The Stench of Hypocrisy Is Overwhelming

Earlier this week, 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life.

In perfunctory manner, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday: "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who were killed."

Yet there has been no direct response from President Bush on the Red Lake massacre.
For the Chippewa, Bush's silence must be particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted.

"The fact that Bush pre-empted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.

According to American Indian Movement National Director Clyde Bellecourt, also a Chippewa Indian, "When people's children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, the president should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don't think he'd have any problem doing that."

Actually, President Bush has no problem with taking action, as long as the action involves dismantling civil liberties at home and imposing corporate-styled colonial rule around the world.

The stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming. Yet, in the world of imperialism, hypocrisy abounds.

The corporate media cover imperialist pronouncements calling on the invited Syrian forces to end their occupation of Lebanon (a country that treacherously came into existence because of a broken promise by France and Britain to its Arab allies in World War I) while ignoring the fact that the United States is occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan among others, and Zionists are occupying Palestine (also known as Israel), Syrian territory, and Lebanese territory. Simultaneously, Iran is being berated by the nuclear-armed United States and Israel for pursuing a uranium-enrichment program.

In reality, the United States has been the main supporter of dictatorships in the Middle East for the last 50 years. It has backed the Shah of Iran, the Saudi Monarchy, Egypt's dictatorship, Saddam Hussein himself, and of course the Zionist occupation of Palestine.

A leopard does not change its spots.

The United States government cares nothing for democracy; it supports regimes that agree to its terms and overthrows those that disagree whether they are democratic or autocratic. The United States values obedience not democracy.

That the United States is a militarized imperial empire is beyond question at this point in time. The level of nationalism, xenophobia, and mindless hatred divides this nation even worse during the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s.

If ever a nation exemplified a “crisis in democracy” it is the United States under George W. Bush and the Bush Brigade, and it’s legions of cheerleaders throughout the nation.

Everything has been turned upside down. Up is down; in is out; wrong is right; war is peace; occupation is liberation; fact is fiction; and freedom is the freedom to agree and do what you are told.This nation under the Bush cabal has launched a brutal, senseless and bloody war. Not against a state, but against a tactic—terrorism. The result has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Iraq is now what it never was, ground zero for fools and fanatics.

Iraq had no suicide bombers until after this country invaded, occupied and then proceeded to sell off all of Iraq’s infrastructure, assets and resources to United States multinational corporations.

It would appear that the people running this absurd and perverted “Twilight Zone” episode (Bush’s “war on terrorism”) have given no thought to “cause and effect” or “for every action there is an opposite reaction.”Every warning given to the Bush Junta that invading Iraq would result in urban, guerilla war, exactly what is being faced in Iraq now, were ignored and discounted. The cost of this has been paid by the over 100,000 Iraqi’s that have been killed and by the over 1200 U.S. personnel killed - and there is no end in sight for the death and destruction.

The Bush-Cheney regime has accomplished what Osama bin Laden needed, and that is to provide a recruiting tool for insurgents through the radicalization of so many in the Muslim world. It is only in this context that Bush is a “uniter.”

The Chippewa of Red Leaf, Minnesota continue to wait for a gesture of compassion from the former cocaine-sniffing, DUI, Texas National Guard deserter and failed businessman now occupying the White House. The Palestinians wait. The Iraqis wait. The list is lengthy, with no end in sight.