Election day is approaching. We have narrowed down the pig pile of Democratic candidates to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who looks more like a melted candle than any other previous presidential hopeful. We are facing the moment of truth: the moment where we decide to either A) take a look at the state of the country and decide to fix it or B) let the fat-cat incumbent have office for another four long years.
Yep, 2004 is the year when we’ll know whether America is sick of George W. Bush’s inept, dangerous idea of presidential duty, or whether we are gullible enough to buy even more of his creative lies and allow him to rule for another term.
Me? You may not have guessed yet, but I’m willing to do without Bush and his cronies for the rest of my life. Who needs to be led down – yet again – the weedy path to war, to economic instability, to environmental destruction and to Bush’s special brand of fundamentalist Christian, narrow-minded moralizing?
We all know by now that the war in Iraq was a sham, that Bush wasted the lives of countless American servicemen and women and even more innocent Iraqi’s to cement his own bullheaded, short-sighted machismo. His now-known-to-be-false declarations of WMDs in Iraq were just the work of an angry, overgrown frat boy seeking to correct an insult on him and his property. Since that “insult” was as catastrophic as Sept. 11 that required the man with the itchy trigger finger to send over military action to a desert country, while hostile, had nothing to do with the attacks. But boy did Bush’s war-mongering briefly make him – and, by extension, America – look strong and tough. (No, it just made us look more stupid and egotistical than we already are perceived to be.)
So we know all that now. Now Bush wants to move away from the controversy of the war to some new controversies that will – in his mind at least – make him look like the ideal candidate for the 2004 presidency. He wants to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11 for his own gaining, using horrifying images of death and destruction from that day to further his own end. He’s using the grief and pain of the families of victims to help promote himself as some sort of modern American hero, bravely leading the country after the worst man-made tragedy since Pearl Harbor. All hail, the self-made deity George W. Bush and his use of emotional manipulation to fraud a public still hurting – almost three years later – from one of the biggest mass murders in American history! Forget that he has, is, and probably will continue to use the terrorist attacks as his own personal “heroic” photo opportunity.
When he’s not busy riding on the coattails of suffering to score himself a political victory, Bush is busy surfing the waves of ignorance and discrimination – all in the name of preserving the “sanctity” of marriage. Bush has been vigorously pushing for an amendment to the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Bush wants to take the living will of the people, the document that has, for over 200 years, protected our rights as citizens in this country of ours, and use it to forbid a percentage of those citizens from having equal rights. And this is the man that represents the American people? If he represents us, than all the strides we, as a people, have made in favor of equality the years will be rendered moot. With Bush at the helm, we are basically saying that we are nation of people who are separate but equal, where only certain folks receive freedoms. Another person has no right to tell another person what to do, unless the person’s activities negatively affect others. Loving a person, regardless of his or her gender, should not come under any legal jurisdiction. No one has the right to put limits on who anyone can love, even if they don’t personally find it “moral.”
Bush’s nefarious recent activities also extend to include outsourcing jobs to foreign countries despite the fact that our economy has been ailing since Bush’s 2001 inauguration. According to the AFL-CIO website, the economy has lost 2.9 million private sector and 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, leading to a unemployment rate that’s been at it’s highest since 1983. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors has said it would have established 3.9 million new jobs (upwards of almost 325,000 a month), but is currently 1.8 million shy of its goal. Bush ignores the workers he courts with his tasteless, but manipulative ad campaign designed to prey on their patriotic, full-blooded-American beliefs. He sends needed jobs overseas to, as he says, boost our economy and forgets the millions of struggling Americans lost with sources of income. How does this help? Yes, outsourcing costs less in taxpayer money than hiring within, but without jobs those Americans can’t even pay their taxes. Bush serves his own special interests, not the people. Hopefully, we won’t lose sight of that as November draws near.
Johnny Donaldson is a Collegian columnist.
