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Mr President, five years
ago I wrote that you "skedaddled" on 9/11. The word was coined during
the Civil War to describe those who ran away from battle, which is what
you did when you flew to faraway hidey-holes after the Twin Towers
attack.
I'm sure you didn't see my column, given your
notorious reluctance to venture beyond Washington and Texas. Others did
read it, though, and many of them were furious. They accused me of
treason because I pointed out your cowardice.
I wonder how those critics feel about you now.
At the time, the details of how you dodged service
in Vietnam and then went AWOL from the Air National Guard weren't widely
reported by a media that coddled you. Since 9/11, we've had many
opportunities to reflect on your history and observe you in action.
You refused to meet with the public except at
tightly scripted affairs where the people and their questions were
screened. You avoided New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina much
as you did New York on 9/11.
You set presidential records for long vacations at your Texas ranch.
Rather than speak with Cindy Sheehan and other mothers of dead soldiers,
you again took refuge in seclusion.
You usurped Constitutional rights by wiretapping citizens without a
court order. Brazenly, you put yourself above the law. As you said in
2002: "I'm commander.
See, I don't need to explain. I do not need to
explain why I say things."
This hubris continued to flaunt itself. In a 2004 presidential debate,
when asked to name one mistake you'd made during your first term in
office, you couldn't come up with anything. Then, after the election,
you said: "Let me put it to you this way. I earned capital in the
campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my
style." You spent most of it by trying and failing to privatize Social
Security.
Last week, you admitted that the United States has been using secret
overseas prisons to >
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interrogate suspected terrorists in 'alternate' ways, thus becoming our
first Torture President. Those detainees are being transferred to Guantanamo for military trials even though the Supreme Court has ruled
twice that you are depriving people there of their civil rights.
You have been consumed with sending others to fight wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. The former did not achieve its objective - to capture Osama
bin Laden - and the latter, your pet war, is beginning to look like our
nation's worst blunder.
You have sent the bill for this debacle to our children and
grandchildren while running up the biggest national debt in US history.
Meanwhile, you are ignoring environmental threats far greater than those
presented by terrorists. Global warming, dead zones in the oceans,
overpopulation - even such mundane events as deaths caused annually by
automobiles and tobacco and hospital mistakes - dwarf the body counts
for 9/11.
For most Americans, obesity, not Osama, is the real danger - it's
projected that
one-third of us will eventually suffer from type-2 diabetes. (We could
win a war against obesity.)
You are soft-pedaling our increasing reliance on a dwindling resource:
oil.
Where's the courage in all of this? Where's the grace under pressure?
Where's the strong man struggling for the many?
Maybe I shouldn't be subjecting you and your strut to scrutiny. Maybe
the puppeteers Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are behind our national mess.
In that case you're just doing what you perfected at Yale where you led
the yells but never played the game.
But I don't think so. I think you have a personal goal. While diverting
us with weekly sound bites about the war on terror, you keep
transferring wealth from the middle class to the rich. You are ushering
in a new Gilded Age marked by political corruption and obscene profits
for your cronies.
In retrospect, five years ago I underestimated the damage a coward with
power can do.
FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 11, 2006
The column that got him fired
The First Post interview with Dan Guthrie
What happened to the debris from the towers?
Source: The
First Post
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