North of the Stupid Line

Further to my post about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs, Living History, after receiving Bill Clinton’s autobiography for my 24th birthday back in 2004, I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve finished it at long last!

I have to say that Bill does certainly know how to waffle. However, I appreciated the detail, honesty and frankness of his account. He has certainly had an interesting life. I liked the way he brushed over the Monica Lewinsky issue; he simply said that he’d done something inappropriate that he was incredibly ashamed of.

What I’d like to pick up on is the partisan nature of American politics. On pages 862-863, Bill states:

“When the New Right Republicans had taken power in Congress in 1995, I had blocked their most extreme designs and had made further progress in economic, social, and environmental justice the price of our co-operation. I understood why the people who equated political, economic, and social conservatism with God’s will hated me. I wanted an America of shared benefits, shared responsibilities, and equal participation in a democratic community. The New Right Republicans wanted an America in which wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of the “right” people, who maintained majority support by demonizing a rolling succession of minorities whose demands for inclusion threatened their hold on power. They also hated me because I was so apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted.”

That sums it all up really, doesn’t it? While the Democrats are more concerned about improving the lives of the working and middle classes, and asking the upper classes to pay a bit more in taxes, the Republicans want the upper classes to pay less and the lower and middle classes to pay more in taxes. Republicans aren’t interested in human rights and the environment. They weren’t interested in working with Bill; they just wanted to bring him down because he was such a good President.

I realise that I have only read one side of the story; Bill and Hillary’s. So I will see if I can get hold of a book published by a Republican, perhaps Newt Gringrich, and see what I think thereafter.

For now, however, I would say that I’d rather be a Democrat than a Republican. Does that make me a Democrat?

I’ll look into how the UK Conservatives and Labour parties compare with the US Democrats and Republicans in a later post.

I was just reading this article in the New York Times and was thinking to myself how glad I am that I don’t live in the USA. Can you imagine having to pay for your health care costs, even if you get cancer or heart disease, or just to find out what’s wrong with you when you’re ill?

For all the criticism levelled at the National Health Service, we are very lucky to have it. You don’t need to worry about health insurance, and the poorest of the poor can have medical treatment and won’t be denied it simply because they can’t afford it, which is what happens in the USA.

Even for the middle classes, it can be a very expensive business, and like the family featured in the NY Times article, some even have to file for bankruptcy as they can’t afford to repay the medical costs as well as their mortgage, living costs etc.

The USA is meant to be the ultimate in democracy. Ha, don’t make me laugh. It is a money-hungry, corporate-minded nation that is generous to the rich and hard on the middle and working classes, as well as the poor. So much for the great US constitution!

I am sick and tired of people the world over using their religion as an excuse for their actions. It just means that their unshaken belief in a supreme being or authority who governs all our lives in some way is used to justify acts which fly in the face of common sense. Please allow me to give you some examples.

George W Bush and the USA

Private Eye has picked up on the tendency of the current President of the United States’s use of God as his justification for his actions, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Take this picture as an example (albeit satirical). Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), a documentary on the 2003 Israeli-Palestinian summit, contains footage of Nabil Shaath, Palestinian foreign minister to Yasser Arafat, who claims that Bush told delegates:

“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”

I agree with Zoe Williams from The Guardian, who suggests that while it doesn’t make sense for God to actually tell Bush to go invade Afghanistan, we cannot dismiss the claims entirely. While I’m not necessarily a Christian, I do feel that – on the basis that our lives would be worth nothing if we just died and faded away to dust, without an after-life to commend what we achieved during our lives – there must be some sort of overseer out there. Anyway, the point is that: we just don’t know.

Nonetheless, why would God rely on Bush to do something like this? Why would Bush say something so profound in its implications, so far-fetched, that doesn’t make sense? Perhaps he is trying to justify his actions, and because there is no justification for the losses of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the military, he is blaming God for it.

Martin Kettle summed up the situation in the USA with regard to their divinity and attitude towards foreign policy in an article published in The Guardian back in November 2004 related to the US presidential elections:

Bush’s apparent acceptance of the view that he may be doing God’s work in the White House … is shared by millions of American conservative evangelical protestants, many of whom believe … that the very existence of the United States is proof of a divine purpose. In that context, the idea that America should reject ties with necessarily less blessed nations becomes existential, an exceptionalism of another order altogether.

Most Americans don’t think in these terms, of course. Yet sufficiently large numbers of them do for their conviction to be massively important, especially when they are so determined and have such powerful armed forces. If you believe that God has a higher purpose for your work, then you bring a special fervour to everything that you do, whether it is re-electing the president, challenging his opponent’s credentials, stopping his voters from voting, challenging their votes or – if by some cruel fate the opponent wins the election – preventing him from governing.

I do have respect for people’s own beliefs, but come on … !

Terrorists

From one extreme to another, terrorists are another example of people using religion as an excuse. A recent example would be that of Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the 7 July bombers, who said in a video released on 2 September 2005, in which he justified his actions as being a protest against the American-Anglo aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine:

I ask you to make du’a [a supplication] to Allah Almighty to accept the work from me and my brothers and enter us into gardens of paradise.

That reference to his religious beliefs is yet another example of how people are justifying unjustifiable acts by referring to an entity that is difficult to identify either physically or mentally. I’m sure that’s not what God intended when he (according to the Bible) created Earth in 7 days and created Adam and Eve.

I’ve just been reading this article in the New York Times whether Hillary Rodham Clinton has a strong chance of becoming a contender for the Presidency in 2008.

New York Region > 2008 Contender: For the Moment, Mrs. Clinton Looks Like the Candidate to Beat” xhref=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/nyregion/04hillary.html” mce_href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/nyregion/04hillary.html” target=”_blank”>2008 Contender: For the Moment, Mrs. Clinton Looks Like the Candidate to Beat

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I’m more of a Democrat than Republican, and that I am somewhat of a fan of Hillary Clinton since reading her memoirs. She would make a formiddable President, and it’s about time the USA showed itself to be the ideal democracy and land of opportunity of freedom by elected a female President. Put it this way, Hillary’s a lot nicer to look at than bloody Bush!

George W Bush has won the US presidential election for the second time, defeating the Democrat candidate, John Kerry. Bush had 274 Electoral College votes as opposed to Kerry’s 252 votes (to win, you need 270 votes).

I have to say that I’m disappointed in the US electorate – the 51% who voted for Bush. It seems that everyone in the world, apart from the Americans themselves, is aware how bad Bush is for the Americans and the credibility of the USA. For the previous four years, he hasn’t achieved anything except sending Americans to die in Iraq, and allowing the budget deficit to spiral out of control. He has cut benefits for the working class and shown very narrow-minded attitudes towards issues such as same sex marriages and abortions. Now he’s been elected for another four years.

In his victory speech, Bush set out a conservative social and economic agenda for his second four-year term, singling out tax reform, social security and education as priorities. I wonder if he’ll be able to stick to that. Or will he just wage war against other terrorist-ridden countries until the USA goes bankrupt and thousands upon thousands of American soldiers have been killed? We’ll see.

There is one good thing about Kerry not being elected – he won’t be able to run for a second term in 2008, paving the way for Hillary Clinton to become the first female presidential candidate of the USA. Simply because she is so popular, I think she would get elected easily. So roll on 2008.

I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s happening with Bush – the Americans have had their say, there’s nothing we can do about it, except watch and pray.