Stump Speech (posted November 25, 2002)

Stump Speech
by arendt (November 25, 2002)

Whoever has the guts to stand up and make this speech in public,
and make it again and again and again, gets my vote. I don't
care if that person is liberal or conservative, black or white,
male or female, Christian or Moslem. George Bush's administration
is a clear and present danger to American democracy and world
peace, and someone has to stop it.

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NOBODY EVER SAID LOOTING ISN'T HARD WORK

George Bush is a crook, a liar, a warmonger, and a theocrat.

He is the front man for the biggest gang of looters America has ever seen.
The looting is not only financial. His misregulation is despoiling our
irreplacable environmental assets. His Justice Department is plundering our
Constitution. If he is not stopped, the international extensions of his looting,
enabled by American military power, will make the world our enemy
and mark America down in history as a rogue megastate in a league with
Stalin's Russia.

The monopoly-concentrated corporate media provides cover for these looters.
I do not expect a fair shake from these propandists and agitprop artists.
The corporate media has not been so biased and partial since the
days of the Hearst monopoly. They consistently whitewash Bush's
constant scandals, outrageous statements, dictatorial bent, and shady
connections. Meanwhile they interrogate the Democratic Party like
Inquisitors who have found a witch with a cat. Clearly the press is
not going to report the facts and let the citizenry decide.

Therefore, I intend to make this stump speech daily, updated with
new outrages, endlessly pouring from the gang of crooks running
our beleagered country into the ground for their personal profit.
If this speech is circulated by its listeners, it will reach everyone who
dares to say this rogue emporer has no clothes.


George Bush is a crook and a crony capitalist.

The media has found ten times more dirt on George Bush's so-called business
career, than it ever found about Bill Clinton's so-called Whitewater
scandal. But they refuse to "connect the dots". In fact, they leave the
discoveries to amateur journalists like the Harvard University paper that broke
the $50 Million insider loan made to Harken by Harvard. George Bush
should be formally accused of insider trading at Harken Energy. He should
be accused of tax-evasion for the manner in which he came to own
his share of the Texas Rangers, with an arcane loan transaction. The
chairman of the SEC under Bush Sr.,who refused to act on these obvious
illegalities, should be accused of obstruction of justice.

Many activities during his term as Governor of Texas also deserve
an investigation, which cannot be made due to GOP control of that
state. The Funeralgate mortician kickback scandal should be followed
to major donors. The investment of state trust funds in contributors
companies for a net loss should be investigated. The totally incestuous
relationship with Enron should be investigated.


George Bush is a bare-faced public liar and a stonewalling hypocrite

Most infamously, George Bush lied twice to the Prime Minister of
Britain in his warmongering attempts to find allies against Iraq.
Twice he foisted stories on Blair about Iraqi capabilites that were
knowably false as to time or place - stories instantly denied by the
very sources Bush claimed to be the authors.

Domestically, George Bush walked away from his campaign promises
of moderation and "compassion" as fast as he could, showing himself
to be a classic Christian Coalition "stealth candidate". He immediately
reversed himself on signing the Global Warming Treaty. Soon afterwards,
he reversed himself on the Yucca Mt. nuclear waste dump. Of course, he
already had Nevada's electoral votes, so it was time to cash out. The
only promises he has kept are to fat cat billionaires and big business
interests. He has yet to meet an upper-bracket tax cut for his comrades-
in-looting that he doesn't like.

He has packed science policy boards with industry stooges and anti-science
fundamentalists, to such an outrageous degree that the non-political and respected
journal "Science" has editorialized against the scientific lies pouring out from hijacked
science reviews.

During his campaign, George Bush dodged questions of hard drug abuse and
being AWOL. The so-called press gave him a free pass for these "youthful
indiscretions" plus his drunk driving arrest in Maine.

George Bush's administration has been marked by an obsessive secrecy
and stonewalling. Dick Cheney is on the verge of contempt of court for
refusing to turn over an embarrassing list of oil looters who wrote his
energy policy. This is 180 degrees from their position on the legally
identical Clinton Health Care Task Force, but GOP hypocrisy is never
an issue for the corporate press.

The law on the release of Presidential Papers has been subverted by game-playing
jurisdiction shifting. How convenient that the papers of the Reagan/Bush administrations,
which contained many of the same shady characters in an Iran/Contra setting, are not
seeing the light of day as the law demands. Constant demands for an investigation into
the intelligence disaster behind 911 are refused, side-tracked, or sabotaged.

You don't consistently behave this way if you don't have something to hide.
Liars have something to hide.


George Bush is a warmonger for oil and a deserter

George Bush maintains that he was surprised by the 911 attack and that
our adventure in Afghanistan is completely about terrorism. More lies.
His administration made a $43 Million grant to the Taliban, trying to
get them to sign up for an oil pipeline deal. When they refused in mid-
summer, Bush already had plans for invasion drawn up. Those plans
were put into action after 911. A former Unocal executive was appointed
regent. Our forces occupied strategic points along the pipeline route.

In the spring of 2002, his administration backed a coup against the
democratically elected president of Venezuela - the major oil producer
in South America. They sent a private jet to carry him into exile. The U.S.
justified anti-democratic actions in its own backyard, even as it claimed
our enemies "hate us for our freedoms". There was no terrorist threat.
It was all about oil. The people of Venezuela understand this better than
the people of America. They threw out the coup leaders.

In September, because "you don't start an ad campaign in August", the
old boogeyman of Saddam Hussein was reinflated. Despite worldwide
skepticism and cynicism about the threat presented, a two month
campaign of hysteria, lies, and alerts kept the political opposition on the
defensive about national security instead of on the attack about scandals
and economic meltdown.

Since before he took office, George Bush has been friendly with the
accused war criminal and long-time bully boy, Ariel Sharon. Bush has
broken the U.S.'s historical neutrality and towed the Israeli Zionists' party
line, which is guaranteed to inflame the Arab street, if not the entire Arab
community. George Bush has deliberately fiddled while Jerusalem burned.

The two sewer lines of warmongering and corporate looting link up in
the disgraceful pork in the Police State Enabling Act (a.k.a. the Homeland
Security Act) allowing military contracts to go to corporations that
have gone offshore to dodge taxes. Combined with the announced
plans to privatize more than half a million military jobs, it is clear that
George Bush wants to turn the U.S. military into the private army of
the multinational corporations, not the protector of U.S. security.

The GOP warmongering is the most flagrant hypocrisy, because George Bush
stands accused of going AWOL by the members of his own National Guard
unit. His jumping over a list of hundreds of more qualified and longer-
waiting candidates is a matter of public record. But this, plus his failure
to report for duty for an entire year and his refusal to take a drug test,
is not deemed newsworthy. The rest of his team is full of these "chicken-
hawks" who have the audacity to criticize everyone else as "soft on
defense". Only a party-line press corps would swallow these outrageous
lies and tell us, without the irony of Shakespeare's Brutus: "But these are
all, all honorable men."


George Bush is an Apocalyptic, Fundamentalist Fanatic

George Bush applies a religious litmus test to all judicial candidates. He
appoints people who describe themselves as "far to the right, even by
Texas standards" and demands they be immediately rubber stamped.
He appointed a fanatical fundamentalist, John Ashcroft, to be Attorney
General. Ashcroft holds prayer meetings in his office, calls America
a Christian Nation, and goes on crusades about nude statues, medical
marijuana, and assisted suicide in the middle of the 911 terrorist crisis.

Bush and Ashcroft are pushing "faith-based" end-runs around a
separation of Church and State which House Majority Leader deLay,
another fundamentalist fanatic, has publically called a myth. Mr.
Delay was thrown out of a religious-based university for his
wild behavior.

With this cabal of draft-dodging, neocon chickenhawks, Bush presses for
war in the Middle East on any pretext. This goes hand in glove with
a Christian fundamentalist drumbeat of unconditional support for
Israel to start the "end times" war at Armageddon. Of course, the
corporate oil and defense companies are all for looting the oil supplies
of the world. They think they can use the fundamentalists, the same
way the German industrialists thought they could use Hitler.

This "end times" war is sheer folly in a nuclearly and biologically-armed
world with porous borders and fundamentalists in India, Pakistan, Israel, and
the U.S. itching to nuke their enemies and go to their reward in paradise.
If you don't believe that the world must be coming to an end soon, that should be
reason enough to vote out George Bush and vote in a sane military policy.

In closing

Nobody ever said that looting isn't hard work. Looters take risks - one of
their victims might get lucky and kill them. The Roman Empire (as opposed
to the Republic) was sustained by looting its vast conquests: Spanish mines,
Greek cities, the tribes of Gaul. The Roman Army is glamorized for its deadly
efficiency; but it was as brutal as the Nazis, and it supported an oligarchy as
corrupt and undemocratic as the Marcos regime in the Phillipines. The later
Roman Empire was a cesspool of slavery, gladiator fights, and social decay.
They ran out of things to loot and went backrupt bribing some of their enemies to
fight other enemies. In the end they collapsed into absolute ruin. Is this where
you want America to end up?

The Vikings are another case of romanticized pillage. They weren't so
glamorous if you were an English peasant whose town was looted and
burned. But, we seem to be attracted to their berserker killing rages,
their macho culture, their wanderlust. These are hardly the values of
peace-loving, hard-working, sober citizens. No, they are the values of
soccer hooligans and painted-faced football fanatics, armchair generals
and addicts of violent videogames. Why do people rail against Hollywood
violence and take a pass on Washington violence?

In the U.S. today, the looting is done in the financial markets. As Marlon
Brando's character says in the Godfather: "One man with a briefcase can
steal more than a thousand men with guns." The American economy and
the American public have seen their assets shrink drastically since Bush
and his band of looters showed up. True capitalism calls for the division
of labor; Bush's looters call for the division of spoils.

The American people have been told to "blame Bill Clinton", but it simply doesn't add
up. Bush is a crook and a looter. His pals are cashing out. Hell, they're prying the fillings
out of the corpses' teeth. They're taking anything of value left in the American middle
class: health care, education, social security. They call it "privatization". I call it looting.
Looting. LOOTING.

In the rest of the world, they still have to do things the old-fashioned colonialist way.
They have to use armies and bribes and torture and assasination to steal what they want.
Too bad that America seems to have used up its 911 sympathy by threatening and
browbeating one oil-rich state or oil-pipeline route after another: Afghanistan,
Venezuela, Indonesia, and now Iraq. When the bill comes due for this, it is
the American citizens who will pay; not the rich boys in their fortress homes
and gated communities. Wake up America. You are being played for patriotic suckers.
Patriotism and religion are the last refuges of scoundrels. And these are world-class,
grand-historical scoundrels.

Enough is way too much. This willfully ignorant, lazy, frat-boy emporer has no clothes.
The shady crooks and spooks that lie and cheat behind the scenes and pull his strings
have no morals, regardless of their pharisaical religious protestations. Image has
triumphed over reality here, big time. I am here to break the hypnotic spell
and to tell America to wake up before its dead. Its already too late. We have
lost a lot, and we may not get it all back. But we aren't dead yet. Stand up and
fight.

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Down with Emporer Bush and his Guard of Oily Praetorians.
Bring Back the Republic. Bring back the Constitution. Bring back an honest press.
May a loving and inclusive and tolerant God help us in our just cause.

Nice post