Posted on 10/13/2004 5:14:18 PM PDT by dennisw
Richard Dawkins
Dear Americans,
Don't be so ashamed of your president: the majority of you didn't vote for him. If Bush is finally elected properly, that will be the time for Americans travelling abroad to simulate a Canadian accent. Please don't let it come to that. Vote against Bin Laden's dream candidate. Vote to send Bush packing.
Before 9/11 gave him his big break - the neo-cons' Pearl Harbor - Bush was written off as an amiable idiot, certain to serve only one term. An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and vindictive; and the thuggish ideologues who surround him are dangerous. 9/11 gave America a free gift of goodwill, and it poured in from all around the world. Bush took it as a free gift to the warmongers of his party, a licence to attack an irrelevant country which, however nasty its dictator, had no connection with 9/11. The consequence is that all the worldwide goodwill has vanished. Bush's America is on the way to becoming a pariah state. And Bush's Iraq has become a beacon for terrorists.
In the service of his long-planned war (with its catastrophically unplanned aftermath), Bush not only lied about Iraq being the "enemy" who had attacked the twin towers. With the connivance of the toadying Tony Blair and the spineless Colin Powell, he lied to Congress and the world about weapons of mass destruction. He is now brazenly lying to the American electorate about how "well" things are going under the puppet government. By comparison with this cynical mendacity, the worst that can be said about John Kerry is that he sometimes changes his mind. Well, wouldn't you change your mind if you discovered that the major premise on which you had been persuaded to vote for war was a big fat lie?
Now that all other justifications for the war are known to be lies, the warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly repeated: the world is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is. But that's the Tony Martin school of foreign policy [Martin was a householder who shot dead a burglar who had broken into his house in 1999]. It's not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave. The world would be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn't justify an assassination attempt. The proper way to get rid of that smirking gunslinger is to vote him out.
As the bumper stickers put it, "Re-defeat Bush". But, this time, do it so overwhelmingly that neither his brother's friends in Florida nor his father's friends on the Supreme Court will be able to rig the count. Decent Americans - there are absolutely more intelligent, educated, civilised, cultivated, compassionate people in America than in any other country in the western world - please show your electoral muscle this time around. We in the rest of the world, who sadly cannot vote in the one election that really affects our future, are depending on you. Please don't let us down.
· Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University. More letters to Clark County will be appearing in G2 over the next fortnight.
____________________________
John Le Carré
Maybe there's one good reason - just one - for re-electing George W Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions, and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who will then get blamed for his predecessor's follies. Probably no American president in all history has been so universally hated abroad as George W Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war - and now anarchy - upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship, but had no hand in 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the US in a dirty war against Iran.
Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair a great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign policy and domestic security to the same hare-brained adventure?
You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same question: how long can the lies last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11. Osama provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.
While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children's access to education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare. Now he's busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency funds to fight a war that his advisers promised him he could light and put out like a candle.
Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties which took brave Americans 200 years to secure, and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but at what you are doing to yourselves.
But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you. And here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George Bush, your nightmares will be ours
.
Europe does not make demands of America.
America makes demands of Europe.
Fini.
The French, Germans, Russians and socialists/terrorists/totalitarians world-wide are all pulling for Kerry. Can't imagine why.
With the hatred of these pompous foreigners, that's another reason to vote for the President.
I remember reading of this effort yesterday, whereby they are inviting Brits to try to influence this county's voters. I can see now, that the letters these people write can only serve to help Bush, not hurt him.
CzarNicky to euroweenies, bite me.
GO Bush!
G.F.Y.
Thanks much for the antidote to Richard Dawkins poison pen.... Frederick Forsyth. I've read some of his spy books.
Hey Euroweenies!!!
Forkez vous off!!!
Sad...
I will never again be able to enjoy the writings of John Le Carre.
These are the elitest bastards that presume to instruct Americans how to vote.....
F'em...
Twice!
Semper Fi
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "America Fails the 'Global Test' "
If you haven't already joined the anti-CFR effort, please click here.
It's not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave.
Well, that left Saddam's regime out, then, huh?
The world would be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn't justify an assassination attempt.
What civilized person would need to say that? Despicable.
I'd like these simple-minded fools to put aside their ideology and hatred for just a brief moment and consider the articles we've seen in the last couple of days with mass-graves, where moms were still holding their children. What have WE done to Iraqi's INDEED. I'm beginning to wonder, in this day and age, if Europe wouldn't have embraced Hitler if it meant it could stick it's finger in the eye of the US, had it been happening today.
Didn't we revolt against idiots like this in 1776?
Excellent post (#2). Truly well said.
"Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University."
Nice sinecure, and the title sounds great. Since the public at large does not understand science, and does not want to, it resembles the second part of a job title from archaic Egypt: "the master over everything that exists, and over everything that does not exist..."
Me thinks they mean, pre-1773 America, since they are not saying the United States. Guess they haven't gotten over we band of rabble casting off King and Country...
Englandistan.
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