America is at war with itself

We must endeavor to understand our present darkness. I'm no more qualified than any other patriot to do so, but I can not justify silence and it's accompanying complicity. Besides, I'm a good guesser.

I guessed that there were no WMDs. Granted, it was just an educated guess.

I guessed that the most likely way for Bush* to win again was to manipulate the election. But, maybe that's too strong of a word. I think more likely that they simply discovered how to use the electoral system to represent their cause, mostly through a religious appeal. At first, they were very hard core (His speech slandering Arizona's moderate Republican, Sen. McCain.) I could have lived with McCain, frankly. In fact, he may have had my vote against Gore. But, we'll never know because he slandered a war hero and the press and the Democrats gave him a total pass. Their efforts (by they, I mean whoever it is out there that is in charge) have become much more subtle as they have gained power. I must concede their brilliance at how they have come into power. When Florida was manipulated, it was a perversion of the electoral process.

To my great relief, I believe that most of Bush*'s supporters in America are simply Patriots who give very little time to politics and a lot of time to being good people. They have a total faith in our system to protect them from harm. They are overwhelmingly protective of our country. Many of them remember WWII vividly. And many more are the children of that tradition. While they may spend little time dwelling on government, they are willing to die - even allow their children to die for their country.

By far, most of Bush*'s supporters are these American patriots.

President Bush* did not handle the Florida 2000 debacle well at all, a trait he carried into his pursuit of war in Iraq. In fact, several of his actions seem unforgivable in the eyes of many, because they constitute a misuse of the system.

Our system for voting is incredibly simple, yet it has been maligned. It is only in the advent of technology that it has become so complex. Therein lies the main culprit in the problems our country has faced of late. There is not an American out there who doesn't think there were major problems in Florida in 2000. There were REPUBLICANS RIOTING, no matter whether you think it was a "planned" riot or not. Everyone knows that the system broke down.

Unfortunately, there were two very major conflicts of interest that were not recognized. First, the Republican candidate's brother was the Governor of Florida at the time of the election. This brought a horrible level of mistrust in the system from the majority of American's who chose to vote. (Gore had the popular majority.) If there was ever a time for a leader to stand up and say re-vote, it was then. The problem was that the people who chose to answer that question were the Supreme Court. Historically, the direction America has taken since December 2003 was based on a decision handed down which was decided by the moderate voices of the Supreme Court, yet seems to have fallen more on Sandra Day O'Conner than any other.

The decision was to call the election. That was a valid decision, if misled. Calling the election will forever be viewed as taking power. We should not have any collection of voices calling an election. The decision should be left to the people. If there is a problem with the election which produced grievances, including the glaring conflict of interest in Florida, the process should have been repeated with more careful temperament. So, this became the second major misstep. The court should have held that there was no choice but to re-vote in order to determine the voice of the people.

Why re-vote? Beyond simple and blatant missteps that I've mentioned, there is an assumption in Democracy that the government is the voice of the people. America has had both a conservative and a liberal voice for many, many years. There co-existence is tolerated, just as I do with my mother and father. We have drastically different views on many things, and we always have, God bless them. But, we love each other. And I believe that love is from God. That may sound silly, and it may even piss some people off, but trying to explain love through biology and genetics and pheromones just doesn't do it for me, because it leaves out the soul - the intangible possibilities that lay in what we DON'T know. Possibilities that lay within each of us. The very possibilities that helped us survive a revolution, a civil war, and the international threats of the 20th Century. These possibilities that make us America are the very soul of America, granted to us by things unknown, and which I choose to call God.

When, in 2000, the voice of the people became muffled, the decision should have been to listen more carefully. Ironically, for the first time in History, this had become possible to do in a reasonable period of time with the advent of computers. The possibilities that lay in our new technological world are so great that their powers are beyond our current ability to patrol. We are living in an ungoverned world. The entire world has looked to America for leadership in the past, and I promise you they will again. But, the current state of affairs tells us that we are not looked upon as leaders. Countries with the most capable resources, who have been our allies many times in the past, have shunned our actions under Bush*, and we must now acknowledge that, in retrospect, they were right to say that we should slow down because the likelihood that there were no causus belli, no valid reason for war - because there may very well be no weapons of mass destruction - was correct. Had we chosen to wait with our allies to defeat the enemy in our Terror War, we would have been taking the more shrewd approach, giving us a greater chance of having caught America's enemy leader, Osama Bin Laden, a name which offends almost every nation on earth.

But, hindsight is twenty-twenty. Although it made me upset at the time, escorting the Bin Laden family back to Saudi Arabia was the benevolent thing to do (no matter the original motives that may have been used). America protects the innocent, and these people were certainly innocent, just as Adolf Hitler's brothers and sisters must have been presumed innocent until proved guilty. And, I believe that, in our current state of emergency and the condition of the world, the fair trial that would have been required would have been too great for our legal system to bear for the burden of the world. No, let his family return home safely. If it is later learned that they were complicit, let them be judged justly.

The matter at hand in 2000 domestically was one brought on by the overt dalliances of our previous President Clinton and the subsequent titles of Impeachment. Like it or not, that dramatic moment divided the representative powers of the governed to a degree which seemed to deadlock America's government. Had we not had this event, our attention would doubtless have better been spent on the ensuing Terror War, which had already been declared by our enemy.

The direct problem that this had on the Administrative System of our government was the passing of the torch to the incoming Administration. On the heels of such a divisive issue, including a divided electorate and their representatives, was the election problems in Florida that I mentioned earlier - Governor Bush's conflict of interest and the failure to seek to more carefully hear the voice of the people.

As a result, those who attempted to get the message across of the impending threat were unsuccessful enough to prevent it. And, the leadership of George Tenet and the CIA was truly abysmal. To advise the President that the notion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk" was truly ignorant, and he should be held accountable for his statements.

Nevertheless, in spite the good advice from our Allies to be more cautious, we entered Iraq with the full force of the American Military - unquestionably the most powerful military in the world. With the hand of man, we struck down the Baathist regime in Iraq, just as we did the Taleban. There is not an American alive who would not agree that the removal of this entity was the removal of a threat to America.

Our current predicament is that, while the Baathists of Iraq were certainly a threat, they were not the direct threat that we are currently experiencing. And, like it or not, our presence there is very unsettling to the people of Iraq and her neighbors. These are the very countries that we need to be enlisting for support in hunting down Osama Bin Laden so that he and Al Quaida can be brought to justice.

The War On Terror is not about tyranny. It is about defeating the threat of Al Quaida entirely, including it's leader, Bin Laden. A defeat which will demonstrate to all the other networks of terror that exist that their crimes will not be tolerated. You are a terrorist network if you are responsible for the commission or planned commission of a crime across international lines that involve the deaths of totally innocent people. These are our enemies that we must seek to destroy, first by annihilating Al Quaida and bringing Bin Laden to justice, and then by enrolling the people of the world in an effort to govern ourselves so that we may protect our common interests from future terror threats.

On these ideas, we are all united. Our leadership must point in this direction. We must restore trust to all Americans that our electoral system is transparent and the desire of our government is to honestly ascertain the voice of the people. We must restore trust that our leaders will be held accountable for their mistakes. We must focus our attention more closely on eliminating Al Quaida and Bin Laden, while also accumulating the good will of the nations of the world, that we might crush terror and whither its future into oblivion.

Frankly, we don't need a debate. We need a leader. We have allowed the voice of those who have money do become too powerful. I have many friends with money, though I do not consider myself to be in that category. They are all good people. But, running a company is different than running a government. A company drives the consumerism that has caused America to flourish - not without problems, mind you. But it is a rich and beneficial part of our country. Our government, on the other hand, establishes justice, provides security for our tranquility, organizes our defenses, promotes the welfare of Americans, and secures the blessings of liberty, both to ourselves and to the generations of Americans to come. That does not require consumerism. That requires leadership. And that is what we have been lacking for many years.

My prediction is that, until we get a leader who can see us through this present darkness, we will continue to suffer economically, and we will not be able to regain the goodwill of the nations of the world. And that is exactly what we need to get us out of this War On Terror.

I think the problem with the majority of * supporters is their unwillingness to educate themselves. I agree with you. When most people hear this case, regardless of their party affiliation, they make the right judgments. We used to be able to be lazy when we had a more activist press but now we don't and people have to dig down. Supporting * makes no sense unless you believe in the "end times" and you're an extremist of some sort.