Who's the real childlike politician in Washington?
Who's the real childlike politician in Washington?
EDITOR:
A recent letter to the editor complained about "childlike" Democrats who have opposed George Bush at every turn. The writer compared Democrats to teenagers who "know there are adults in the room to clean up their messes."
Has the writer been living under a rock the past six years? George W. Bush is a 6-year-old child in the body of a 60-year-old man. Our country will be cleaning up his mess for years, if not decades. to come.
In the good old days, Papa Bush could bail his boy George out of most any jam. Little boy George avoided Vietnam, dodged his own incompetence while nearly bankrupting several oil companies, and was given a cushy well-paying job as the figurehead director of the Texas Rangers baseball team -- all because of the adults who looked after him and cleaned up his messes.
In an effort to bail out his son one last time, Papa Bush persuaded long time family fixer James Baker to head the Iraq Study Group. Unfortunately, George behaved like the little boy that he truly is deep inside and ignored the group's advice.
Our child president plugged his ears to everyone, including the voters in November and sent more troops to their death and dismemberment in Iraq while a thousand miles away the Taliban and Osama bin Laden grow stronger, unimpeded in northern Pakistan.
You see, he's "the Decider." When I see little boy George at a press conference I half expect him to stomp his feet or hold his breath until people listen to him. What a sad, sad, excuse for a man. What a stain upon the Bush family name. What a frightening reality that he will be with us for another two years.
BILL ADAMS
Austintown
On the road to 'peace,' the vehicle is torture
EDITOR:
The peace process was temporarily revived recently for the visit of Condoleezza Rice, only to fall back into a coma due to the fact that the Palestinian leadership continued to fail to humiliate itself and its people enough before their Israeli aggressors and occupiers. This is a clear case of a victim not blaming itself enough for its own victimization and pursuing instead an ever-elusive "justice" to restore not only its property but also its dignity, both of which Israel reserves the right to refuse.
The question is: Is there really a "peace process, " or has it in truth turned into a psychological torture process? Anyone who has read Alfred McCoy's book, "A Question of Torture" must be aware of the amazing similarity of techniques of torture perfected by the CIA during the Vietnam War and beyond to the "peace process": total control over the victim, isolation of the victim from all sympathy and assistance, so-called "self-inflicted pain" whereby the victim is manipulated into being responsible for its own torture, mass humiliation, deprivation, dangling the bait of peace before it, only to remove it. This is an endlessly drawn-out process that literally distorts the sense of time.
How to torture an entire nation, break their will once and for all and then dispose of them forever, only to have the entire world blame them for their failure and praise and support the perpetrators for their pursuit of the peace process. That is the trick, the magic of the peace process. When it fails at peacemaking, it only succeeds further as torture. Where it appears to fail is where it is most successful.
That is why Condi always has such a smug smile on her face despite the "setbacks."
ROGER LAFONTAINE
Youngstown