The camel's straw
It's not that easy to describe my political position. I read The New Republic and Mother Jones. I'm a capitalist. I believe that profit is a good thing, and that mega-corporations have stolen free enterprise from the marketplace. I believe in personal responsibility and that how we treat the weakest and neediest in our world is one of the greatest indicators of our character and values. I believe in legal marriage for homosexuals because to deny that right creates a less than equal class of citizens in a country where that's not supposed to exist. I believe in being fiscally conservative, spending less than we bring in, preparing for emergencies and saving for the future, but it looks like that's become a liberal value. I believe the protection of our environment is a conservative value because it maintains value for the future. I believe that we have a right to privacy from not having people listen to our telephone conversations to what happens in our bodies. I believe that accountability should be for everyone, not just those who can't buy their way out of it.
No matter how I try to wrap my brain around this one, though, I can't make it fit into a real national agenda, even one tailored by the extreme right. Someone please tell me one logical reason why the fuck we need a nearly $600 million embassy the size of the Vatican in Iraq? Just one logical reason please that doesn't provide proof that our President's primary belief and value system is manipulating the American public for an agenda that benefits only him and his cronies, while trying to misdirect the people who put him in office with words he thinks we want to hear.
Those are the harshest words I have ever written or spoken about George Bush. I'm old fashioned. I believe that the office of the President of the United States of America should be respected, regardless of who holds the office. The person in the office is a symbol as well as an individual, and that symbol deserves respect. Over the last seven years, I have gotten more and more discouraged though, and I don't know if I can keep that up or ever offer it again to another President.
I've known for awhile that I was one of the last of the true believers in the American Way, truth, justice, liberty, equality, all that jazz. A Girl Scout to my core, an annoying do-gooder because doing good is what's right, I tear up at the national anthem because of what we tried to be and what we could be with the ideals established by our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Bush administration may have stamped that out in me. What's the point when our country has become all about the concentration of power and wealth for the few?
Please mend my broken heart. I miss the country I was raised to respect and love.
Iraq embassy
posted by Cynthia at
11:04 PM
8 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Bush Administration has been an education to many of us pie-in-the-sky idealists. I lost my "respect for the office of the presidency" early on in Bush's first term. George Bush is an idiot, a charlatan, a liar, a criminal, and worse. The fact that he occupies the "Office of President" does not make him any more intelligent, honest, or deserving of my respect or loyalty. The Republican Party has had a field day with folks who believe as you do and as I DID. "Respect the OFFICE" ...because they sure as hell know the man himself does not deserve it.
And as far as our national anthem goes, I lost my love for it years ago, when I realized it is little more than a war chant...
Oh dear ~ you hadn't heard of the Emerald City and it's Golden bunker, the Last Great Excess of King George? No wonder you still had stars and stripes in your eyes.
I feel your grief. My mourning period is already over. I marked the death of the republic with the silent coup/court appointment of the Idiot Prince turned Mad Warrior King. Now I am left with only bitter regret. We should have fought harder to save that which we cherished.
Welcome to the club no one wanted to join. Take a seat and have a cocktail; it's going to be a long dark night.
You found your angry words. Much better than mine, because my angry words got lost in my throat and were all about making sputtering sounds and strangling, choking motions. A part of me died when I read about this clusterf*&^ing abomination.
Cyn, you may absolutely, positively speak for me on this subject today - especially since I can't do it without becoming apoplectic. You have found something constructive to say out of this mess.
Let's mend together.
"We" need the embassy because the administration has been floating trial balloons in the last week or so that Iraq is the new Korea.
Never mind that we have something like three or four thousand soldiers in South Korea as a show force opposed to an inept and tragically poor North Korean government.
Never mind that part of the trial balloon, which appears to be tacitly accepted by the Democrats, is a U.S. force in Iraq in the tens of thousands for the forseeable future and that they are going to be shot at and blown up for the foreseeable future for no other reason than some sort of national honor thing.
The new mantra seems to be that this is no Vietnam, it's Korea.
The only saving grace for me is that I'm too old to have to die for the idiocy, I just get to pay my "fair share" to pay for it, and the aftermath.
Finally, your mild diatribe was much better put than this comment.
Cynthia,
Its people like you that help me keep some of my faith in humanity. Thanks for yet another thoughtful post.
Peace, Virginia
I can think of so many other uses for that money...aids/HIV, MS, feeding & sheltering the poor, Child protection.
Do we even need an embassy in Iraq?
Makes me embarassed to be a repulican.
I will always love America, but the leaders are something else. The world cannot keep going on such a money-driven agenda. Somewhere along the line, ideals have to matter again.
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