Beating Around Bush
To the Editor:
Thank you very much for the highly informative editorial “Unpatriotic Act” (February 13th issue). It was indeed appalling, and it confirmed my deepest fears about the Bush administration’s alleged War on Terror.
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 is especially terrifying considering [that behind it] are the same right-wing Republicans who have given us McCarthyism, Watergate, the Iran-Contra crimes, and the Clinton impeachment. Clearly, they intend to arrest their enemies: peace activists, ACLU members, feminists, homosexuals, Islamists perhaps, and definitely “liberals in the media.”
I want to know more about this Domestic Security Enhancement Act. I have heard nothing about it from other news sources. The news about this should be shouted from the rooftops!
Howard Wiggins
Memphis
To the Editor:
So, here’s the scenario: Bush, the keeper of the oil-lit flame and seeker of the second term his father was “robbed” of (how else to explain the rabid Republican pursuit of the robber for the entire ensuing eight years?), fans the fires of war with Iraq and plays his own war brinksmanship. And what is the immediate, most visible effect of all this war-drum thumping? A run-up in the price of gasoline. Has anyone else noticed that?
How, you ask, does that benefit our cowboy president? Simple. It’s his war chest for the 2004 election. The oil companies are traditionally among the biggest contributors to the Republican Party, so, when Dubya comes with his hand out to ask for help to finance his campaign, he’ll be calling in his chits. He can tell his oil-patch buds he’s just making a small withdrawal from the account he funded by his game of petro-politics.
I say we seize all of the assets of the first family and those slopping themselves at their trough to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the billions of wasted dollars of our money they’ve spent to ultimately line their own pockets. That would be my idea of “democracy in action.”
Martin H. Aussenberg
Memphis
To the Editor:
President Bush calls the millions of war protesters around the world a “focus group” and says they won’t have any effect on his decision to invade Iraq. Maybe he considers the majority of voters who voted for Al Gore a “focus group” as well. The young soldiers we will be fighting in Iraq are mostly fathers. Half of the population of Baghdad are children. The Iraqi soldiers will have guns at their backs and our guns in their faces just as they did in the last Bush war.
When do we get back to the business of investigating the president’s and vice president’s corporate criminal activities, where the spotlight was before this war of mass distraction?
Don Johnson
Minneapolis
To the Editor:
Why has the man who brought down the towers been forgotten? The man President Bush solemnly promised to find and bring to justice is still loose. Why has Bush shifted our attention to Iraq, a country that did not attack us? Even more puzzling, why did Bush break the national ban on flying a few days after 9/11 in order to fly 11 members of bin Laden’s immediate family out of the United States? Despite the bin Laden oil family’s ties to the Bush oil family, all the bin Ladens should have been made to stay within the United States. Instead, they were whisked back to Saudi Arabia before the bodies from the 9/11 attack were even cold.
I wonder what the Republicans would say if President Gore had been the one to break the nationally imposed flight ban to fly the family of the world’s most wanted man out of the country? Cries of “Impeach Gore” and “Cover up” would have deafened our ears and filled that liberal media of ours to this day. Kenneth Starr would have had no end of things to do. It would have made peanuts of his Lewinsky case. Yet, we have no special investigators, no truth-seeking task forces, no Osama and family, and no questions about it all from the major news networks. Alice, pass me the looking glass.
David Singelyn
Memphis
Correction: In last week’s City Reporter, we identified Robert Spence as the attorney who issued an opinion that the Memphis City School district did not legally exist. It was actually attorney Allan Wade who wrote that opinion. We regret the error.
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