Neo-Hippie Ramblings - I'm a Non-Conformist Just Like All My Friends: George Bush belongs in front of a war crimes tribunal

Monday, May 09, 2005

George Bush belongs in front of a war crimes tribunal

I don't know what's worse, this morning.

Surfing around, I ended up on Newsweek.com and found myself at a photo gallery of a family of children whose parents had been shot to death in front of them by US troops at a security checkpoint. In one photo, a little girl no older than 8 or 9 is sitting on the road wailing, spattered with her parents' blood.

And then I come to this article. Basically, we don't even know how the war in Iraq is going.

The article begins with a picture of a soldier cradling a bloodsoaked towel, from which dangle a set of tiny feet. I can't even describe the horror that it evokes and I can't get the image out of my head.

Fuck.

posted by Rambler Joe Snitty @ 7:00 AM  |

1 Old Comments:

A friend responded via e-mail:


> Definitely scary, but what (if this is even possible) do you think it will take for our fellow Americans to demand that it stop?
>

We need someone who can demand accountability from the Bush administration and exert enough pressure to extract us from this mess in Iraq before it gets any worse. At some point in the near future, we'll either have to pull out of Iraq or there will have to be a draft. The US military is simply becoming overextended.

The Left needs a leader, something it hasn't had since Bill Clinton left office. While Clinton was obviously flawed, he was charismatic and felt 'real' in a way that leaves both Gore and Kerry looking like stick figures. I don't know if Hillary Clinton could pull it off or not -- that election would be a TOTAL zoo.

I'd been hoping that Wesley Clark would win the Democratic primary last spring, but unfortunately he didn't. Instead, the Democrats nominated such a wet noodle that the whole 2004 platform came down to "at least he's not George Bush".

Assuming that a leader emerges, that person would need a strong message. All arguments are based in some combination of logos, ethos and pathos -- and the best combine all three. This slow-motion train wreck we've been living in since January 2000 should have given the Democrats a very easy win in the 2004 election. Dubya could have been bent over and spanked in front of his strongest supporters, simply by pointing out the degree to which he failed to meet their expectations.

It seems to me that the Left needs someone who can cross traditional party lines, especially in terms of advocating a combination of fiscal responsibility, global citizenship, environmental awareness and real social justice. Gen X is a pragmatic bunch. While I think a lot of us support someone like Ralph Nader in spirit, we also recognize that he's garnered such a reputation as an unelectable flake that we don't want to waste our votes on him.

By Blogger Rambler Joe Snitty, at 10:34 PM