George Bush and the Great Divide
January 2007

“They have acceded to lying, scape-goating, wire tapping, torture and breaking down the door. Don’t call me Cassandra for mentioning Mussolini!”

Thanks to George W. Bush two of my oldest friends don’t talk to each other any more. Unfortunately, this is not an altogether uncommon experience these days. Not since the Sixties have we been torn apart with a virulence such as this administration has managed to foist on us ever since their supreme home-court referee’s decision in 2000. With past GOP administrations we democrats got pretty pissed-off with some Nixon and Reagan shenanigans but it never got to the point of divorce. Now however, as we experience daily assaults on our basic rights, our public lands, our world esteem and the health of the planet, and, perhaps most tellingly, an oceanic difference of opinion on foreign policy, it is hard to have a beer with our republican friends.

The wife of one of my old republican buddies said the other day, “How can you jeopardize forty years of skiing, climbing, drinking, weddings and dinners over something as trivial as politics?” Hmmmmm. Interesting remark, but there is certainly a large part of the problem: white middle-class comfortableness. She’s never had to work (so why worry about minimum wage or Social Security); she never had to get an abortion, she has health care, she sent her kids to the best prep schools and colleges and she and her husband ski every weekend from their cozy condo in Vermont. What’s to worry about? Are crummy schools trivial? Is abortion trivial? Was Chamberlain’s compromise with Hitler trivial? Does she think it is “trivial” that we were lied to about WMD in Iraq? She is still living in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Inevitably, at some point, political, ethical and social rightness must take precedence over all else, including old, once-dear friends (and even family). In the 1980’s, for example, when Ronald Reagan was arming his “freedom fighters”(illegally, as we all know now) and spreading all sorts of xenophobic falsehoods (“pretty soon they’ll be in Brownsville”) about the Sandinistas I went to Nicaragua three times. The Nicaraguan people had just succeeded in throwing out a despicable tyrant and now the United States wanted to crush them because they were experimenting with some of the theories of that anti-Christ Karl Marx! I had majored in Central American history in graduate school ten years earlier. I went down there and saw what was really going on and when I came home and lectured and showed slides and my republican friends (and some family) insisted on continuing to believe the White House propaganda about “Freedom Fighters” defending our national security, Thanksgiving dinners left a bad taste in one’s mouth, if you know what I’m saying.

Sometime in 1934, 1935 or 1936 a lot of Germans had to decide one way or another. Can you imagine being friends with somebody who remained a card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party right up until 1944 (such as the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger)? It is one thing to have remained friends with a regular, hard-working, liberal-minded German through the war but a dues-paying Nazi? When might you have decided to abandon your Nazi friend…in 1933 when Hitler was “elected”? Or maybe later that year after the iniquitous “Untermensch” declaration? Maybe in 1934 when all Jewish shops were blazoned with yellow Stars while a couple Sturmabteilung thugs stood outside discouraging business? Maybe in 1935 when the “Nuremberg Laws” were passed? Perhaps you might have held to your friendship until1938 and the Krystalnacht? Maybe when you looked out the window late one night and saw your neighbors being taken away by the SS you decided enough was enough. At what point would you have lost all patience with your Nazi friend and all his hating, scape-goating, lying bulshit about Germany having not lost World War I, the Jewish-inspired “Versailles Diktat”, the Jewish-controlled banks, and about the myriad wonderful things the Nazis were going to do to revitalize Germany? I am not suggesting for a second that George Bush is anything like Hitler but he has, in fact, done more than any other president in history to alter the landscape of politics in America in ways that are not consistent with the tenets of our forefathers.

No, there probably won’t be a single megalomaniac but there could be a single ideology, a single domination by neo-conservative forces, a cabal of military-industrial, executive branch policy-makers, supported by a sympathetic Supreme Court which would amount to a particular domination of our public lands, our schools, our sexual and religious predilections and our esteem in the world for generations. It probably won’t actually happen (I know that that is what they thought in Chile) but it is naïve to pretend that momentous, irreversible changes are not being made. I think one of the salient differences we liberals have with our republican friends is that we take the long view on things and they seem to support the short view. It is as though we are all members of a huge, wealthy family sharing a big ranch and one side of the family wants to put up fences, shoot the neighbor’s dog, sell off the back forty, do a bit of dredging down by the water hole, burn the garbage and plant single-yield rice. Doesn’t leave much for the grandkids does it? I mean, who wants to be Cassandra: but lets face it, some very weird stuff is coming out of this White House.

I would like to try to explain why some of my friends are no longer talking to each other (and why I hate republicans). I think it is a long list of things in which our republican friends indulge rather gratuitously in what we call cognitive dissonance – they know the truth in their hearts but persist in believing only what they want to believe – a bit like the Germans who saw their Jewish friends being carted off in the middle of the night but continued to believe (pretend) that they were just being taken to the country to cut hay. My list begins with the smarmy election of 2000 and moves on through Kyoto, lies about WMD, invective against our closest allies, lack of post-invasion strategy, the 2004 Swift Boat Smear, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Alaskan wilderness, stem cell research, Social Security, Israel and the arrogance of power. The usual stuff.

Debate among friends requires a lot of give and take if the friendship is to remain conversational, sincere and long-lived: the guy who loves Marciano has to admit that Ali did not have a glass jaw; the democrat has to concede that Reagan might have brought down the Soviet Union, the Catholic has to confess that there is some mischief going on in the vestry. All that we liberals ask from our republican friends is acknowledgement that there are some serious problems with the leadership of this country and that they (republicans), too have difficulty accepting all these things with equanimity; that they too are troubled by the way this government has behaved, that they too abjure furtiveness and mendacity. But it’s like pulling teeth; they don’t wanna budge on anything. They don’t even want to admit that their own guy McCain got screwed in 2000 by the same draft-dodging miscreants who engineered the “Swift Boat” smear of Kerry in 2004!

Anybody who pretends that the 2000 election was not a low point in American politics is probably one of those people who still believe that the Spanish blew up the Maine. We will never know the whole truth about Florida but we do, for a fact, know that thousands of African Americans were intimidated and probably lost their votes. That aside, it is not a happy thing to have a president who did not garner a majority of poplar votes. I don’t think it is asking too much from our republican friends to get at least a nod of agreement that things could have been better.

In the Collegiate Range of Colorado is a 14, 000 foot mountain called Mt Holy Cross. It bears such a moniker because of a distinctive permanent snowfield on its eastern face in the shape of a cross. That cross was pretty diminutive forty years ago. We knew something was going on way back then although the term “global warming” was not in our lexicon. By 2000 we sure as hell knew a great deal about an unassailable truth of 21st century life; human beings are pumping a lot of bad stuff into the atmosphere causing, or, at the very least exacerbating, the onset of climate change which could prove disastrous beyond our wildest imaginings. Other industrialized countries are already passing legislation to put a curb on the emission of greenhouse gases. One of George Bush’s first acts, as president was to eschew the Kyoto summit and thereby announce to the world that the economy of the United States was more important than the imminent suffocation of the earth. Of course, we are not gonna start coughing and drowning for many years perhaps but glaciers are melting, temperatures are rising and we humans are clearly a large part of the problem so; back to the ranch analogy, are we gonna keep polluting the ole swimming hole or are we gonna start giving a damn about our grandchildren?

Recently, I was coming back from a few days of backpacking in the Olympic Mountains with an old (republican) friend and as we were driving through the evening rain we got on the subject of “weapons of mass destruction,” the principal cassus belli for the Iraq War. When I waxed impatient with the administration’s unrelenting insistence on their existence, despite no evidence to support this claim, my friend turned to me and said with quiet, deep-throat authority, “but Arthur, there were WMD in Iraq, and just before the invasion they were all taken out by Russian Spetsnaz units to the Bekaa Valley!” What could I say? I had never heard of this impressive agency called Spetsnaz or the Bekaa Valley. Later, when I got home, I looked for confirmation of this remarkable fact and found the so-called Drudge Report and a few other references to WMD in the Bekaa Valley in southern Lebanon all emanating from very suspicious sources, most notably, the World Tribune.net, a conservative blog published by an editor at the (very conservative) Washington Times. The fact that we have U-two planes, satellites and Boeing E-3 AWACs all over the skies of the Middle East which can spot a fly on a camel’s ass and they never saw this mysterious caravan of WMD strikes me as inconsistent with Dick Cheney’s perseverating insistence on WMD in Iraq. But there you have a large part of the problem; we on the left, read the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, The New Yorker, our local newspapers, assorted books from Tom Friedman to Paul Krugman, sources with respectable academic credentials for reliable research and credible reporting, while our republican friends read un-publishable opinions, hunker down on their islands and continue to rely on Fox News and the blogosphere for their information. Talking about WMD and the Iraq War with a republican is like trying to have an intelligent conversation about “natural selection” with William Jennings Bryan.

As John Donne said, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” each of us has to work to maintain sincere and reciprocal relationships with our friends and neighbors. When we were attacked on 9/11 we felt as though we were on an island, having been singled out by pitiless agents of horror. Immediately however, the entire world responded to our grief with unparalleled sympathy and generosity. Everybody understood our reactive invasion of Afghanistan. But Iraq? Our closest friends in Berlin and Paris knew there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq nor was there a connection between Sadaam and Bin Laden; but we went ahead anyway with our faux cassus belli, lies and bullying. This administration’s mendaciousness toward the United Nations and two of our closest friends is unforgivable. The French and Germans are no strangers to disingenuous politicians so they might come around to forgiving us but again, we liberals are left wanting solace for such pig-headed bellicosity.

When it became clear that the White House was bound and determined to invade Iraq we jejune, unpatriotic liberals pointed out that such an invasion would create a million more terrorists. You didn’t have to be Otto von Bismarck to figure that one out. Is there anybody alive who disputes that that is exactly what has happened in Iraq? Are all those guys flooding into Iraq from Syria, Iran, Jordan and Palestine just trying to get on the Iraqi soccer team? I don’t think so. The chaos in Iraq today illustrates the fatuous thinking of the neocons who talked about garlands of flowers our troops would walk through when they entered Baghdad. It is no big deal for a super power to win a war against a third world army. The problem all along was how to win the peace?

Many of us had hoped that the successive elections of two obvious Viet Nam War evaders, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would forever put to rest military service as a precondition for residency in the White House; and maybe it has (although it remains to be seen what John McCain will do in 2008). However, in the 2004 election, the martial issue raised its ugly head again if only because Mr. Kerry had served in Viet Nam. After Yale he enlisted and got a commission as the captain of a small boat in the Mekong Delta. He took some fire, got some medals and returned home a local hero. Possibly, his wounds and valor were unremarkable. Understandably, his youthful political handlers in 2004, made an issue of his active duty, “in harm’s way,” in comparison to his opponent who understandably, like many of us, had succeeded in staying as far away from The Mekong Delta as possible. So here are two rich guys who went to the same school, belonged to the same club and both graduated with unexceptional GPA’s. A very nasty war is going on and one of these guys joins the fight and the other chooses a safe alternative to active duty. Thirty years later the guy who took some fire gets roasted because his wounds and valor were not Herculean? Go figure!

What is there to say about Katrina other than to appreciate the fact that we are not particularly well equipped to deal with national disasters despite all the hoopla coming out of the White House. I don’t even blame Mike Brown, the horsy FEMA Director, for his ineptitude. I do blame George Bush for his lack of compassion and inertia. Here was a man pretending to be our war president, out defender of national security and he could not muster his forces to aid a million Americans in harm’s way.

So my old republican climbing buddy wants to believe there were WMD in Iraq but what amazes me is his sanguine acceptance of this administration’s conservation and energy policies. How can he tolerate a president who is doing more than any previous president to eliminate huge tracts of untrammeled public land in this country? Why can’t we have a national energy-conservation policy and free ourselves from dependence on oil from some of the most uncharitable people on earth and meanwhile preserve some of the few remaining truly wild places in North America (ANWAR)? I mean, the nepotistic, bald-faced, shortsightedness of the Bush-Cheney cabal is staggering. We need to drill for more oil in Alaska like George Bush needs to sell part of his ranch in Crawford to pay his income taxes. There is only six month’s worth of oil in Alaska anyway. It is time we stopped pretending there isn’t a link between the oil barons and the White House. We are at war for God’s sake. Lets make a few reasonable sacrifices rather than continue to pad the pockets of petro-lobbyists.

The most important thing to appreciate in world affairs and political science is that nothing is simple; nothing is black and white as this government likes to insist over and over; good guys and bad guys. Stay the course or cut and run. Every single event around the globe has as many significances and repercussions as it has origins. World War One remains the gold standard for historical analysis. Yes, Germany seems to have been the major bully on the block in 1914, but one must never ignore the very belligerent rolls played by England, France and Russia, not to mention Serbia and Austria-Hungary. How simple to just blame Germany for the war and get on with reparations and isolationism. And how such simplistic thinking led to another, even more disastrous war! Al Qaeda is not the only group of people in the world which hates us. Not all terrorists are bad people. I am a terrorist at heart. I could easily be persuaded to wreck mayhem for the right cause. I have certainly pulled up survey stakes and poured sugar in gas tanks. George Bush has learned from Ceaser: “Cry havoc and bring out the dogs of war!” People who engage in serious thought know that “Al Qaeda” is not, in fact, a superbly well-organized global terror organization. Al Qaeda did not even exist before 1990. A great deal of what we see now is copy-cat terrorism by a bevy of disaffected people all around the world.

It is not a pleasant thought, but nonetheless we do well to remind ourselves that the United States helped fund and support Mr. Bin Laden and his Mujahadeen when he was waging a nasty fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. And lets not forget that the United States funded and supported a veritable army of thugs throughout the Twentieth Century, to wit: Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, The Shah in Iran, Noriega in Panama, Sadaam Hussein in Iraq and Bin himself. What does that say about our long-term foreign policy objectives? Does the word stupid come to mind? My point is that Al Qaeda is not quite what we are being propagandized it is. Sure, there were training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere and there continue to be Jihadist training camps and terror cells all over the place, and Bin Laden might be the most brilliant and charismatic terrorist, but the fact of the matter is that terrorism will continue, fester and grow with or without Al Zarqawi or Bin Laden. Al Qaeda is quintessentially net-centric. As long as there is imperialism, unrest, poverty, despair and zealotry in the world there will be terrorism or seeds of terrorism.

Liberals are indeed wafflers and flip-floppers and for a good reason; things change. Duh? Without change (flip-flopping) we would all still be living in caves. We grow and change as human beings; we learn facts which contradict past follies; we do research which disproves old theories (do the names Columbus, Copernicus and Einstein ring a bell?) We travel and experience other cultures; we discover there are other gods besides our own. We might celebrate Floyd Landis’s victory but then when we find out he was using drugs we do not hesitate to accept the unhappy truth. We’re not going to hang on to all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories and faux medical reports contradicting the findings of the International Drug testers. We might celebrate “Manifest Destiny” when we are in high school but later on when we learn more and realize what this impressive sounding phrase meant for millions of Native Americans we change our minds. We might even have been persuaded by Mr. John Foster Dulles’s “Domino Theory” and thought for a while that, yeah, if those Commies are going to attack one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin we need to put some hurt on them. But later, when we dig deeper and come to know the truth of the matter; that Hanoi was not a mere puppet of Peking, that in fact, our ships were in their waters illegally and not really attacked….and digging even deeper, realizing that Viet Nam was simply trying to get out from under all foreign domination, having just driven out the French, we then acknowledge that the Viet Nam War was actually a civil war, in fact, a travesty on our part, if not a horrendous crime against humanity. As Americans we have to acknowledge this. And now we have to acknowledge that our government lied to us; again. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Sadaam and Bin Laden were not members of the same club.

Sadly, I think the average American accepts our president’s one-dimensional declaration that “they” attacked us on 9/11 because “they don’t like our way of life.” This kind of thinking carries the same force of intellectual acumen as an insistence on the flatness of the globe, Tom Friedman notwithstanding. People all over the world have a surfeit of excellent reasons to revile us. To think that after what Dole and United Fruit have done in Central America can one really believe those people would not have just cause to dislike us? After squeezing all the copper out of Chile is there any reason to think they too would not have an aversion to us? What about the silver in Bolivia, and as if that weren’t enough, Bechtel recently tried to privatize their water! Every country, from Sri Lanka to Malaysia, where REI, GAP, Levis, L.L. Bean, Sears and Swatch have sweatshops people will come to loathe us and will, when incited, wreck havoc on us. My republican friends are reluctant to appreciate these myriad sources of terrorism. All they can think about is how great it is that we are “providing jobs” along the Mexican border, jobs making sleeping bags and bras in Beijing, jobs building cameras in Singapore and more jobs in Sri Lanka, Nicaragua and Viet Nam.

To understand and articulate why Bin Laden and his followers hate us is not, for a second, to consent to or forgive such an atrocity as 9/11, but understanding why people hate us and want to do bad things to us might help ameliorate, if not avoid such acts down the road. For example, I mentioned to an old republican friend the fact that Americans are more reviled around the world now than ever before (proven, by multiple polls, if not daily demonstrations and news reports around the world). He said, “On the contrary Arthur, people all over the world like us more now than ever before!” And not so long ago this same guy told me that he thought the (military) campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were brilliant. Yeah, and right up until 1918, the German people were told that they were winning the war! When I.F. Stone lectured he said to audiences all over the country, “Remember just three words. All governments lie.” Anybody who thinks this government is not lying to us must not have anything but A History of Impressionist Painting and A Day in the Life of Australia on the coffee table.

Not that long ago Iran and Iraq were at war . Now we are at war in Iraq and we seem determined to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Turns out (according to a recent Harris Poll) that forty percent of Americans think Iran and Iraq are one and the same! The point is, Iran is not some rinky-dink “rogue state.” Iran is a huge piece of real estate inhabited by a lot of very handsome, intelligent people who we have meddled with unconscionably for decades. Yes, of course, President Ahmadinajad seems like a frighteningly parochial, anti-Semite demagogue but nonetheless, we have to try to understand where he and many Iranians are coming from given our unflattering (regime-changing) intervention in their history. My Iranian friends remember 1950 like it was yesterday. Mr. Bin Laden is not the sole architect of today’s Islamic Jihadism.

How can we think charitably about a president who encourages homophobia? When I was younger and insecurely homophobic I couldn’t even tolerate the word homogeneous or homo-anything, nor would I have gone to a Gay 90’s bar. I understand homo-phobia. I understand how a nineteen-year-old kid in a submarine wouldn’t want to share his bunk with a “queer”. Now however, at sixty-two, when I am finally comfortable with my sexuality I recognize homosexuality for what it is…a way of life for some people whether from genetic or environmental roots. It doesn’t matter…all that matters is the elimination of fear and hatred and suspicion in this country and the opportunity for all people to live equally under the law. There are millions of gay couples in long-term relationships, many with kids. They should have all the same rights of insurance, health benefits and death benefits as heterosexual (married) couples. Period. We do not need any more insecurity, lynchings, draggings or hate crimes. We do not need a president who equivocates on these things because of his ties to fundamentalist Christians who abhor their own fears.

And what about abortion? Is there any doubt that this administration wants to reverse Roe v. Wade? Of course, abortion is not the sort of thing anybody wants, but until somebody comes up with a genuinely effective “saltpeter” for our high school drinking fountains, there are going to be sexual trespasses and unexpected surprises; not to mention very real medical emergencies. In1972, the Supreme Court decided that women have the right to choose whether or not to nurture the new seed in their bodies. Ninety percent of women favor Roe V. Wade. What is this Bush, Rove, Robertson man-god-in-heaven policy-making all about anyway? Just like the gay debate, this administration has succeeded in polarizing us to the extent of violence.

And then, what about stem cell research? Of course there are some possible ethical problems with stem cell research and the inevitable capitalist tendency to make fortunes and abuse science but lets deal with that if and when it happens; but in the meantime lets get busy with research which might yield fantastic benefits for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and brain-damaged people around the world. If we don’t do the research the Chinese surely will, or the Russians or the Japanese. It is so intransigently antediluvian I want to puke at the Christian right’s reluctance to celebrate the noble scientific genius of man.

The recent war in Lebanon was clearly cause for left-right argument. As with many Middle East problems it devolves down to the Israel-Palestine dispute. Eliminate the problems between Israel and the Palestinians (persuade Israel to pull out all settlements, recognize Palestine as an entity in the West Bank, establish a solid corridor to Gaza, and get on with it) and many of the other problems in the Fertile Crescent would evaporate into the hostile sands. Most Arabs are Muslims and they all share a commonality which we Americans repeatedly fail to appreciate. The thing which offends us liberals so much is the callous, martial, pig-headedness of this administration and Condi Rice giving public carte blanche to the Israelis. Of course we love Israel and will defend her no matter what, but what does the world think when we say publicly that it is all right for Israel to invade Lebanon and lay waste to their civilians and infrastructure (I am well aware of the civilian/guerilla relationship of Hezbollah)? The world is sick and tired of our bullying (and the bullying of our proxies); we need a new foreign policy which acknowledges all the facets of every situation.

Burly firefighters in full gear standing on street corners with cups in their hands trying to raise money for new ladders is not an encouraging sight. About one million containers come into the United States every month and very few of them are inspected for anything, much less radioactive material. Every day people flood across the US-Mexican border with impunity carrying three fourths of the drugs entering the United States. This is the “National Security” George Bush has promised us? There are still jealousies between the ATF, FBI, CIA, DEA, FEMA, the Pentagon, US Marshals, Sheriffs and local constabulary all across this country. As we saw with Katrina they still haven’t even figured out how to talk back and forth on their walkie-talkies for crying out loud.

I would like to speak to one final, depressing aspect of this administration, which is the diminution of esteem the rest of the world holds for the United States thanks to the myopic, egotistical and illegal policies of this particular administration. Abu Ghraib, with that poor hooded bastard standing with his arms stretched out with electric wires dangling is to the Arab world an icon no less shocking and symbolic than the stark, striped, living skeletons from Dachau are to us. Indeed, we were attacked by a bloodthirsty and pitiless enemy. Now however, we too have stooped to a level of degeneracy that will take generations to erase. After 9/11, a majority of people around the world shared our grief, even loved us for our pain. What a precious moment that was! Now, after the vain, deceitful, pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, there are few intelligent people anywhere who like us.

Abu Ghraib was just the tip of the iceberg we now know. Clearly, from the Attorney General to the Secretary of Defense there was a conscious refutation of the Geneva Accords with the stupid idea of ferreting out the bad guys with sundry barbarisms. This wanton abandonment of civil behavior is one of the things which leaves us jejune liberals so bereft of tolerance for this administration and the people who support it. Not going to Kyoto was bad, lying about WMD in Iraq was bad, bad-mouthing the Germans and French was bad, wire tapping was bad, homo-phobia is bad, sacrificing the environment is bad…but torture? Electric wires, water-boarding and biting dogs? My god!

Lets face it, the war in Iraq is The Thing, the grotesquely all-pervasive monster on all our minds these days if for no other reason than that it was totally unnecessary, totally unjustified and totally odious to common sense and human decency. The situation in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster now with unremitting bombings, beheadings and disappearances across all walks of life. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people are killed every day in Baghdad alone. Are we so bereft of imagination that we are not horrified by this quotidian slaughter! Many sources claim that nearly half a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. And we wonder why they hate us and want us the hell out of there? Several hundred university professors have been murdered in Iraq in the last three years! Basically, we, and George W. Bush have been the cause of an increasingly terrible civil war in a sovereign country. Indeed, I think the conclusions of the Iraq Study Group suggest a liberal view of the situation; admission of failure, drawing down our troops, and getting (the hell) out of Iraq while talking with Syria and Iran. George Bush however, remains adamant about not talking with the axis of evil guys and insisting that this thing can be won by “surging” the troops. And people call me Cassandra when I mention Hitler and Pinochet? The American people want us out of Iraq, the generals want us out, the congress wants us out and now the president is getting us deeper in. Go figure.

I have talked about many things here. Much remains to be discussed. For example, we effete liberals agonize over the fact that about forty million Americans do not have health care. We are angry that with all the hoopla about “homeland security” a quarter of a trillion dollars has been spent with little to show for it. We liberals agonize over the obvious deterioration of our once-great public school system. We are still uneasy about the future of Social Security under an administration that obviously would love to get its hands on that money. We are sick at the wanton sale of public lands to giant (energy) corporations. We are sick of lower standards for gas consumption and industrial emissions. Despite our own personal consumption, we fret at the gluttony of our national consumerism (the average American uses forty times the earth’s resources compared to the average Nicaraguan) and how this is linked to global enmity toward us. We are worried sick at being a gigantic debtor nation. We liberals realize the bitter irony in the fact that we are waging war against Muslim fundamentalists while we are governed by Christian fundamentalists. This government has succeeded in turning beautiful words into profanity, heroes into villains and governance into exploitation. We are sick of the hubris and mendacity! It’s not easy sharing a pitcher with a guy who thinks Bud Lite is great beer.