Dr. Forbush Thinks

I was thinking about the insanity of our current administration. It is hard to imagine that the American system works when I think about what these guys get away with and how the American public accepts their action as a “matter of fact.”

When the Vietnam war was ending and the protesters began to attend the Discos instead of the protest rallies activists asked themselves why the public wasn’t more engaged with the many other issues facing the country. The consensus seemed to be “We saved the country from the stupidity of the government. We know that this will never happen again, because we have shown the government what the limits to their reach are. We have done what good rational Americans should do to save our country from the brink of disaster. Now we can rest assured that it won’t happen again and we can go party.”

Many people lost friends and relatives in a stupid war that meant nothing for Americans but something for the oil companies that thought that the Gulf of Tonkin held large amount of oil. My mother’s friend lost her boyfriend. My father lost some friends as well. These weren’t people that I knew, but I knew that the war hit hard at home and no one felt that it was worth the blood and treasures being wasted on it.

But, it isn’t the soldier’s stupidity – it’s the government’s stupidity for sending soldiers to fight a useless and needless war. When the government uses lies and deception to build support for a war Americans need to be vigilant.

So, I was thinking about a different timeline in a different world. This is a gedanken experiment into what life would be like if we had George W Bush as president during 9/11 but the cold war was not over. Would we even be here at all? Chances are that playing loose with the facts as the Bush administration continues to do then we would find ourselves in a much different America.

Imagine 9/11 happening again, but this time our number one enemy is still the Soviet Union. Would the Bush administration believe the truth, that Arab terrorists had conducted the plot? I believe that would feel that a “state” must be behind such a horrible attack. In fact the conservatives and radical right would be the first to accuse the number one enemy of the USA as being behind the plot. They must have been the ones to organize the plot, because the Bush administration surely couldn’t believe that a Saudi could mastermind the plot. The administration would surely ignore the truth as they did in the current case. They would call the Soviet Union on the carpet, because they surely must have been guilty. And, it may even be highly likely that even if the Soviet Union continued to deny the facts the Bush administration would surely call them liars and would certainly threaten them with a retaliation strike of some type to even the score.

It’s a scary thought to consider the stupidity of the Bush administration. We are just lucky to be living in the times that we do live in. But, it is easy to imagine that the Bush administration could still get us into a mess in the next three and a half years.


politics