Why I Hate Bush, etc.

"Why I Hate Bush" is my latest at the Partial Observer. If you have comments or would like to contribute your own reasons, I would appreciate it if you post them there.

As expected, I'm already kicking myself. At the Birch Blog, William Norman Grigg reminds me of another reason to hate Bush, the cases of Mohammed Yousry and Lynne Stewart. By the way, at the end of his post, Grigg provides some good definitions:

-“conspiracy theory:" drawing impermissible anti-government conclusions from politically inconvenient facts.
-“paranoid:" someone who notices things without government permission.
-“terrorist:" any individual – US citizen or foreigner – whom the government summarily imprisons, or murders with extreme prejudice.

Elsewhere at the Partial Observer, Stephen D. Thomson from Australia has a heart-wrenching piece about his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which persists 35 years since his military discharge:

Those of today - the car accident victims; the victims of violent crime; the soldiers in the streets of Iraq; and many, many more seriously traumatised people, for whatever reason, all around the world - will, hopefully, receive counselling before the trauma becomes buried and the locks hammered into place by time. Once that happens then the clock starts ticking on the bomb that is their psyche, ready to explode at anytime and even many times, as in my case, with my anger. Unfortunately though, very few receive that much needed help. Most are never offered it. Some refuse it when it is. Also, many just cannot afford the help when it is available. And, as it is said, life goes on. And society pays, in the end, a lot more than it would have cost had it dealt with the problems in the beginning. As I know more about the military side of this, I'll stick with what I know and what I have experienced.

Just before I was discharged from the military, I put the locks on. I know now exactly when that was. It would have been so simple, on reflection, if someone had come to me and said, "Son, let's talk this thing through. Let's slay the demons that you're going to fight for the rest of your life if you don't deal with them now." It didn't happen. As a consequence I closed up. From day one. And, to a great degree I still am "closed up"...but, at least, I am still alive. And kicking.

I should take this opportunity to invite readers who like to write to consider submitting to the Partial Observer. The PO accepts fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from a variety of perspectives. I know of nothing like it on the web. And now, the editor/webmaster Mark Johnson has his own blog about television, Program Notes.

One thing I like about The Partial Observer is its name. It doesn't cover everything, just what is important to those who want to write for it. Compare that to "news" pages, which tell us what's important and then try to flush the rest down the memory hole. Consider the Philadelphia Daily News story about the Supreme Court's assisted suicide decision (which I write about below). At the very end, the story says:

The justices also:
• Refused to hear an appeal from families of New York firefighters killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, to allow them to proceed with a lawsuit against New York City and Motorola for supplying the rescuers with faulty radios.

• Rejected an appeal from an anti-war protester convicted of violating the boundaries of a "restricted area" established during President Bush's visit to South Carolina in 2002.

• Declined to block lawsuits brought on behalf of thousands of gypsies, Jews, Serbs and others who claim that the Vatican Bank received valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

Don't get me wrong: I don't know anything about these cases, or whether they were rightly or wrongly decided. But don't you think these (or the first two, at least) are as big if not bigger as the assisted suicide case? The first one seems to tell us that if government screws its own firefighters and the taxpayers by overpaying a corporation for crappy equipment, justice will not be served. The second seems to tell us that free speech is allowed in some areas but not others, regardless of what the First Amendment says. The third looks totally confusing: what good is a lawsuit in a U.S. Court for things that happened across the ocean sixty years ago?

Elsewhere, Jeff Wells provides some details of the Jeffrey MacDonald case, which I mentioned briefly here a while ago. And Vache Folle, inspired by yours truly, ponders running for President.