A Little Beauty Really Can Restore Optimism

I’m back in California for the week and I’m sitting on the deck looking out over this beautiful lake and the rolling hills in the distance and I’ve realized that I often blog from a place of outrage. I read the news in the morning, get mad by what I read and head straight to my laptop to vent. Today, in this warm weather, with the sun reflecting off of the water, I can’t seem to muster up any anger. I guess we should all take more time away from our busy lives, it really does allow for a new perspective.

I’ve come to realize that I simply do not believe that terrorism is a major threat to this country. Putting it into its proper perspective, we should be spending much more time worrying about driving around in our cars, than hijacked airplanes and suicide bombers. My bleak outlook for this country stems not from instability in the world, radical religious nutjobs (of any stripe) or from the hyped clash of civilizations, but from the Bush administration itself. The greatest threat to this country and the world is the regime we have right here in our White House. It’s not a coincidence that the world has started falling apart since these thugs took over. The instability that we feel now is by design and it benefits those it was meant to benefit. If you have any doubt, just look at who has prospered while the rest of us stew in fear and watch our resources dwindle.

My first reaction to the recent foiled terrorist attacks in London was disbelief, much the way I felt about the men arrested in Florida last month that were supposedly an immediate threat to Chicago’s skyline. We have seen the Bush administration, over and over, use terrorism as a tool of fear, so like the little boy who cried wolf, it’s just so hard to believe anything they say. They don’t spend much time trying to thwart terrorism, but they will use any opportunity to remind people that we should be afraid and that we should be relieved to have their strong arms protecting us.

Even if stamping out terrorism was a high level priority for the Bush administration, I have a feeling that we would then be in some serious danger. Incompetent doesn’t even begin to adequately describe the disastrous leadership they provide. They could start a fire making cereal in the morning. If they were actively trying to root out terrorism, then surely we’d have shit blowing up in this country every day. The real dangers we face aren’t suicide bombers and hijacked airplanes, they’re the more subtle attacks of economic terrorism and the plague of social conservatism, and that is by design.

Bush claimed today that the Iraq war is straining the American psyche. How absurd. I can see how it would be damaging to his psyche considering that he has no idea how to turn his disastrous war of choice into a political win. For a man that came into office intending to prove he is better than his father, Bush will walk out of office as the worst President in the history of this country, quite a feat really considering some of the losers we've had in the past (his father included). If the American psyche has been strained, it has not been the result of the Iraq war, but rather the realization that we allowed this ideological idiot to lead us there.

The fear that this administration has used as a means of holding onto power, is starting to wear thin and more and more Americans, conservatives included, are beginning to realize that the only thing we have to fear, is Bush himself. The good news is, the remedy really is as simple as it seems. Kick the bums out of the People’s House and the White House, and we can start moving back toward normal.