by James Glaser
February 11, 2004

When I was a kid my dad drove Ford cars and today I drive a Ford truck and most of my automobiles have been Ford. Guys I talk to that drive Chevrolets or Mopar tend to be driving what their parents have. Sure there are kids that don't drive what dad did out of spite and there are lots of foreign models now, but what I am saying is that your parents influence does stay with you for the rest of your life.

Margaret Tutwiler is the official in charge of the State Departments "Public Diplomacy" section. This week she testified to a sub committee of the House Appropriations Committee and said, America's standing had deteriorated to such an extent that "it will take us many years of hard, focused work" to restore it. She went on to say, "unfortunately, our country has a problem in far too many parts of the world."

Like the influence my parents had on me with cars or how many men and women that grew up in Union households, now as adults, vote Democrat, children the world over will carry some of the thinking that their parents have about the United States for the rest of their lives.

America has in the last fifty years, killed several million innocent people all over the world. I will say that again, America has in the last fifty years, killed several million people all over the world. Way over two million in Korea and Vietnam alone and we have been in an almost constant state of war with somebody since 1950.

Every person that we killed had many family members that have some amount of hate for us. Every country we have dropped bombs on and there are many, have hundreds of thousands of people that have grown to hate us. Think of all the hate losing 3,000 on 9/11 caused right here at home. We had people out killing foreign immigrants in less than 24 hours. That was blind hate and why would we think other countries would be different than us?

We now have an American General in uniform preaching in churches that our God is better than the Muslim God; in fact theirs is the devil. Also he states that our God put George Bush in the White House. That General's taped preaching I am sure, has been broadcast all over the Muslim world.

Yes Margaret Tutwiler is right, we do have a problem. We have billions of people around the globe that hate us and what do you think they are teaching their children?

I don't know what we can do about all the millions of innocent women, children, infants, crippled, young men, young women, old men, old women, mentally handicapped, and disabled people we have killed. Their loved ones will harbor hate for us till they die.

I know this is a novel idea, but we could stop killing innocent people and stop thinking our rights are greater than the rights of the people we kill. Also we could stop American officials in American uniforms from telling over half the world that their religion is bunk and that the real God appointed our President to set them straight.

Tutwiler is right about it taking years for us to be a respected nation again. Most of the world believes that George Bush is the greatest threat to peace in the world and billions think he is the greatest terrorist in the world. We will not change those people's mind, but we have to start some time and some place.

America has to start leading by example. You can't buy the people whose children you have murdered. Yes I know about the Just War Doctrine our government trots out every time we want to attack somebody, but tell that to some mother or father whose child was just blown to bits by one of our cluster bombs or one that takes a bullet in the head from a nervous soldier that was scared and surprised by a child's shout.

We can sit here with our thumbs up or asses and keep saying that we are right and they are wrong, but in the adult Christian world that we claim to live in, you try to love and help those that hate you.

We can continue to "cherry pick" those parts of the Bible that glorify war and use our most powerful military to take over the world, but it isn't going to work. Many have tried it in the past and many of those claimed that the "real" God was on their side, but they lost anyway.

For the Last 50 years we have been taking on the weak and the oppressed of the third world, countries that have been no match for us and we have kicked ass and we still crow about it. Remember the only two real armies we have ever fought in the last half century, North Korea and Vietnam, fought us to a stand still and defeated us respectively.

Oh, I have no doubt we can defeat anyone in the world, but we will have to kill almost everyone in some countries to do it and I don't think the American people are into Genocide just yet.

POST SCRIPT

The White House has magically come up with George Bush's pay records, that they say prove he was not AWOL. On Tuesday of this week, Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post admits that he was paid for two years while in the National Guard and attended no meetings and he got an Honorable Discharge. This happened at the same time Bush was in. So pay stubs mean almost nothing

The White House says, "When you serve, you are paid for that service. They are showing Bush's pay records as proof that he served, but even in their pay records there is a five month gap in which he didn't get paid. So, using their analogy about "when you serve you get paid," it stands to reason that if you didn't get paid, you didn't serve.

Another part of this story that doesn't pass the smell test, is that in all of these years of looking, Bush can not find one person that ever saw him at a National Guard training session in 1972, the missing year in his service. Hundreds of the members of that unit are still alive today and you know if somebody came forward, George would be in their debt big time.

When I was in Vietnam, I could have used a five month break. It would have been fine with me if they didn't pay me. From these records I can only say that George Bush deserted his unit during a War and I think the man should be in jail. Of course, that is only my opinion. Having gone through a totally horrible time in Vietnam, I could be a little biased.

Richard Cohen writes, "When George attempts to drape the flag of today's National Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up."