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Have we really learned any lessons?
March 19, 2008 - 7:01am
By DOUG THOMPSON

Demonstrators gather on the Washington Mall today to protest five long years of a failed war in Iraq, a war launched by invasion of a nation that posed no threat to us, a war founded on lies and faked intelligence reports, a war that has helped drive this nation into economic chaos and destroyed American morale and its reputation with allies and its own citizens.

President George W. Bush will claim success in Iraq in a speech before a carefully-screened audience at the Pentagon today but his speech will be filled with the same lies and cooked statistics that have marked his discredited Presidency.

Bush, and those who surround him, are serial liars who treat truth as a disposable commodity and use the laws of the land as toilet paper. They have shredded the Constitution, eliminated the civil and individual rights that used to define this nation and brought a once-great America to its knees.

Today is more than just an observance of a lost war. It is an anniversary of a five-year long assault on the foundations of a nation, a milepost in the dismantling of a way of life and a culmination of Bush's desire to ruin a country and leave it in tatters as his Presidency comes to an end.

No President in history has done as much to break the backbone of America and cripple a government designed to serve the will of its people, not the corrupt agenda of a criminal cabal that serves only the greed and self-serving interest of fatcat lobbyists and rich friends.

An armada of hijacked commercial airliners crashing into hundreds of national landmarks could never do as much damage to the American psyche as George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, thugs and scoundrels. No invading army could ever have taken over the government and subverted it as much as Bush and his partners-in-crime -- the Congress of the United States.

Bush invaded Iraq but he did so with the explicit approval of Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Two of those criminal co-conspirators are running for President today. Bush destroyed the Constitution of the United States with a USA "Patriot Act" approved by a vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and reauthorized, again, by a majority of members in both political parties.

If the Republican-led Congress rubber stamped Bush's actions, the Democratic-led Congress that replaced it went along with his lunacy and reneged on promises to end the war that marks its fifth anniversary today. Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton may talk about opposing the war but she voted to authorize it, voted to strip away American rights in the Patriot Act and she has never, ever, apologized for those mistakes. Barack Obama says he opposes the war but we have yet to hear where he stands on the rights-robbing USA Patriot Act.

Bush has led American's descent into a political and moral hell but he did so with the help of Congress and the complicity of a media that did not ask enough questions before the war and an electorate that returned him to office.

He remains in office because Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refused to allow her colleagues to bring forward well-deserved articles of impeachment against a criminal President. The blood of those who have died in an illegal and immoral war stains not only the hands of George W. Bush but also those of too many Republicans and Democrats in Congress who did nothing to stop his lunacy.

Today Bush will lie, politicians will pontificate and demonstrators will demonstrate.

Then, tomorrow, we will go on. More Americans and Iraqis will die, more Americans will lose their homes, life savings and financial security while more speeches and promises will be made.

But will anything change? Probably not. On this day when we mark the anniversary of a criminal war brought by a criminal enterprise in the White House and backed by a criminal enterprise on Capitol Hill, let's remember that the legacy of more of the same is the biggest crime of all.

CHB Front Page 03/19/08

Learning lessons seems not to happen during periods of relative security.
Plumbing the depths of pain and despair may set a better learning environment.
The temptation is to remove government from the life equation, but that assumes the goodness of our fellow men, and no matter how much we wish for this, it will not be.
And so we'll begin again, but from a lower level.

We Americans have learned to grumble amongst ourselves about what our government is doing in our name. I often wonder why that is instead of doing something about what our govenrment is doing.

Is it perhaps we don't know how to go about effecting change in top layers of our government such as taking to the steets en masse - I mean really en masse to such an extent that we American shut down the American economy for the day?

Is it because we expect our elected poltical officials to "do something" about our govenment only to be shut-down by the likes of Nancy Pelosi who state "Impeachment is off the table"?

It's frustrating not to be heard by our elected officials.

The policy of "divide and conquer" is working. Maybe "divide and neutralize" would be more accurate. Polarization based on competing ideologies, blind partisanship, refusal to give the "other side" a fair hearing prevents any real progress on just about any front.

Unfortunately, it is accurate to say that nothing will really change. I want you to change; you want me to change. You want me to come around to your way of thinking; I want you to come around to my way of thinking. "Compromise" means that one side must yield 100% to the other side's position. But both sides (all sides?) have their heels firmly dug in, because both sides are irrevocably convinced that theirs is the correct one and that the other side is just dead wrong.

And so we will go onward in our death spiral towards ultimate oblivion. The lessons of history have not been learned. It is doubtful whether future civilizations will learn anything from our experiences.

And we call it "progress".

Yeast tends to call it progress too, before it commits the inevitable die-off. With due respect to the Ranter who used it in their sig, "are humans smarter than yeast?"

Judging from the events of the last eight years, no.
Let the die-off begin now in earnest.

JeffH in Occupied TX