| For Kath |
| 2:47 AM, Monday, April 19, 2004 |
While I obviously can't tell you for sure, I like to think that I would have spoken out against certain excesses committed by the Roosevelt administration, mostly the illegal internment of many Japanese-American citizens in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, especially given the lack of similar treatment (though I'm not sure that's ENTIRELY a bad thing) regarding Germans and Italians in America. I'm not sure about the atomic bomb; that's a philosophical and moral question that will take a significant amount of thinking to decide and honestly I still don't have an answer for you on that topic.
Regarding the Bush administration, much of my anger with him is the repetition of history which we already know doesn't work -- the creation of internment camps for Muslim and Middle Eastern people in America, the detention of thousands of such people, the "random" checks by security personnel which are completely unrandom (when someone you know gets checked EVERY TIME, it's pretty easy to tell it's not random -- if she'd thrown a Qu'ran under her arm, they'd probably have arrested her at gunpoint), the suspension of liberties in the laughable so-called "Patriot Act", the sheer arrogance and gall in the We Stand Alone philosophy, the inappropriate disdain for the United Nations and various country's opinions shown in, among other things, the declarations that "if you are not with us, you are against us", the outpouring of public suspiscion which was aided and abetted by the Bush administration in the wake of 9-11, the obsession with external patriotism, the kickbacks and favors granted to companies such as Haliburton, Enron, and various other campaign contributors (did you know that all but two of Bush's cabinet-level advisors have links to at least three and generally many more companies, several of which are involved in the "reconstruction" of Iraq), the forcing of our ethics and morals upon a people who don't care (this is how we got into this mess in the first place, people), the kicking-by-the-wayside of the people of Afghanistan now that Osama Bin Laden is confirmed to be NOT in the country (when was the last time you heard something about the reconstruction and democratizing of Afghanistan, I wonder?), and various other promises by the Bush Regime which have, quite naturally, gone unfulfilled.
The laughable promise to "leave no child behind" has turned into a finger-pointing festival where the states don't have enough money to try to meet the standards established by the federal government. If a FRACTION of the $87 billion!!! that is being spent in Iraq were to be diverted to school systems, they would have a massive amount of funds to meet the needs of their students.
The economy is shot to hell and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse. Skilled jobs are being exported to various countries; he's supporting business over academic research -- business pays more, because academic research is non-profit and tends to be in the public domain. Unskilled jobs are being filled by imported labor, most of whom are illegal aliens which Bush is doing nothing to prevent. The war on drugs is failing miserably, because all Bush's money is going to foreign policy.
Now ... what, precisely, sounds like Roosevelt's administration in that? Aside from the fact that we went to war ...
-David
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