November 7, 2005
"Blaming Others for Their Own Failures"
What Country was Bush Talking About?
By DAVE LINDORFF
You have to wonder whether President Bush
[Hey, isn't he the guy we want to impeach?!?]
just thinks we Americans are stupid, or whether he is so out of touch
with reality that he isn't aware of what he's saying.
In Latin America, trying to sell his American imperialist snake-oil to
a group of nations whose leaders, and especially whose people, were
skeptical to hostile, Bush argued for the American model, instead of
the neo-socialist approach being taken and advocated by the wildly
popular Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
That latter approach, the president said, "seeks to roll back the
democratic progress of the past two decades by playing to fear,
pitting neighbor against neighbor, and blaming others for their own
failures to provide for their people."
Now at the moment, it would be hard to find any failures in Venezuela,
where Chavez has been using his country's windfall revenues from oil
to fund schools, to help displaced and unemployed workers take over
shuttered factories and run them as co-ops, and to bring in doctors
from Cuba to bring health care to the country's poor.
Chavez, incidentally, has survived a most likely U.S. -orchestrated
coup, and has been elected twice by wide margins, in elections that
were monitored by international observers (including former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter) and declared to have been fair.
As for the U.S., it would seem to me much closer to what Bush was describing.
Certainly the Bush administration's introduction of arrest and
indefinite detention without charge or recourse to an attorney or the
courts, his authorization of torture, his ramming through Congress of
laws granting new police powers, and his two presidential campaigns'
successful efforts to subvert the election process, notably in Florida
and Ohio, have "rolled back the democratic progress" in the U.S. His
declaration of a so-called war on terror and his Homeland Security
Department's blatantly political use of terror alerts to divert public
attention from his failures and various political crises have played
to fear. His effort to introduce a neighborhood spy program (Operation
TIPS), and his administration's support for ethnically, racially and
religiously-based arrests and round-ups of alleged "terror" suspects
has "pitted neighbor against neighbor." Finally, if his response to
the Katrina disaster in New Orleans wasn't a case of "blaming others"
for his own failure to provide for his people, I don't know what was,
His comment was no doubt met with laughter and derision in Argentina,
Brazil and other Latin American countries.
Sadly, it was simply reported without comment in this nation's excuse
for a news media.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch
columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
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