Happy Thanksgiving

LSB: What are you thankful for today? I'm thankful that the American people have taken back control of their government. George W. is responsible for a lot of memories that will haunt Americans for a long time… memories of Shock and Awe, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, Fallujah, Samarra, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad... For six years, he and his puppetmasters have worked overtime to turn my country into something I often do not even recognize. I am thankful that following the November elections this is not his America any more... not all the way… not all the time... It is going to be a long struggle to regain our position in the world and even to rediscover the trust of our own citizens. But we will get it back. Our country is going to be ours again. I hope each and every one of you enjoys your Thanksgiving today! (Rewarming an older post I found specifically for today. Enjoy!)

04/03/2003: Allow me to present (i.e., steal) a posting by MadMathew over on Table Talk.

Here's my reply to a coworker's observation that "Boy, you really seem to have problems with Bush."

Aside from the fact that he’s a drunken, coke-snorting frat boy who partied his way through life, never doing a damned thing except trading on his family’s name… And he deserted (stopped showing up, that is) from his cushy National Guard post during Viet Nam after the flight physicals started including drug tests… And every business he ever owned cratered right into the ground…ditto the Texas state budget… And a group of truly evil polluters from the petrochemical industry recruited him to run and financed the effort… And that he was selected into office by clear vote shenanigans in Florida, on a 5-4 vote of a partisan Republican majority on the Supreme Court, in a decision that will go down with Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson as among the court’s worst ever… And that despite having no mandate, he persists in ramming through a hyperpartisan extreme right-wing agenda, weakening pollution laws, financing tax giveaways to the rich, cutting veterans’ benefits and education assistance, walking away from already agreed upon treaties and appointing judges who will force desperate women back to the back alley butchers… And that his attorney general says those who dare question the Bush Junta are traitors (well, he said “give aid and comfort to terrorists,” but close enough)… And that if you are deemed an “enemy combatant,” with that decision left solely up to the authorities, you can be arrested without warrant, detained without lawyer or trial, held incommunicado indefinitely, and executed on the sole order of the president… And that we’ve gone from having a president who was lionized overseas, got standing ovations in foreign parliaments, who brought peace to Northern Ireland and was “this” close to achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians, to having a president whose arrogant, bellicose speeches have him almost universally despised, to the point where he dares not travel outside the U.S. for fear of historic, massive
protests, except for quick photo-op trips to U.S. military bases… And that the economy is completely in the dumpster… And that he’s so inept he lost a PR battle with Saddam Insane… And that despite claims of being “born again,” and that the Iraq war was a last resort, Time magazine reported that he stuck his head into a meeting not long after Sept. 11 and shouted, “F*ck Saddam, we’re taking him out,” which doesn’t sound like someone born again OR considering war only as a last resort… And that a wave of ignorant nativism topping the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early 1800s, the Red Scare of the 1920s and the McCarthyism of the 1950s is now sweeping the country, with people being beaten and having their homes vandalized and losing jobs and being arrested simply for asking questions about invading another country that has not attacked us, with all this applauded by the crowd in Washington… Well, no, other than that, I have no problem with Little George at all.

Nope. I guess I don't have any problem with him either, once you leave all that aside.