Wednesday, July 11, 2007

A Subscriber Responds to Issue 78: Impeachment and Executive Privilege - Vol. 3 Issue 79

Dear Savant:

I just can’t resist writing you after reading today’s installment of your thinking about Bush.

First of all, I agree with your assessment that impeachment would be the wrong step ... and for a very simple reason:

This country has had its “eye off the ball” for the past 6 years. There is (1) no more widely available healthcare, (2) no “better” education (schools seem to be teaching to some point of mediocrity established by “No Child Left Behind,” a program that was never designed or even partially implemented to do what its name suggests it should), and (3) no greater sense of well-being among our citizens (although, some would say that my inability to bring a simple pen knife on an airplane makes them feel so much safer ... this, as they take a sip of their bottled water in the hope that no one has tampered with it!).

It seems impossible to calculate the damage, both internal to our country and external to rest of mankind that has been wrought by the actions of this President.  My anger makes me feel his legacy of misdeeds and his prevarication in the name of the honor of our country should suffice to put him in his rightful historical place ... at the bottom of the lowest rung.  Then again, part of me feels that this nail in the coffin of America’s greatness was bound to come sooner or later.  After all, any country whose citizens become so self-absorbed in the sexual shenanigans of their President (and inside the sacrosanct Oval Office, oh my!) would never have been expected to see “W” coming, let alone to have recognized that the fall of the American Empire began long before 9/11, perhaps as early as the 1970s.

Our President is not our savior, though many are in search of just such a human (or, should I say “super human") being to save us all from ... well, essentially ourselves.  He is simply charged with guiding us for our the collective “good”, while not lying to, cheating or stealing from us, nor allowing others to do the like.  Well ... so much for his discharge of his ethical duties as President.  Never in my lifetime have I (and my 91-year-old father) felt that the country was being led so totally in the wrong direction ... and lied to with impunity.

I keep wondering when (in my dreams) our president will put himself squarely in front of the cameras and tell us something that resembles the truth, like: “My fellow Americans, I come to you tonight to atone for my pass misdeeds and to ask for your forgiveness.  I have lied to you about the fundamental reasons we are in Iraq and Afghanistan and, worse than that, I have played on your feelings of patriotism to garner support for a War on Terror that is really nothing more than an attempt to keep safe our supply of the energy that our country needs to sustain itself at the levels to which you ... and I ... have become accustomed ... “

Ooops. Time to wake up and get back to work!

(Great dream, eh?)