Life In These United States

(I had a very unpleasant experience with the billing department of Reader’s Digest over a “trial” subscription once, so I’m only too happy to steal this from them; if they don’t like it, they can bite me.)

This Guest Opinion appeared yesterday in the Bucks County Courier Times from Bruce Lloyd of Lower Makefield, PA, who, according to his bio, is a principal engineer and construction official with the state of New Jersey. He is also a retired commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and a former U.S. Senate page.

Our country is heading in the wrong direction, and it’s serious. Our war on terror is a sham; our actions and inactions are only making it worse. We are being told that everything is fine and right on schedule, but it’s all a con because George Bush and other Republicans in Washington are only interested in one thing – staying in office. And they will seek to do so no matter how much it sets our country back and no matter how many lives are lost or ruined unnecessarily.

While these people have no idea what they’re doing and are taking the rest of us with them, there is good news. We can stop them – one vote at a time. And that means electing Patrick Murphy as our next congressman. We must tell incumbent Congressman Michael Fitzpatrick that we don’t need his representation any more.

Iraq is in the middle of a civil war. The “constitution” that was drafted and passed has no meaning. No one here is paying any attention to it. Now some of the responsible leaders in Washington are saying that the resolution Congress passed authorizing the initial invasion (based on fabricated and distorted intelligence information) may no longer be valid. The American people and Congress gave no authorization for our country to be in the middle of a heated civil war.

Even Fitzpatrick has tired of the current strategy. I refer to the Aug. 8 edition of the Courier Times, “Fitzpatrick takes new stance on Iraq war policy.” Yet, as the story reports, “Fitzpatrick offered no new strategy.”

Mr. Fitzpatrick tells us with pride that he sent a letter to an organization called the Iraq Study Group with the United States Institute of Peace. In it, he says he exhorted them to work harder. That’s great. We have over 2,600 dead Americans to date, and some 30-40 being killed every month, and our first-term congressman is writing letters to a study group.

Patrick Murphy has a plan that makes sense and can work. Start bringing home our National Guard and reserve troops shortly and redeploy many of our regular forces to the borders of Syria and Iran; then, start bringing home regular forces on a gradual basis by the end of the year.

When George Bush came into office, we handed him a budget surplus of $230 billion for fiscal year 2000, the highest in U.S. history. Bush and his administration immediately got to work attacking that with excessive tax reductions for the rich and by slowing needed increases for education and health care. Meanwhile, deficits are accumulating from prescription drug bill. And the massive debt for the Iraq war continues to accumulate.

These deficits hurt. For example, gas prices have risen from $1.40 in March 2001 to $3 per gallon for much of this summer. The cost to attend a public four-year college has increased 32 percent between the 2000-2001 and 2004-2005 school years. Student debts are rapidly becoming horrendous and in some cases double what they were when this Republican administration started in 2001.

In closing, let me direct readers to some great web sites so each person can do his or her own research: www.murphy06.com, www.americanprogressaction.org, www.opensecrets.org, www.vote-smart.org, www.dccc.org, and www.democrats.org.

Mr. Lloyd brought up something that I really didn’t address earlier, and that was the fact that Mikey contacted something called the Iraq Study Group when he realized that everything wasn’t just ducky with the war after all.

As noted here, the person running the Iraq Study Group is none other than James “The Fixer” Baker III, the Bush family confidant who I somehow thought was a better man than Poppy and his ruinous progeny, but I guess is perhaps not after all.

As noted by Robert Dreyfuss of the Washington Monthly...

"'Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home—that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics,' a member of one of the commission's working groups told [Dreyfuss]. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the [Bush] administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. 'I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train.'"

Yes, I know there is a hint – just a hint – of bipartisanship in the list of individuals in the group, including Leon Panetta, Vernon Jordan, and Lee Hamilton, but make no mistake; this is Baker’s show.

Also, I noted yesterday in the piece on Rummy (and I definitely promise more on this whole ridiculous propaganda campaign comparing the Iraq war and the Israel-Hezbollah spinoff to World War II) that the Rothenberg political report had the U.S. PA 7th Congressional District race between Crazy Curt Weldon and Admiral Joe Sestak as a toss up (I wish the 16th district race between Joe Pitts and Lois Herr was "on his radar," though).

That’s good news, but in the 8th district race, Mikey is still slightly favored over Patrick Murphy (Fitzpatrick is a shrewd political animal, and he manages to get his face on local TV a lot – he’s also helped by a lot of die-hard knuckle draggers up here, unfortunately).

To help Patrick close that gap and make this race a toss up also, click here.