Tag Archives: crimes

Dubya Today

Posted on by elizabeth
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I know everyone just wants to forget about him now.  I don’t.  I want him to be charged with the crimes he and his administration have committed.

Here’s Simon Shama at Another Point of View:

Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.

Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself “the decider” has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush’s own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.

Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners – and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.

Read it here

Reagan’s Demons are Bush Demons

Posted on by elizabeth
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Miguel D’Escoto Brockman has been elected President of the UN General Assembly.  Immediately, he started talkin’ “crazy”:

A Nicaraguan priest who has been a stern critic of the United States won election Wednesday as the next president of the U.N. General Assembly, beginning his post with a “sermon” that touched on love, politics and the Iraq war.

In his acceptance speech, d’Escoto spoke out against what he called “acts of aggression” in Iraq and Afghanistan – without mentioning the U.S. by name.”The behavior of some member states has caused the United Nations to lose credibility as an organization capable of putting an end to war and eradicating extreme poverty from our planet,” he said.
The remarks drew immediate protests from the U.S.

“The president of the General Assembly is supposed to be a uniter,” said Richard Grenell, a spokesman for the U.S. Mission. “We have made it clear that these crazy comments are not acceptable, and we hope he refrains from this talk and gets to work on General Assembly business.”

 More crazy talk:

“They elected a priest. And I hope no one is offended if I say that love is what is most needed in this world. And that selfishness is what has gotten us into the terrible quagmire in which the world is sinking, almost irreversibly, unless something big happens,” d’Escoto said during a news conference. “This may sound like a sermon. Well, OK.”

 LOVE?  Oh well, love.  Definitely crazy then.  Downright certifiable.  Much better to be full of hate and greed and talk that way and invade the countries of others and refuse to leave and lock people of for years without charge, torture them, ship them off to other countries where they’ll be tortured …

In 2004, D’Escoto talked in a similarly crazy fashion about Ronald Reagan’s legacy to America and the world:

First of all, let me start out by saying that, of course, Reagan is now dead. And I, for one, would like to say only nice things about him. I’m not insensitive to the feelings of many U.S. people mourning president Reagan, but as I pray that god in his infinite mercy and goodness forgive him for having been the butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans, we cannot, we should not ever forget the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled freedom and democracy.

More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but in fact the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan, as you mentioned just a few minutes ago, was known as the great communicator, and I believe that that is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator means to be a good liar. That he was for sure. He could proclaim the biggest lies without even as much as blinking an eyelash. Hearing him talk about how we were supposedly persecuting Jews and burning down non-existent synagogues, I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny.

And just in case everyone has forgotten:

The 8 years Reagan was in office represented one of the most bloody eras in the history of the Western hemisphere, as Washington funneled money, weapons and other supplies to right wing death squads. And the death toll was staggering-more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, 30,000 killed in the contra war in Nicaragua. In Washington, the forces carrying out the violence were called “freedom fighters.” This is how Ronald Reagan described the Contras in Nicaragua: “They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers.”

Father D’Escoto was Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister under the Sandanista government.  Ronald Reagan talked nice about them anyway.  Crazy? 

via Creekside