Dear Bart,

This is wehere the religious right and the 9-11 conspiracy theorists meet...  They are all out there ignoring
plain reality. DeLay is a crook, Christian or not. He is also, like all of us, fallible, but he took it to the
Senate, made his fallibility public and thereby created a frightful role model for young people. That is what I,
personally, really fault him for. Not the crime, necessarily, but the model issue. Same for the rest of those
creeps up there. They are setting a bad example for our children, giving he uplift to ignorance, ambition
and power-madness. They are also guilty of every deadly sin in the good book.

As for the 9-11 conspiracists.... I had a friend who worked for one of those National Enquirer type tabloids.
He told me what kind of stuff he did: Photo of a woman with a basket, from the back (couldn't identify the woman).
Caption: Woman walks off with $1 million.

The conspiracy theorists work with the idea that you cannot prove a negative. What they are missing,
is that the reality is far worse than a conspiracy. The Bush government's primary sin was ignoring warnings
(perhaps intentionally, I don't know, since it was obvious that any major attack on the USA was a welcome
excuse to trash the Bill of Rights and send us into a permanent war). Secondly, they are detracting from the
real point of 9-11, namely to put the US government to the test and American democracy to the test.
And there we failed miserably.  Franklin Roosevelt would have acted differently and our democracy would
have been saved. He would have comforted the American people, built up a powerful coalition, worked with
secret service and police forces the world round (combatting terrorism cannot be done on the battlefield, it is,
in the words of the experts, police work), and told us to get along with our lives. He would have ensured that
the economy was powerful, that the people of the world could all look UP to America, not down. Bush has
mortgaged us to China, engaged our military in a completely senseless war (for the profit of his family and
assorted cronies), and has finally confirmed the image of America's darkest sides.

But OBL couldn't have picked a better moment to strike (forget controlled demo, didn't happen, the towers
had some fundamental strucural weak points and they pancaked down, period): The Bush Regime is and was
intent on creating a powerful oligarchy, like those that ruled many Latin American nations for decades, with the
support of our tax dollars, and 9-11 is what got the ball rolling. I think that was a bonus for OBL.
He did not even expect it.

America doesn't need Al Qaeda to be destroyed, with Bush in power, it will destroy itself quite nicely, thank you.

Many Americans hark back to America's role in "saving Europe." Especially in the face of European criticism.
And in Europe, many people of a certain generation are thankful for that. But America's own memory is short.
And as a collective, we made the mistake of resting on our laurels, and said laurels have become dry and brittle
and will soon be dust. Were you a great hockey player in college? Great. But if you spend your life drinking beer,
flopping down in front of the TV eating nachos, I guarantee you, you will look idiotic at 60, weighing 280 pounds,
saying "I am a great sportsman because I whacked a puck when I was 20." Same goes for the nation: We have
wasted our international political capital, in particular with the "patriotic" presidents, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes.

Oddly enough, while many Americns seem to consider the Watergate Scandal a failure,  it was one of America's
great moments, sheer proof that we could get rid of a crook and his crooked cronies and yet continue. Exit from
Vietnam was a great moment as well: Proof that we were a nation that could recognize a mistake and a hopeless
situation and pull out. All that was lacking was recognituion of those poor screwed vets and the dead ones, and
recognition of our brutal bombings that killed nearly 2 million Vietnamese, who I am sure had something better to
do in life than fight some foreign over-technologized power interfering in their country's affairs. We should have
listened to Ho Chi Minh in the late 1940s, when he wanted our support to decolonize Vietnam (Indochina).
We didn't, so he went to the Russians. Recognizing that would have made us an even greater nation. But I digress.

As an ex-pat, I often found myself siding with the USA in political discussions. I always said: America is a
sanguine nation, able to change itself quickly. Nowadays I have to admit: ignorance, complacency and
intellectual laziness have become systemic. We have excellent political potential, but they will not, could not, run,
because they either don't "look right" or they don't "sound right", or because they are not Baaahble pounders.
We have great food, but we eat MacDonald's.

Regards,
Marton, The Netherlands
 

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