Barack Obama, the Anti-Bush

The Infinite Echo
B. Thomas Cooper
Editor

Barack Obama is everything George Bush is not. He is good looking, he is brilliant, and yes he is multi-ethnic. More importantly, Mr. Obama is a man of great integrity, a candidate who will stand with the people, a far cry from the paranoid doom merchant currently occupying the oval office.

Can Obama capture the White House in 2008 the way he has captured the hearts of so many Americans in recent months? I think he can, and you never know… he just might.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Crawford Texas…


Original post from - National Newswire


I am pleased to hear so many voices of late apposing the Bush administration’s blind arrogance, an arrogance which has already caused the loss of over three thousand American lives in Iraq.

Bush wants to feed more soldiers into the fire. A surge, as he prefers to call it, but a tragic sacrifice of lives and a monumental strategic disaster by any account. Bush simply doesn’t give a rats nickel. He is more concerned with winning a bad war than solving a bad problem. George Bush and his administration are not listening to America. They are not listening to reason.

The surge has already begun. More than three thousand additional troops shipped out before congress was ever notified. Bush is the decider, as he says. Like it or not, he has made his decision. He has decided to sacrifice more American lives in a last ditch attempt to save face. As they say, no-one likes a loser, and that is not how George W. Bush wishes to sail into history. A “Last chance to win in Iraq? Forget it George, that ship has sailed.

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Hubris and Folly (Revisited)

The Infinite Echo
B. Thomas Cooper
Editor

Hubris and Folly.

Just two of the words used by Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post to describe the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and subsequent occupation.

And those were the nice words.

In his book, Fiasco, Ricks also accuses George Bush of being misguided, and incompetent, providing a plethora of disturbing detail, guaranteed to cause the reader great anxiety.

“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,” Mr. Ricks warns. “The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”

Indeed!

Sectarian violence is all the rage now, and the afore-mentioned “regional conflagration” is warming up backstage. This as members of Congress prepare to battle the president over his determination to increase US troop levels in Iraq by twenty-one thousand, at a time when the majority of Americans would like to see the troops brought home.

Saddam has gone to the gallows, but violence in Iraq continues. Yesterday, 70 people were killed, and another 170 wounded as a result of a deadly attack on Mustansiriya University, north of Baghdad. Scores were killed or wounded in other attacks throughout the region. Iraqi civilians continue to die in huge numbers. Over thirty-four thousand Iraqi citizens were killed as a result of the violence in 2006 alone. So far 2007 is shaping up much the same.

The situation in Iraq is dire indeed and no-one suffers more from the carnage than the Iraqi’s themselves. I certainly hope they have enjoyed their brief dance with Democracy.


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George W. Bush, a Legacy of Lies

The Infinite Echo
B. Thomas Cooper
Editor


Go ahead, admit it.
The manner in which George W. Bush has conducted his administration during the past six years has been nothing less than shocking. I doubt anyone, including myself, could have predicted the level of arrogance and hubris demonstrated by these individuals. Good ol’ boys, indeed! Good-fellas is more like it!

And that’s just for starters. No other administration in our nations history comes even remotely close to the shear volume of shameless, unrepentant lies, as those foisted upon the American populace by George Bush and his cronies. When it comes to dishonesty, this administration takes the cake, and then lies about it.

Unfortunately, far too many Americans are still willing to turn a blind eye, having chosen to either ignore the lies entirely, or write them off as business as usual. There-in lies the rub. Perhaps the endless parade of disinformation streaming from the oval office is, as some insist, business as usual, but it most certainly shouldn’t be tolerated, nor should it be ignored.

Wake up, America!
The Bush administration has serious integrity issues. These guys would lie about the weather. In fact, they already have. Just ask one of them about global warming.

And the lies just keep rolling in. Try typing “George Bush” and “Lies” into Google, and see what you get. The results are staggering. Yes, every administration buries it’s folly under a mountain of untruth, but presidential scholars have concluded no other administration in US history has ever told so many obvious whoppers with such blatant disregard for the ramifications.

These are not little white lies, mind you. I can’t help but believe there is a substantial difference between a semen stain on a dress, and bloodstains on a flag draped coffin. Bush apparently sees no such distinction.

George Bush still claims we invaded Iraq for all the right reasons, although those reasons have now changed. He claims leaving Iraq too soon will only embolden the enemy, an enemy who’s country George W. Bush invaded, and destroyed. He claims the media isn’t showing the progress in Iraq, but I have yet to see a new Starbucks open in Baghdad. Take a good look at the carnage, my friends. If that is reconstruction in progress, then I must be the Lindbergh baby.

Yes, George Bush claims a lot of things, many which simply aren’t true. His lies have already led to the untimely deaths of over three thousand Americans in uniform. Predictably, he claims their deaths are difficult for him.
He often talks of their sacrifice. He talks of meeting with the families of the fallen and how he feels their pain. And yet, I can’t help but wonder if it’s all just another lie.


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Happy New Year, & You Can Quote Me On That!

The Infinite Echo
B. Thomas Cooper
Editor

Happy New Year
And You Can Quote Me On That

I’m taking the day off today. I hope you are too!
In the spirit of good will, I have collected a few of my favorite quotes for you to ponder during the next three-hundred sixty-five days. Read on.

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on occasions, that I wish it always be kept alive”

“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government,
And to protect it’s free expression should be our first object.”

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty,
than to those attending to small a degree of it.”

“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, it’s necessary consequence.”

Thomas Jefferson


“All wars are follies… very expensive, and very mischievous ones.”

“There was never a good war or a bad peace.”

“Wars are not paid for during wartime. The bill comes later.”

And of course, the oft referenced…

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary security, deserve neither and will lose both.”

Ben Franklin


“Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.”

John Adams


“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

“An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”

George Washington


“If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

“I’m the commander, see… I don’t need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president.”

“There are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way… any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap it requires, a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way… when we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think patriot act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protecting our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”

George Bush


“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation which is attacked, and every man will be glad for those conscience- soothing falsities, and will study them, and will refuse to examine any refutations of them, and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self deception.”

“Our country, right or wrong. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?”

Mark Twain


“In order for a lie to be effective, it need not be accepted as truth…
It need only be accepted.”

“Information is a unique currency. It possesses an intrinsic value and is instantly redeemable. It can be transferred, stolen, manipulated, diluted…
even hoarded.”

“Ignorance is bliss, providing one happens to be ignorant.”

“It is neither noble, nor patriotic to guard the door, while the fox raids the henhouse.”

"It is truly pathetic, the extent to which fear has caused our leaders to betray our core values, and allow the wholesale destruction of our basic civil liberties."

“May the truth be your longest shadow.”

B. Thomas Cooper

Have a wonderful 2007,
and you can quote me on that!

Brad

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