VOTE FOR A MAN, NOT A PUPPET

The following opinion piece by conservative columnist, Charley Reese is
worth reading and circulating. Reese is a columnist for the King
Features Syndicate. He turns out three columns a week and is known as a
staunchly committed conservative. I guess that's why this column is
causing such a stir. He apparently took a good hard look at "Bush Co.'s"
record vs. rhetoric, and came to some inevitable conclusions.


VOTE FOR A MAN, NOT A PUPPET

by Charley Reese

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's
re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war - Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of
neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.

I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a
frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his
administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world
of any president in my memory. It's no wonder the president avoids press
conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk.
Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke
more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their
joint press conference recently.

John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think
and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's
comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate
that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal
to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that
people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never
will be.

People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their
stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush
is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once,
but he won't fool me twice. It is not at all conservative to
balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to
show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people
that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant
fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what
their government is doing.

Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the
20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the
authoritarian. It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a
few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found
yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either
you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy
combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?

This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but
because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost
restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America
is notonly hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the
worldthanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't
forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and
Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.

I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in
the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it.
Go to Kerry's Web site and read some of the magazine profiles on him.
You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than the GOP attack dogs
would have you believe. Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays
hockey, windsurfs, ride motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and
speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has
killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect on a man
and dispels all illusions about war.