Friends:

I will send my own analysis when I write it, but I thought it appropriate to send you some sentiments that express the situation clearly. The first is by Ralph Nader and is about Lebanon. The second is a rumination on what Tom Paine would have said about George Bush. Hm, at the time the despot was George III of England. I think Georgie is our third President named George. The first was O.K., so far as I can tell, but the last two – well, maybe it’s about time to stop letting people named George run things.

P.S.: I understand, from Public Radio International, that bird flu is still rampaging Indonesia, death toll reaching 47 this year, so be careful!

Finally, comments are welcome!

*ZNet | U.S.*

*Bush -- "Take Your Time"*

*by Ralph Nader; August 23, 2006*

Open letter to President George W. Bush:

The widespread destruction of a defenseless Lebanon -- its

civilians, its life-sustaining public services, its environment

-- is a grim and indelible testament to your consummate cruelty

and ignorance. Nearly two weeks ago when your tardy Secretary of

State met with the Israeli Prime Minister, the message she

carried was summarized in a large headline across page one of an

Israeli newspaper, "TAKE YOUR TIME."

Yes, take your time, says George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing

refugees in cars full of families, bombing apartment buildings,

hospitals and the poor huddled in large south Beirut slums.

Take your time, says George W. Bush, in destroying bridges,

roads, gasoline stations, airports, seaports, wheat silos,

vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked ambulances taking

the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory .

Take your time, says George W. Bush, while shelters are

demolished with bodies of little children together with their

mothers and fathers buried in the rubble.

Take your time, says George W. Bush, while the number of fleeing

refugees nears one million Lebanese, many exposed to hunger,

disease, lack of potable water and medicines. All this in a

country friendly to the United States, which played by your

rules, protested the Syrian army back into Syria and was trying

democratically to put itself together.

Take your time, says George W. Bush, while he speeds more

supplies of precision missiles containing deadly anti-personnel

cluster bombs which will claim the lives of innocent children

for years into the future. The phosphorous bombs laying waste to

fields growing crops and horribly burning innocents come from

the U.S.A. under your direction.

Do you think the taxpayers of America would approve of such

shipped weapons were they ever asked?

Are there words in the English language suitable for the

impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in

committing not only in Iraq but also now through your

encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli

government?

Are there words to describe your strategic stupidity which will

further increase opposition and peril to the United States

around the world and especially in the Middle East? Your own

Generals and former CIA Director, Porter Goss, among others in

your Administration, have declared that your occupation of Iraq

is a magnet attracting the recruiting and training of more and

more "terrorists" from Iraq and other countries. And so now this

will be the case in Lebanon. All this is a growing "blowback,"

to use the CIA word for a boomeranging foreign policy, that is

endangering the security of the United States.

The calibrated Israeli terror bombing of Lebanon comes in three

stages. With its electronic pinpoint precision bombing and

artillery, the Israeli government goes after civilians, their

homes, cities, towns and villages.

Then after telling some to abandon their neighborhoods, it cuts

population centers off from each other by destroying

transportation facilities into and inside Lebanon, making both

refugee flight and delivery of emergency relief efforts either

impossible or very difficult. Then its planes, tanks and

artillery endanger or destroy what food, water and relief

efforts manage to get through to the injured and dying.

Warehouse food supplies are incinerated. About four hundred

small fishing boats north of Beirut on the oil-polluted

coastline were demolished as well.

All the above mayhem and much more have been reported in the

U.S., European, Lebanese and Israeli media. The bulk of the

fatalities in Lebanon have been civilians. The bulk of the

fatalities on the Israeli side have been soldiers. Very

fortunately for the Israelis, the Hezbollah rockets are very

inaccurate, the vast majority falling harmlessly. Unfortunately

for the Lebanese, the precision American armaments of the

Israelis are very accurate, which serves to account for why the

total casualties and physical destruction are 100 times greater

in Lebanon than in Israel.

Most of these accurate munitions come from your decision to send

them. Knowing they will be used for offensive purposes,

including the lethal demolition of a long-established UN

compound, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which you

have sworn to uphold, places the responsibility of being a

domestic law breaker squarely on your shoulders.

There is another law that is not being enforced -- the

Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act of 1996 sponsored by then

Republican Senator Robert Dole. Foreign aid is supposed to be

cut off to any nation that obstructs the provision of

humanitarian aid to another country. As one example, press

reports that two tankers, each with 30,000 tons of diesel fuel

critical for operating Lebanese hospitals and water pumping

stations, are idling in Cyprus from fear of the totally dominant

Israeli navy and air force.

There are only a few days left of fuel in Lebanon, which is

heading for a larger wave of secondary casualties. They and

other critical suppliers need safe passage which the U.S. Navy

in the area can readily provide, should it receive orders from

the Commander in Chief.

You heard high Israeli officials accurately say on the day the

massive bombing of Lebanon began, followed not preceded by

Hezbollah rockets, that "nothing in Lebanon is safe." That huge

over-reaction to the recent Hezbollah border raid, in addition

to many more previous air, sea and land border violations by the

Israeli government, certainly put you on public notice.

Since you view yourself as a reborn Christian, and since you

have the power to stop the Israeli state terror assaults on

Lebanon, you may wish to reflect on Leviticus 19:16 "Neither

shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor." Lebanon was

a friendly country to you and you have stood by not just idly,

but willfully aiding and abetting its devastation.

*ZNet | U.S.*

*What Might Tom Paine Have Said About George Bush?*

*by Sherwood Ross; August 23, 2006*

Peculiarly, a lot of what American patriot Tom Paine wrote in

1775 about the British Crown seems to apply to President Bush today.

For example, Paine believed, "any excuse can be made to serve

the purpose of malignity when it is in power." And when ever was

there a more deceitful example of this than Bush's lie that Iraq

had WMD?

As historian John Keane wrote in his excellent "Tom Paine: A

Political Life" (Little, Brown and Co.) despots --- as Paine saw

them- plunder "the pockets and lives of their subjects, since

that is the most effective way of raising and feeding armies and

making their subjects afraid, obedient, and willing to pay

taxes. Wars between despotic states thereby tend to increase

rulers' lust for power over their own populations. War, wrote

Paine, is 'the art of conquering at home.'" (Original italics.)

And so we are, indeed, conquered at home. We live under a regime

that can arrest and imprison any of us for as long as it likes,

one that denies our privacy, scraps our international treaties,

and shreds our Bill of Rights.

Having been given no honest reason for launching the war on

Iraq, the real reason most probably is oil, just as Paine wrote

the reason King George III made war on America was because "her

crime is property."

As President Bush confiscates our taxes for Iraq, and squanders

the lives of our troops, let's recall Paine's words about the

crimes of the Crown: "Hath your property been destroyed before

your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie

on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by

their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor?"

These words ring true in thousands of American homes tonight,

where loved ones have been killed or maimed in Iraq; where

millions of people are sliding into poverty as a result of

Bush's anti-compassionate policies; and where 40-million people

have no health coverage. The bell tolls even louder for millions

of Iraqi families whose nation Bush has turned into a veritable

charnel house.

And what would Tom Paine have made of the wanton cruelty that

George Washington forbid his soldiers to engage in but can now

be described as "routine" under Commander-in-Chief George Bush's

military?

"It is time to have done with tarring, feathering, carting and

taking securities for their future good behaviour," Paine wrote

charitably of British sympathizers. "Every sensible man must

feel conscious shame at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show

about the streets." What Paine might have said of men stacked in

human pyramids or hung from chains until dead!

Paine inveighed against the death penalty. Condemning the

excesses of the French Revolution, he said, "as France has been

the first of European nations to abolish royalty, let her also

be the first to abolish the punishment of death, and to find out

a milder and more effective substitute." What would he have said

about the ever-sizzling Texas electric chair under Governor Bush?

As for all citizens bearing government's burden equally, Pain's

view was very different from President Bush's call to ditch the

"death tax." According to Keane: Believing as Paine did the

earth is "the common property of the human race," it followed

"the propertied have an obligation to help the poor, not by

charity alone, but by accepting a government-administered

inheritance tax system designed to redistribute and equalize

income."

As for Bush's boasting about "freedom," let us recall these

words by Paine: "When it shall be said in any country in the

world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to

be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets

of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not

oppressive'--- when these things can be said then may that

country boast of its constitution and its government."

With two million men in jail, and the poor growing by the

millions, Bush has precious little to boast about. Speaking of

jails, when do you suppose Bush might pardon the hundreds of

thousands of Americans imprisoned on flimsy marijuana

convictions while he, who tramples the law of nations, whose

tongue spills lies, and whose hands drip with the blood of

hundreds of thousands, enjoys the run of the White House?