December 8, 2005

Letter to the Editor

The current road show of both the President and his Secretary of State that has taken him to the Naval Academy and the Council of Foreign Relations, and Ms. Rice to Kiev, and to Germany to speak to the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a cynical effort to obfuscate the real issue of their continuing failures at home and abroad. Even though Ms. Rice has attempted to shift international concerns about human rights abuses to the chastising of the Russian government, and Mr. Bush, in his own inimical fashion, has tried to convince us that we have “turned the corner” in Iraq, the truth is quite different. Whether we are not “stuck” in the tar baby morass that Iraq has become or whether we can shift the subject of our own nefarious tactics regarding prisoners to the subject of protest groups in Russia begs the issue. No matter how many trips abroad, and empty speeches that preach to the choir promising the classic “light at the end of the tunnel,” the truth is that this administration has basically been a failure of mismanagement, incompetence and forthrightness. It has supported itself with lies, have-truths and chicanery right from the beginning. From their record of planting phony news stories, to their linkage of terrorists with the Baathists, to their lies about Iraqi WMDs, to relying upon nefarious Iraqi double dealers, the record is clear. As Lincoln said, “It is true that you can fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  The continued failure by the Bush Gang to manipulate the news has not lessened worldwide terror, it has not made us safer, and it has cost too many American lives and treasure by ill thought out adventurism. Hopefully the American people will rise up in righteous indignation come 2006 and start the process of long-needed change.

Richard J. Garfunkel