You Didn’t Know? Like Breathing, Blaming Bush is Automatic

For the Left, why think when you can blame instead?

Among the left, there seems to be a great deal of consternation when discussing the current situation of the world and the issues that populate it. Much of the discussion centers on two-term President George W. Bush.

Even now, as Bush approaches official “lame duck” status in the White House, the hardcore and bombastic left have trouble separating any Presidential contest from Bush in 2008—even though the man is all but officially out of office.

But leave it to the wild-eyed among the leftists to spread their toxic brand of liberalism to the somewhat more sanguine and sensible membership of Party-Democrat.

As a result, the uber-liberals among the left have bloodied the Democratic Party in a big way. Three-term senator Joe Lieberman, (D-CT) has recently become a victim of the malady known as “McGovernitis 2006.” For the less seasoned reader who is unfamiliar with whom George McGovern was, take a look at the former senator’s Presidential run in 1972, and it’s easy to understand why the Democratic Party as an institution has ever since been running away from the liberal label --and the memory of George McGovern’s disastrous presidential run--ever since.

But maybe, the running away from the erratic and dangerous liberalism showcased within the Democratic Party has slowly changed to that of cautious acceptance.

Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to political newcomer Ned Lamont, whose only real campaign issue was that of tying Lieberman to Bush and Iraq. Lamont needs nothing else to get the support of the vituperative left. Bashing Bush over Iraq and equating Lieberman with it, is all the left needs to hear.

But really, that is all that is needed to appease the “I hate Bush and his mother” crowd. This bunch of thirtysomething leftist kooks who are still living with Mommy and Daddy would sooner kiss a crocodile on the lips then ever let Bush just fade out of his Presidency. It is an obsession that has overtaken anything positive the Democratic Party ever had planned for the country.

But didn’t you know? The left has good reasons--very good reasons--to hate George W. Bush.

After all, everyone knows that on January 20, 2001, the world as we know was forever transformed, and in some areas, created, by America’s 43rd president.

For instance, before Bush was even comfortably seated in the same Oval office in which former President Bill Clinton worked with plump White House interns, Bush created the dysfunctional and dangerous tyrannies of North Korea, and Iran, and heck, let’s say Iraq too, and call it a day, or better still, an “Axis of Evil.”

Surely, here were three of the world’s leading lights. North Korea is legendary for its “compassion” for the less fortunate among its own people, and Iran, of course, is a “paragon” of religious freedom. Iraq was certainly the most democratically run Muslim state in the East under Saddam, right? Yet, as reported by the media and echoed by elected Democrats in Congress, that all changed when Bush took office.

Didn’t you know that?

And, of course, those two edifices to America’s capitalistic genius, the twin towers, would have stood for a thousand years…if only Bush hadn’t been elected.

Saddam Hussein had WMDs? And he used them on his own people? Preposterous! Everybody, from France and the rest of the European Union, to most liberal members of Congress, know that if there were any truth at all to those rumors, it was certainly perpetrated by one carrying the initials GWB.

Hurricane Katrina, the Duke Lacrosse team’s raping of a defenseless woman, the Space Shuttle exploding over Texas, global warming, the death of Coretta Scott King, McDonald’s french fries being cooked in pork grease. It is all the doing of one George W. Bush.

Didn’t you know that?

But, of course, you did. And now, you want to know to just what it is that Bush plans for the future, don’t you?

Naturally, no one knows the future (except Bush), but if I were a betting man, I would say that as long as journals like the New York Times have anything to say about it, more bad news is on the way, no matter what the reality of the situation is.

The war on terror was started on President Bush’s watch, but it should have been started long ago. America has been a victim of terrorism as far back as 1961, when the first U.S. aircraft was hijacked by Puerto Rican born Antuilo Ramierez Ortiz, who “forced at gunpoint a National Airlines plane to fly to Havana, Cuba, where he was given asylum.”

Other more serious, and deadly, incidents followed, like the Iranian hostage crisis in November of 1979. Then-President Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran into the U.S. Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American diplomats hostage. Thirteen hostages were soon released, but the remaining 53 were held until January 20, 1981.

In 1983, a 12,000-pound bomb destroyed the U.S. compound, killing 242 Americans in Beirut, Lebanon. Earlier that same year, sixty-three people, including the CIA’s Middle East director, were killed when the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed. In both instances, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

More recently, the first world trade center bombing that killed six and left 1000 injured, and the summit of Islamofascism, 9/11, which, in case you have forgotten (and far too many of us have) killed 3,025 U.S. citizens and other nationals.

Since 1961, the U.S. State Department has kept a chronology of terrorist attacks that have been perpetrated against the world. At the end of 2003, some 241 terrorist acts had been committed against the world community, with thousands killed, and tens of thousands injured. Since then, further terrorist attacks have killed hundreds more. (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/5902.htm)

President Bush did not invent terrorism, nor enable it. He simply does what others before him have not done: he fights it. While Bush has dropped the ball on many domestic issues here at home, he has been shown a warrior’s zeal in fighting this modern-day Nazism that we call Islamofascism.

It is a fight that will surpass the Bush Presidency, and probably several more. Future administrations, be they Republican or Democrat, will have to deal effectively against terrorism, and essentially, kill or be killed.

President Bush seems to grasp this concept of us-versus-them, but that is not the case for many on the left, and a goodly sized plurality of the voter at large. Whether it likes it or not, America is in this fight for the long haul.

Or didn’t you know that?

Archives of "The Citizen Politican"

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City.

Send an e mail to Vincent Fiore