100 people who are screwing up America

Did you write that post yourself?

What number are you on the list, rayban?

Why does the Right hate America?

Man, you sure have hate in your heart.

There's only one guy screwing up America...let E.L. Doctorow explain why:


An Essay on President Bush and Death - E.L Doctorow

[Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of
American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most
talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the
twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two
National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith
Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred
National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating
with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at
Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior
editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as
editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his
time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American
Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several
institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton
University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California,
Irvine.]
_____


I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is.
He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to
be what they could be.


On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the
lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what
death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of
necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower
could bear.


But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for
it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the
WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the
stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd,
smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't
understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a
speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the
brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their
country.


But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an
emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has
no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the
thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.


They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or
wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly
torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance
of aborted life.... They come to his desk as a political liability which
is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their
coffins from Iraq.


How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets
nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he
knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled
plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a
disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his
war in Iraq has licensed it.


So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought
this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not
the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew
those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is
one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because
you want to but because you have to.


This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer
the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president
and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to
take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of
themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything.
You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent
becomes inappropriate.


And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not
sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.


He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the
families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us
who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot
afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are
turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to
work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing
for how many people in this country this President does not feel.


But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is
relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax
burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air
we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the
safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and
that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for
overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them
into the professional class.


And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the
flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our
democracy is choking the life out of it.


But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember
the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the
war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm
and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After
all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are
little wars all over the world most of the time.


But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of
people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of
mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy
was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in
history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary
power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of
civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated
with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring
their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.


The president we get is the country we get. With each president the
nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable
national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of
lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people
he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us
into, is his characteristic trouble.


Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report.
He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we
sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and
ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and
the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a
figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

- E.L. Doctorow

Just another name calling thread. How about something constructive?

It's not too bad, at least I got to read the Doctorow piece. It might be name-calling but it's high-class, literate, well thought out, beautifully expressed and right on the money. I wish I could name-call like that :wink:

Whoa.....got to change the title to 101 people screwing up America.......just added Doctorow to the list with his vacuous condescencion......Panzade do you actually accept any of that ****? You should stick with your writing.....yours has some meaning.

Doctorow forgot to mention that 10,000 would die that day when Eisenhower prayed. He also forgot to mention the reason so many would die........it was because we waited until an insignificant little threat grew into a monster while the world stuck it's head in the sand.

He also forgot to mention another reason so many would die.......it was because we mistakenly thought WW1 was the last war so we abandoned our weapons, disbanded our military and stopped reseach and development of new weapons. We had to play catch up because assholes like Doctorow didn't have sense enough to maintain a strong military.

Oh yes we must by all means wait until they catch us with our pants down. We must give them a good chance to kill us.

You guys go ahead and believe that **** and wait for the next attack looking over your shoulder instead of meeting it head on.

That was a complete hatch job on history. Your ignorance is stunning.

Total casualties for "D-Day" of the Normandy invasion, for the United States, England and Canada, were 10,300. That's killed, wounded and missing. How facile to convert all casualties into dead soldiers and rant on about what a Republican (Dwight David Eisenhower) was praying for. The United States Senate failed to ratify the League of Nations treaty, proposed by a Democratic President, because of opposition by Republicans.

Just keep raning on, though, Rayban. Don't let inconvenient things like facts get in your way.

Yep...EB was correct. First come the insults and then.........Go pick a fight somewhere else you're not welcome here sonny. Adults would like to have a civil discussion.

Sonny is hardly an appropriate way to address a man in his fifties, but given the character you reveal in every thread you pollute, it does not surprise me. You've never engaged in civil discussion once since you've been here.

I ask the other participants to ignore the pesky nuisance......he will soon slink away.

Re: 100 people who are screwing up America


Thank God no conservatives oare running America, or the world for that matter, into the ground.



Part of that "tolerance of crap" is a tolerance for crap like this--assertions that excessive tolerance is a societal pollutant.
Au contraire. Intolerance is the virtuous remedy to the ills of middle America.



....or think that they can regurgitate views that appeal to their senses in a fora that you and I simply can not acquire access to.
I guess it's far simpler to accuse them of being dumb because they're famous.



Kinda like the "culture of life" hypocrites....?



I'm sure you'd endorse "Hurricane Tyrone", the African American hurricane that did to Miami what it did to every urban center in America huh? Just f*cked up the neighborhood. Surprised you'd object.



America bashers have been around long before 9/11.
9/11 just put the exlamation mark at the end.



"So-called?"
A little early for revisionist history isn't it?



Whew...at least this one wasn't an RPG launched attack on the left. I'd hate to think that a President of the United States wasn't padding the corporate accounts of friends and family members and stealing the lives and futures of some wonderful American men and women....a man needs at least one business venture to succeed in his lifetime.
If you call this success.



Well, Americans "elected" George W Bush twice, and his intellectual and academic record stands for itself.
It's really not Frank's fault.



Substiture "Rick" and Kathy Hilton" for "George and Barbara Bush" and we'd have a legitimate discussion.
Paris is a socialite, GWB is president.
Surely you see the difference.



You find Barbara Streisand's misquote significant and substantial, yet you write off the entire WMD intel debacle as an innocent mistake?



Coulter, Coulter, rah, rah, rah... Hannity, Hannity he's our man.
Limbaugh, Limbaugh, he's our man, if he can't do it no one can.
<pukes>



This is hideous!!


Hailey's song



Yes Rayban, it is the left who is paranoid.
Dean is in the cockpit.



Gotta hate it when them colored folk start fightin' the power...bitin' the hand that feeds 'em.
Ingrates.



God bless the 1st amendment 'cause God knows, if you had it your way, you'd have that too revised in your favor.

Oh, i don't know, it's a lot of fun to see you attempt to warp history to your purposes. You know, that's at the heart of Marx's dialectic--to attempt to employ history for one's propagandistic ends. How appropriate for the Right in America, to employ the heart and soul of communist propaganda technique.

Candidone

Clap....Clap.....Clap.....hey man you worked hard on that one. You really deserve the C- I'm generously giving you. :wink: Don't give up though, it was fun reading your ......... thinking???

Naw.....Karl Rove wouldn't stoop to using any tactic so thoroughly proven wrong. Karl has adopted a tactic that moves us quickly to a position inside the opposition's decision making cycle. Very quickly it is game, set , match.

I wasn't referring to that little ****, i was referring to you, and your pathetic attempt to use history to support your ludicrous argument. Care to expand on the "10,000 killed" on D-Day? You still want to make that claim?