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A Reputation in Tatters - Time To Impeach Bush (by Paul Craig Roberts)
Chronicles Magazine ^ | 5/20/05

Posted on 05/20/2005 1:26:39 PM PDT by KidGlock

CHRONICLES EXTRA | EVENTS | HOME

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

A Reputation in Tatters

George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.

America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.

As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused 1 billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.

America’s reputation is so damaged that not even our puppets can stand the heat. Anti-American riots, which have left Afghan cities and towns in flames and hospitals overflowing with casualties, have forced Bush’s Afghan puppet, “President” Hamid Karzai, to assert his independence from his U.S. overlords. In a belated act of sovereignty, Karzai asserted authority over heavy-handed U.S. troops whose brutal and stupid ways sparked the devastating riots. Karzai demanded control of U.S. military activities in Afghanistan and called for the return of the Afghan detainees who are being held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century. The secret British government memo (dated July 23, 2002, and available here), leaked to the Sunday Times (which printed it on May 1, 2005), reports that Bush wanted “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . . But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. . . . The (United Kingdom) attorney general said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defense, humanitarian intervention or UNSC (U.N. Security Council) authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult.”

This memo is the mother of all smoking guns. Why isn’t Bush in the dock?

Has American democracy failed at home?

COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: antiwarright; clueless; delutionalnonsense; idiot; pathetic; paulcraigroberts; unaware
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To: rlmorel

Likewise, once a "conservative" drinks the "it's okay to intervene in other people's business as long as it serves my purpose," he's no longer a conservative. Seems like Roberts remained a conservative, and the term has been hijacked by some.


361 posted on 05/20/2005 9:30:43 PM PDT by Gondring (Pretend you don't know me...I'm in the WPPFF.)
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To: iconoclast

Well said.


362 posted on 05/20/2005 9:44:27 PM PDT by Pelham
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To: Peach
Facts mean nothing to some freepers and their desire to undermine the Bush presidency is so obvious that I often wonder who is paying them because surely there is no reason to come here without a paycheck as their ideology is so far removed from conservatism.

I don't believe that condemning Mr. Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq is removed from conservatism at all.

The bottom line is that Mr. Bush sold the war as a necessary means to eliminate the threat that Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD's posed to the U.S. But as we have seen, there were no WMD's, no mobile biological labs, no drones, absolutely nothing that we were told turned out to be the truth. Of course, Mr. Bush, having doubts of his own also brought up the brutality of Saddam's regime and the miracle of democracy as if channeling Woodrow Wilson was some kind of conservative virtue.

Mr. Bush has violated Russell Kirk's sixth canon of conservative principles: "Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence."

.Conservatives are realists. Conservatives are historians and conservatives predicted the budding civil war, the quagmire that would befall our military, and the seedbed for terrorism that would become Iraq following Mr. Bush's invasion. Conservatives are not cheerleaders for a political party and a leader who woefully lacks the prudence necessary to be a conservative statesman, nor grows the breadth and reach of the government while spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

363 posted on 05/20/2005 9:54:46 PM PDT by St.Chuck
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To: Peach
All I can figure, is that the "game" becomes life. That is certainly what drives followers of Saul Alinsky, like Hillary Clinton, Paul Begala, etc. These people will distort facts and reality in the heat of the argument, desperately trying to gain an advantage, only to fail to understand what is really at stake. And that is the national security of our country.
364 posted on 05/20/2005 9:55:06 PM PDT by Richard Axtell
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To: Gondring

That isn't the impression I got from reading that article.


365 posted on 05/20/2005 10:01:08 PM PDT by rlmorel
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To: rdb3
You still have your brain, so you don't qualify.

Snickering.

366 posted on 05/20/2005 10:29:45 PM PDT by farmfriend (Send in the Posse)
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To: bert

There is no grounds for impeachment nor will this go anywhere. It is the same ravings of Leftists we have been hearing for a long time now.


367 posted on 05/20/2005 10:33:41 PM PDT by justshutupandtakeit (Public Enemy #1, the RATmedia.)
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To: rdb3

Yes it has. We have seen its insanity up close on many occasions here.


368 posted on 05/20/2005 10:37:57 PM PDT by justshutupandtakeit (Public Enemy #1, the RATmedia.)
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To: Paleo Conservative

Muslim pirates raided American shipping in the 1780s and held Americans hostage during the Confederation. We had no Navy capable of doing anything. Unfortunately Jefferson and his allies fought desperately to prevent one from being built.


369 posted on 05/20/2005 10:42:19 PM PDT by justshutupandtakeit (Public Enemy #1, the RATmedia.)
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To: nuffsenuff

Maybe he married some young Leftist chick.


370 posted on 05/20/2005 10:43:05 PM PDT by justshutupandtakeit (Public Enemy #1, the RATmedia.)
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To: St.Chuck
Conservatives are not cheerleaders for a political party and a leader who woefully lacks the prudence necessary to be a conservative statesman, nor grows the breadth and reach of the government while spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

Wow. Are you sure? Isn't that the definition of "conservative"--according to some around here? Oh, add in, "discourages inquiry, and considers disagreement tantamount to treason"...

371 posted on 05/20/2005 11:04:50 PM PDT by Gondring (Pretend you don't know me...I'm in the WPPFF.)
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To: Gondring

The truth is the truth. Doesn't bother me.


372 posted on 05/20/2005 11:31:04 PM PDT by Fledermaus (Rats theme song: "Whatever it is...I'm AGAINST it ! - Groucho Marx")
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To: oldbrowser
Do you have a high school diploma?

Yes why do you ask ?

Because someone who would display contempt for the academic credentials of the Hoover Institution is clearly such a cognitive giant that they probably went straight from grammar school to college, bypassing high school altogether.

The Hoover Institute is an academic think tank on the campus of Stanford University. It has some other halfwits and dullards like Thomas Sowell, William J. Perry, Lawrence J. Lau, Terry L. Anderson, John Cogan, and Condoleeza Rice. You probably never heard of any of them, either.

Socialists, statists, and loopy leftwingers HATE the Hoover Institute and attack it at every opportunity, but no one who can count into the triple digits will disparage the quality of scholarship that comes out of that place. For years it stood virtually alone as a tower of freedom in the hotbed of lunacy on the left coast.
373 posted on 05/21/2005 4:57:11 AM PDT by chronic_loser
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To: chronic_loser
It has some other halfwits and dullards like Thomas Sowell, William J. Perry, Lawrence J. Lau, Terry L. Anderson, John Cogan, and Condoleeza Rice. You probably never heard of any of them, either.

The above listed people have most likely not been drinking Sterno.

374 posted on 05/21/2005 5:04:48 AM PDT by Stentor
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To: nuffsenuff
This Paul Craig Roberts seems a bit disturbed to me. Anyone know what happened to him?

Yes, he had vastly different views in the past.

Syria, Iran, N. Korea and some others posed a far greater threat than Iraq. However, from a STRATEGIC angle, If Afghanistan and Iraq were "converted", it would isolate Iran and make it easier to eventually see them leave their wacko/terrorist ways. In this sense, I think the arguement "why Iraq" is not looked at by Bush critics from a strategic angle but by a nation by nation tactical angle.

My criticism of Bush centers around the financial, the tactics used, and Bush's ignoring of the invasion from Mexico.

It was wrong to spend $300 billion dollars and to be politically correct. We were attacked on 911. It would have cost next to nothing to use a few well-placed tactical nukes and then go in and target strictly leadership. This fighting the foot-soldiers and "insurgents" is nuts, as well as rebuilding Iraq and spending $300 billion dollars. We should have let Europe "rebuild Iraq" after we leveled the damn place. No matter if we spend $300 billion or $3 trillion, the people in that region will still hate us, even if we bankrupt ourselved doing it.

Bush's financial managment and decision making has been atrocious. Continuing this Mr. Nice Guy Politically correct way to wage war is killing America. We should be using the $300 billion to improve our national security and procure new advanced weapons and to beef up our Special Ops forces, not wasting it on the Arabs who will always hate us regardless.

Maybe some of these things bug Paul Craig Roberts also.

375 posted on 05/21/2005 5:31:39 AM PDT by Dont_Tread_On_Me_888 (John Kerry--three fake Purple Hearts. George Bush--one real heart of gold.)
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To: rlmorel

The flaw in your Benedict Arnold analogy is that there are several time tested writers that seem to think that GWB's resemblance to a conservative approximates my little Cairn Terriers to a Great Dane.


376 posted on 05/21/2005 6:04:11 AM PDT by iconoclast (Conservative, not partisan.)
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To: Richard Axtell

Freepmail back.


377 posted on 05/21/2005 6:25:55 AM PDT by Peach
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To: St.Chuck

Uh, aside from the fact that you're wrong on every single thing you just said, what other opposition do you have to the war?


378 posted on 05/21/2005 6:26:33 AM PDT by Peach
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To: muawiyah
The Barbary Wars involved classic robber barons.

Comparing the Muslim pirates of the Barbary nations to the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, et al, is hardly accurate. The point I'm trying to make is the way Islam treats those who do not share their views. Convert or die, in it's essence. A more accurate comparison would be Mohamed to Hitler when you look at the belief systems they established. Mohamed said he was instructed by an angel of God to write the Koran, there were no witnesses to the event, therefore Islam was created by Mohamed.
379 posted on 05/21/2005 6:26:34 AM PDT by Pipeline (The lessons can be harsh. All are repeated until learned.)
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To: iconoclast
At the time of our preemptive attack Saddam had been bled dry by over ten years of our blockade and fly-overs. He most certainly did not have the strongest defense in the region (probably the weakest).

Nice attempt at rewriting history with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

At the time we were told it was going to be another Nam with 10s of thousands killed on our side. We expected and presumed that he had a fierce Republican Guard that would fight us the entire way and especially street to streed in Bagdud.

As for the WMD why do you think our guys wore Chemsuits the entire time? Your hatred of W is making you say things that are not true.

Pray for W and Our Troops

380 posted on 05/21/2005 6:40:16 AM PDT by bray (Pray for Iraq's Freedom from Mohammad)
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