The Brilliance (and absolute criminality) of the Bush Administration

“The majority of Americans, the ones who never elected you, are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction.”
Michael Moore

The above quote may be true. Perhaps the majority of Americans are not fooled by this administration’s “weapons of mass distraction.” But perhaps that isn’t the point. Perhaps it’s not that simple. Perhaps the true brilliance (and criminality) of the Bush administration is that its members know they cannot fool us but they can overwhelm our senses and our resources with more and new “bad acts” that will distract us and take our focus off last month’s scandal, last week’s catastrophe, and yesterday’s infamous offense. The brilliance of the administration’s strategy is its willingness to dish out a continuous onslaught of negative press in an attempt to take away all efforts to focus on any one particular controversial event or investigate thoroughly any one specific misconduct.

Firing federal prosecutors without cause
Outing Valerie Plame-Wilson, a CIA covert operative
Illegally wiretapping and spying on American citizens
Iraq
Endorsing and Approving torture in Guantanamo Bay & abroad
Harboring “enemy combatants” without charges in secret prisons in Eastern Europe
Failing to allocate funds to research alternate energy sources
Driving the national debt up from a surplus to hundreds of billions of dollars in the red
Supporting Israel in its summer campaign against Lebanon
Refusing to support stem cell research
Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleezza Rice, Harriet Miers, Mike Brown, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft
Cluster bombs
Illicit diversion of $700 million from Afghanistan to Iraq
Ohio, New Mexico, and Florida and the story of voter fraud and butterfly ballots
Jack Abramoff’s illegal lobbying and corrupting of public officials
Halliburton and Lockheed’s stock rising over 400% over the course of the Iraq war
War profiteering in general
Abu Ghraib
$1.8 billion of reconstruction money in Iraq disappearing
The Pentagon-Israel spy case with Larry Franklin
Illegal corporate contributions to Republican candidates
Dick Cheney shooting his friend and fellow hunter
No Child Left Behind
Ground Zero’s unsafe air and the EPAs false reporting
Iran
The Niger Forgeries and the (mis)use of Joe Wilson’s report
Senator Foley and his sexually explicit emails with Congressional pages
Tedd Haggard, crystal meth, male prostitutes and weekly White House briefings
“Mission Accomplished”
the list goes on and on and on…

There rarely goes a day or a week without some new crazy story that has some connection to the Bush administration. And it’s no coincidence. This is planned chaos. The brilliance of the strategy lies in the fact that, while each one of these scandals and failures could probably, if investigated to the its full extent, lead to impeachment or at the very least indictments of high numerous hacks and high ranking officials, the rapidity with which these stories flash upon us completely incapacitates us. While we are shocked, overwhelmed with horror, and outraged, that’s where it ends. But as we sit in our homes, watching CNN with our jaws dropped wondering, “Again? Another scandal?,” the political hacks and cronies keep profiting off their abuse of power and continue destroying all the amazing values and aspects that made this country great.

I wish I had an answer, a solution to the seemingly endless web of heinous acts that the Bush administration has committed. I wish I could end this post with some light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel proposal. But I think the most important thing that we can do right now is recognize the problem, the tactic, the grand scheme.

Once we see the pattern, then maybe we can plan better how to combat it. Our political organizations must start delegating and focusing energy on specific issues. Investigators must probe into one issue at a time and stick with it. News stations must not forget and just move on from one scandal to the next. They should remind us and update us on stories that unfolded months ago but that have been on the back-burner while new calamities have surfaced.

As Muslims, especially as Muslim youth, we must recognize these problems in the political realm and talk about them, speak out against them, write about them, stand up for the ideals and values that we know are consistent with Islam and democracy. We must not isolate ourselves to pursuing issues that relate solely to Muslims because, if you look at the list up above, you will notice that many, if not all the above misdeeds can be related to us as Muslims. They are an offense to our ideals and our way of life. And as citizens of this country, we must demand better from our leaders. Even if we don’t live in an Islamic state, we must relate Islam to our political world and stand up for the integrity, justice, equality, tolerance, fairness, and uprightness that our religion and our country’s Constitution call for.

We think we can have no impact. We feel that we are the scapegoat of modern times. We feel pressured, threatened, spied upon, criticized, misunderstood. But look…we have a Muslim female judge and a Congressman from Michigan. We have a man running for President of the United States who has Muslim roots (whether he likes it or not!). We have the country’s attention and it’s time for us to use this opportunity to promote not only causes that our close to our hearts like Palestine, but also those that might not seem as obvious. We have a place in this nation, and our morals, ethics and values should be heard, promoted, and adhered to. As Muslim youth, make an effort to read, research and get invovled in politics. Whether you make it a goal to read the New York Times or to work on a campaign, it doesn’t matter. But the Muslims are strong and intelligent, and knowledge will help us be productive, proactive citizens who can have a strong impact on how our government operates. Let’s add some Islam, some adab, some haya, some ihsan into the halls of Congress and through the rooms of the White House.

The grand project would be to make a mural and write on it the scandals I listed above and all the others that the Bush administration has engaged in, to serve as a reminder to people that…

…”we will never forget…”

…the defrauding of a nation, the blatant, shameless hubris, the virulent attack on our national conscience, the destruction of our good will, the glorification of all that is wrong with capitalism, the barefaced refusal to uphold the Constitution, the wanton pushing aside of democracy, the glaring neglect of the poor and oppressed, the utter acquiecence to the demands of private special interests and big business, the war on the middle class, the butchering of the soul of the United States of America.

~ by raggiungere on March 20, 2007.