STILL BLUE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

It's the type of day on which we all remember where we were when it happened. September 11, 2001. That day joins the other "days of infamy" such as Pearl Harbor and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I was in Leon, France with my wife as we were near of end of a wonderful European vacation when I saw the demise of the Twin Towers on CNN. We were in shock as was most of the world. The tour we were on consisted on one third Americans, one third Australians, and one third New Zealanders. Our Aussie and New Zealand friends had lost some people in the towers but their sympathy for us was tearfully comforting.

The French people were extremely gracious to us for the next several days even giving us free phone calls back to the states. The world grieved with us as our president vowed to "get those responsible" for what became known as simply 9/11.

Now, I sit here six years later only to see yet another Bin Laden videotape shown on my television set. I sit here six years later watching a general and an ambassador trying to justify our continuing war against a people and a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.

I cried when I saw the towers fall. I cried when I saw the Pentagon hit and when the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. So did millions around the world but the pain and suffering caused by the terrorists on that fateful day has never been answered. Instead of going after the masterminds of the plot, our fearless team of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield et. al chose to send our volunteer troops into the wrong harm's way.

Why am I still so blue (here I describe the melancholy feeling, not the political blue) after all of these years? These six, long, deadly years? Well, for one thing new information keeps being uncovered that show that our president has lied to us from the very start about Iraq. Just last week, a September 6, 2007, article on Salon.com highlighted the facts that Bush knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. CIA director told him that his sources pointed out that no weapons existed but Bush just ignored him. The fact that Bush lied about the WMD does not surprise me. I'm not sure he's capable of telling the truth.

Does that really surprise anyone? Hell, even from my little spot in West Texas, I wrote against the war in Iraq on Epinions.com on January, 8, 2003. Bush didn't give a damn whether or not Saddam had WMD. His later reason that we entered the war to "free the citizens of Iraq" was also a load of manure. Hell, Bush and Cheney wanted to attack Iraq for oil and revenge for Saddam's attack on the first Bush president.

And, more importantly and even more sinister, the Iraq war is simply the crowning achievement of an administration bound and determined to create an Imperial Presidency. On NPR's "Fresh Air" of 9/5/07, Charlie Savage summarized his findings about this topic. He's written a book entitled "In Pursuit of the Imperial President." The book is still more cause for me to be depressed or blue. I should have seen it coming. Savage points out that the neo-cons around Bush have been pushing for this new form of King Bush for decades. Cheney has been pissed off since Congress weakened the presidency during the days of his first boss, Tricky Dick Nixon. Savage has also written extensively about one major tool in the advancement of Imperial Presidency--the infamous signing statements.

Bush has utilized these signing statements more than any president in history to nullify or amend congressional bills as he signs them into law. This, along with the Bush administration's attacks on the rights of all citizens and ultimately on the U.S. Constition are enough to cause me to be permanently blue.

So, what can we do? What can I do? Well, for one thing, I would like to think that Congress is going to do something about all this insanity. We've had a lot of talk, but little action. I can write my Congressman and the Senators of Texas but, since they are all conservative R's, I won't get very far. I think that we all ought to "get mad as hell and not take this anymore" (to paraphrase a character in the movie "Network") and call for Bush's and Cheney's impeachment. They've lied; they've taken consitutional rights from us, they've ignored the law and put our young men and women in danger by re-defining "torture" and ignoring the Geneva Convention rules. It's time for Bush to come back to Crawford, Texas and continue to clear brush. At least there, he wouldn't be killing Americans.