
can come up with is the Zimbabwe regime of Robert Mugabe. Voted out of power in
the last election, the great man hasn�t left. Zimbabweans are going to have to
vote again, and the great man has said that any vote that is not for him will
be cancelled by a bullet.
Does anyone remember how determined the British and the
Americans and everyone else was to turn Rhodesia over to Mugabe
in order to save Rhodesia
from the evil Ian Smith? What a fool everyone was.
But before we laugh at those fools, we had best laugh at
ourselves, or cry.
It is now an incontrovertible fact, known all over the
world, that George W. Bush and his regime�s operatives lied through their teeth
in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and that
the Bush regime is doing the same thing again in hopes of launching an attack
on Iran.
There have been a number of memoirs from high-ranking Bush
appointees who cannot stand all the lies. Bush�s first secretary of the treasury,
Paul O�Neill, told
us that an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda prior to 9/11. There is the
leaked Downing Street
Memo in which the head of British intelligence told the British prime
minister and his cabinet that the Americans have decided to attack Iraq and are
creating the "intelligence" to justify the attack.
And now we have the White House�s own spokesman from
2003-2006, Scott McClellan, ratifying what we already knew: that President Bush
deceived us and led us into war based entirely on lies and fabrications, and
that he, Scott McClellan, was deceived into issuing a false public denial that
top Cheney aide Scooter Libby and White House operative Karl Rove were involved
in committing a felony under US law by revealing the identity of a covert CIA
operative, Valerie Plame.
As a consequence of Bush�s lies, there are a million dead
Iraqis, mostly women and children, 4 million displaced Iraqis, 4,100 dead
American soldiers and tens of thousands of seriously wounded. No one knows how
many dead in Afghanistan. And there is the ongoing Israeli slaughter of
Palestinians and Lebanese that has fallen under the rubric of the "war on
terror."
The only ones pleased with these wars are the American
neoconservatives, the Israeli right wing, the US corporate military-security
complex, and Osama bin Laden.
The Bush regime has created enormous hatred and disrespect
for the United States. A recent worldwide poll found that George W. Bush ranks
at the bottom of world leaders as one of the least trusted, along with US
Pakistani puppet Musharraf and the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, who has the
disadvantage of being the victim of demonization by the US and European
corporate-controlled media, which serve as ministries of propaganda for the
governments that control their broadcast licenses. The American and European
media lie for their living.
The two leaders with the highest approval rating are UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and former Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So, the old adversary, Russia, now has a more respected
leader than the "leader" of the Great Free Nation, a Great Free
Nation that has sat on its hands while its "leader" destroyed
America�s civil liberties, America�s reputation, the jobs of Americans, and
committed the US to a course of war crimes punishable by the International
Criminal Court at the Hague.
A number of readers took issue with my recent column, Obama and the
Fall into Tyranny. Echoing
former Alabama Governor George
Wallace, readers said Obama would make no difference. But that is what I
wrote.
My point was not that Obama would make any difference, as he
has put himself and his administration into the hands of Wall Street and the Israel
Lobby. I said that the American people could make a difference by rejecting the
Republicans, as it was the only accountability that the Republicans were likely
to suffer.
If Americans return a Republican regime, Americans will
validate the right of the president to violate with impunity US and
international law. Americans will validate the use by the president of the
United States of deception and lies in order to initiate wars of aggression,
aggression that is a war crime under the Nuremburg standard established by the
US. Americans will validate the infringement of US civil liberties in the name
of "safety" and "national security." Americans will
disembowel the US Constitution and leave themselves at the total mercy of the
government.
Reelecting Republicans means the end of the United States as
a land of liberty.
I am sympathetic to the argument that we, as a country of
liberty, are near our end regardless. Look at the Democrats. Last Friday, the
House of Representatives, which the voters gave to the Democrats in the 2006
congressional elections in order to end the pointless barbarity that the US has
brought to Iraq, voted the largest war-spending bill ever. The
"antiwar" Democrats completely collapsed, giving the warmonger
Brownshirt Republican regime everything it wanted.
The House Democrats, led by "impeachment-is-off-the-table"
Nancy Pelosi, added to the Democratic
Party�s shame by passing a bill
that shields from punishment the criminal Bush regime and the
telecommunications corporations that the Bush regime coerced into committing
felonies under US law by cooperating in Bush�s illegal spying on American
citizens.
The great hope of the Founding Fathers, the people�s house,
the House of Representatives, has passed an unconstitutional retroactive law
making acts legal which were illegal when they were committed.
If a Democratic House of Representatives will pass a
retroactive law in order to legalize the criminal violations of a
Republican regime, the same House will pass a retroactive law making illegal
what you did legally yesterday. No one is any longer safe in America. By abandoning the US Constitution,
Republicans and Democrats have made America as potentially unsafe as Zimbabwe for
anyone who takes exception to the government.
The total collapse of the Democratic Party and the House of
Representatives signals the end of liberty and democracy in America.
Henceforth, led by the Republican Federalist Society, we will gravitate toward
the beautiful regime of "energy
in the executive" that has been achieved in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe.
Paul
Craig Roberts [email him] was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan�s first term. He
was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic
appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic
and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by
French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton
of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the
Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelow�s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of
prosecutorial misconduct.