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Thursday, October 28, 2004
Non-policy reason to vote for Kerry over Bush #5: Bush's fearmongering
This is an important election for so many reasons. Certainly, there are important issues out there. But that isn't what this daily countdown is about.
Why?
Sometimes a man assumes power who is so inept, so untruthful, and so unwise that it becomes top priority to get that man out of office as soon as possible. In the U.S.A., we do it by voting. Let's make sure it remains so.
So far, the reasons are...
Reason #10: Kerry is hard-working, Bush is lazy.
Reason #9: Bush is careless with his words.
Reason #8: Bush is dangerously secretive.
Reason #7: Bush refuses to listen to contrary opinions and is incapable of changing his mind when the facts require it.
Reason #6: Bush is cruel.
And so we come to...
Reason #5: Bush uses fear as a weapon against the people of the United States.
Fear has become the preeminent tactic--lying excepted--in the Bush public policy arsenal since 9/11.
The longest-standing tactic of fear has been the color-coded terror level alerts. Not once since 9/11/01 has the terror level been below "yellow." In New York City, it has never dropped below "orange."
Despite this, advisories to the public on actions they can take to make themselves safer or to help defend against terrorists are few and far between. We have the "duct tape and visquine" advisory, and a few advisories about schools or about insurance companies or a couple of others. But generally, the terror level alerts serve to do nothing but increase the anxiety level in the people of the United States.
This is in Bush's best interests. Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's pretty common-sense, actually. It basically says you have to take care of the basics of your life before you can go on to more lofty goals. In other words, you can't work on maximizing your potential as a human being if you're scrounging for food. Safety is very low on the hierarchy--it ranks just after the basic body needs of food, air, water, and so on. In other words, if you don't feel safe, it becomes difficult or impossible to take care of things you might want to take care of, such as love, self-esteem, or the improvement of yourself.
By keeping the population at a constant low level of anxiety, Bush creates out of his own actions a perceived need for himself.
Thus, fear has become used elsewhere in the Bush Administration. What was one of the main reasons for Bush's invasion of Iraq? Saddam had WMDs, Saddam might use WMDs, Saddam might turn WMDs over to terrorists, Saddam might help terrorists gain their own WMDs. Since the invasion, we've learned that 1) Saddam's old stocks of WMDs were destroyed after the Gulf War. 2) The international squeeze on Iraq's economy led to the destruction of Saddam's WMD programs, and 3) Saddam had no ties to al Qaeda, and the few meetings they had led to the secular Saddam rejecting the offers from the fundamentalist terrorists. But Bush's cherry-picked intelligence given to Congress and the public made the threat look real, and thus, the fear seem palpable.
Thus, fear has been used to both create a false need for Bush's "services" and to create a need to invade a country that was anything but an immediate threat. But more recently, fear has been used against the Kerry campaign:
On Tuesday (10/19/04), Cheney told Republican supporters in Ohio, "The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
Cheney called it the ultimate threat," and suggested that Sen. John Kerry is not the man to deal with that threat: "For us to have a strategy that's capable of defeating that threat, you've got to get your mind around that concept," he said. (end quote)
In other words, vote for us...or else. This is the ultimate threat, and the ultimate use of fear.
But does that stand up?
Kerry is not a cowardly man. He's a Silver Star-decorated soldier who volunteered for one of the most dangerous duties within his branch of the Armed Services.
Kerry is not a stupid man. By all accounts, he is highly intelligent.
Kerry is not a man who sees a problem and does nothing about it. He proved that with the "Winter Soldier" investigation, and with the Kerry Commission as a Senator. He has detailed plans for every major issue put out in the public, which you can check out at his web site. Maybe you don't agree with every point of it, but you'll find that national security is right at the top of his list. And this is the man who, when asked in the first debate,
If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?
KERRY: Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it.
I did a lot of work on this. I wrote a book about it several years ago -- six, seven years ago -- called "The New War," which saw the difficulties of this international criminal network. And back then, we intercepted a suitcase in a Middle Eastern country with nuclear materials in it. And the black market sale price was about $250 million.
Now, there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today.
And this president, I regret to say, has secured less nuclear material in the last two years since 9/11 than we did in the two years preceding 9/11. (end quote.)
So not only do we know Kerry has extensively worked on this issue, we also know that Bush has fallen down on the job.
I don't plan on doing my own fear-mongering. But look at the facts. Bush has been extremely aggressive overseas. This has been the backbone of his "offense, not defense" anti-terror plan. But Afghanistan was his main success, and that was limited by his removal of military units to Iraq even as the troops were pushing out the Taliban. Now the warlords and the Taliban itself control large sections of Afghanistan. All this lack of success was part of the price of Iraq, which doesn't have any bearing on the war on terror. Or, I should say, it didn't at the time of Bush's invasion. Now there are many terrorists there, attacking our soldiers and anyone seen as helping the U.S., and the Iraqi invasion has been a boon to Islamic terror recruitment throughout the world.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, about 5% of cargo containers are inspected as they come into the U.S. And last month, three years after 9/11, Time magazine ran a cover story saying that America's borders are just as porous as ever, even though there is evidence that terrorists are starting to use the Mexican and Canadian borders for entry attempts into the United States.
Again, I would never say that if you vote for Bush, you're putting yourself in danger. I will say that I will sleep better at night knowing that an intelligent, wise man like Kerry who can see all aspects of an issue, and has a history of taking action where action is needed, will be on the job. Now that's a way to combat terror.
And do you really want to live through another four years with a man who wishes us all to live in fear just so he can hold onto power? That's today's non-policy reason to vote for Kerry over Bush,
#5: Bush uses fear as a weapon against the people of the United States.
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