By Richard Astukewicz
Liberal Democrats keep reminding me that this war has gone on longer than World War II. Yes, it has, and it may well go on so that my great-grandchildren will be fighting this war. In World War II we fought an enemy, Germany, with military uniformed men. Today we are fighting a war with an enemy whose only uniform is that black mask over their faces and who knows who they are, and there is no Marginal Line.
Liberal elitists did away with the draft and opted for an all-volunteer military and so here we are without a military to defend this nation in a time that is worse than both world wars. We did away with the draft, and the liberal savior came along in the presidency of Bill Clinton, who, during his eight years in office, aided the liberal cause. He cut the military, he cut the defense budgets and lessened our military power, which Vietnam veterans like Colin Powell struggled to revive, at a time when we should have been building up our military might, to perhaps defend this nation in a most troubling time in history. Consequently, Donald Rumsfeld went to war with the military he had.
President Bush has been called the imperial president. Well, Imperial President Clinton, "who would cheat at solitaire" (Jay Severin), had eight chances in one year to destroy bin Laden but did not. He chose to fight a more moral war, as Sen. John Kerry has called for, and so bin Laden, with a $50 million bounty on his head, is still at large, just as Whitey Bulger is.
Don't tell me that we haven't got bin Laden, that we haven't defeated al-Qaida or the Taliban — you have all become liberal appeasers searching for peace at any price in a world full of horrors all around you that you seem to be blind to. You worry about what the world will think about us as the world destroys us with a different war— the economic energy war.
We have a new face on the political scene, the one who will talk to our enemies. What will he talk about to the leader in Iran: "Please don't build that nuclear bomb." India, Pakistan, China, Russia, France, England, Israel and we the United State have nukes, suddenly North Korea and Iran should not.
We have lost our power, we have no strength, nothing to offer in talks with our enemies; they have all the aces in the deck — oil and energy — and all our honorables in Washington have sold this nation to the No. 1 world power — American and world corporations.
Liberals want to destroy the Patriot Act and FISA, which are tools being used in the war on terror. They claim these programs violate our constitutional freedom, yet in Chicago the city has 10,000 cameras spying on citizens by citizens, but that's not a violation of our rights. It's a police tool, but we can't do the same with terrorists who want to inflict pain on Americans. Somehow that's not logical. I guess the philosophy of liberals is, "If it isn't broken, fix it till it is" (author unknown).
Once again liberals seem to be bent on destroying this nation. Liberal elitist environmentalists have stopped the drilling for oil in Alaska, in the Bering Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, on federal lands, off the coast of California and off the coast of Florida and you continue electing them to office ... but remember we will save the globe from global warming ... with $5, $6, or even $10 a gallon gas and heating oil.
Your great liberal leaders are solving your energy needs with a windfall profits tax on oil companies and a lawsuit against OPEC. Are they serious? Will this lower the cost of gasoline and home heating fuels? I guess they think so.
I am not like the liberals who for the past 71/2 years have done everything to hinder and destroy the presidency of George Bush. I want whoever is my president to succeed, it's in my own self-interest. That said, I do not want a socialist; I want my freedom as given to me by our Constitution. I do not want socialism to invade my life, my freedom, and my God-given natural law rights.
Socialists create these new socialist laws and programs, taking away our freedom, and then make us pay for them with higher taxes all in the cause of "for the greater good of the society" while looking down at the average Joe and Joan, pretending to champion the cause of poor and middle-class America while being the holier than thou ivory tower elitists who know what's best for us ... and Americans are buying it. P.T. Barnum would love it.
Richard A. Astukewicz of Salisbury is a retired business manager.
