More politics

If you vote, then please do a little research before you decide. I don’t care who you pick. To be honest, I don’t think it makes that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things. But please pay attention to what is going on in the world before you make your decision. With that in mind, here are a few interesting stories I’ve read in the last few days.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Paul O’Neill scandal. He’s the main source for the book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. In it he says that from the first day in the White House George W. Bush has been trying to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. CBS News has a nice article about O’Neill and the book. Here’s my favorite quote:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” forcing top officials to act “on little more than hunches about what the president might think.”

Another new book deals with the “Bush Dynasty”. American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips reveals details of the Bush family’s many connections with the Middle East. The website Common Dreams has reprinted an article about the book that originally ran in the L.A. Times. Here are a few nice quotes from this article:

…the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.

In a way this backs up something I’ve thought for a while now – if George W. Bush had not been elected president, the September 11 attacks may have never happened.

The U.S. is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons. As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 “Nightline” program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: “It is becoming increasingly clear that George [H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.”

You can read more about the book and some excerpts at http://www.americandynasty.net/.