Bill Sykes' - In Retrospect VIII.
(September 2007)

Bill Sykes looks back in retrospect at material which has been published in previous editions of "View from America", in an attempt to determine whether the subject matter written then is still applicable in today’s world.

Preface: (Sorry about the late news—but better late than never).
In this edition of "Looking Back in Retrospect" I have decided that it was about time that I included another opinion as to whether this traveling salesperson of a president has outstayed his welcome, and who better to provide such an opinion than Mr. Keith Olbermann, the anchor of the MSNBC TV program "Countdown", (who, to say the least, is not an ardent  admirer or supporter of the George W. Bush Presidency), and so I have provided a link to a video which was  produced and published by MSNBC TV on the 3rd of July 2007.  I don’t know whether Mr. Olbermann writes his own scripts but I must give him the credit as he provides a scathing TV video commentary attacking several decisions made by President Bush, and commences with questioning the President's action to commute the jail sentence that had been given to Lewis "Scooter" Libby. (*see below).
In his follow up commentary Mr. Olbermann suggested as I have done in several past editions of this newsletter that President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should resign.
Freedom of speech, although somewhat curtailed in this day and age from what it used to be in the past, apparently has triumphed in this publication by MSNBC, and YouTube, of Mr. Olbermann’s  highly personal critique of the President of the United States.
I don’t suppose that either Mr. Olbermann or yours truly will ever be invited to attend a White House formal gathering whilst this current President is in residence.
Note: The Keith Olbermann video is published upon YouTube and can be found upon the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN-eGOtBGbg

My Comments.
I’m afraid that on the surface this article may not appear to be a "Looking Back in Retrospect" article, but if you the reader remember previous comments that I have made over the years in various editions of "View from America" as to the perceived lack of capability of the current President and some of the members of his Administration you may be also be reminded of my constant criticism of the failings and go it alone, dictatorial attitude of this President and some of his closest associates.
Indeed, if readers recall the comments that I have made in previous newsletters they will be aware that I have gone further than the comments made by Mr. Keith Olbermann and have gone so far as to suggest that the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, should not only be impeached and forced to resign, (Secretary Rumsfeld has already resigned), but should also be tried by an International Court of Justice as war criminals for conducting acts of war - in that they and other members of the administration provided false and inaccurate information to the general public of the United States and the world at large in order to gain support for conducting  a war against the people of Iraq for all the wrong reasons.  
I also have noted in past editions of this newsletter that I did not consider the actions of this President, members of his administration, and the many members of Congress who supported the action to go to war against Iraq, to have been in the best interests of the American people and the people of the world at large.

One small paragraph from the TV Video article by Mr. Keith Olbermann.
(For the complete text of Mr. Olbermann’s comments please sees the above video link).
Mr. Keith Olbermann stated in one portion of his TV program:
The actor John Wayne, (who was an ultra conservative), uttered the following words when he learned of the hair's breadth election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, instead of his personal favorite Richard Nixon, "I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job".

My Comments:
With respect to the above statement, I can assure you, the reader, that I as an independent voter certainly did not vote for George W. Bush on the occasion of his first, or indeed on the occasion of the highly contested second election to the Presidency of the United States, on the basis that I firmly believe that the duty of any President of this great country, (above and beyond everything else), is for the President to faithfully serve the American people to the best of his/her ability and this includes serving all the people of these United States and not just a favored few - unfortunately certain actions and decisions that have been made by this President have contravened his sacred oath of office and in my view this President has not fulfilled his sworn obligation and has certainly been delinquent in his lack of effort to faithfully, and without reservation, serve all the people of this nation and therefore he should at the very least resign from the office of the President of the United States.
As I said in a previous sentence, I didn’t vote for George W.  Bush, (or for that matter his father before him), and even though some of the American people "expected him to do a good job" - I’m afraid that they were very much mistaken as he has turned out to be in my opinion the worst President that this country has been lumbered with in the forty years that I’ve been a resident.
He has been seen by many people of this world as a petty, less than intelligent, self opinionated, dictatorial person who has rejected and overridden intelligent inputs from many distinguished sources, (with the exception of his close knit circle of political misfits), and he is a person who has misrepresented the facts and deceived the people of America into supporting a war against Iraq for all the wrong reasons.
Mr. Olbermann’s initial comments were aimed at President Bush for his commuting of the sentence given to Lewis "Scooter" Libby who had been charged with lying under oath and perjuring himself in testimony to a Grand Jury - but I get the idea that Mr. Olbermann’s real intent was to castigate the President for all the unilateral bad decisions that he has made under his dictatorial Presidency.

(*) Who is Lewis "Scooter" Libby and what did he do?
Mr. Libby was the former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Originally it was expected that Mr. Libby would be placed on trial for leaking the identity of Valerie Plane, an undercover CIA agent and wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, (which apparently was not considered to be a federal offence), and incidentally no one was charged with disclosing her name.
Eventually Mr. Libby was charged with lying to a Grand Jury who were inquiring into whether Bush Administration officials had intentionally revealed Ms. Plane’s name in retribution for a negative report given by her husband Joe Wilson when he returned from Niger, where he had been sent by the CIA to ascertain whether Iraqi was seeking to purchase yellow cake uranium with the intention of using the uranium to develop a nuclear weapons program.
Mr. Wilson stated that the purchase by Iraq of uranium was not accurate and he accused the Administration of twisting intelligence in order to build a case for going to war with Iraq.
Mr. Libby finally received a two and a half years prison sentence and an attached fine of $250,000 for obstruction of justice and perjury. (Please refer to next paragraph).

The last straw:
 President Bush commuted Mr. Libby’s two and a half year sentence, (that had been given for obstruction of justice and perjury), on the basis that he considered the sentence to be excessive.  
Why did President Bush’s action in commuting Mr. Libby’s two and a half years prison sentence for obstruction of justice and perjury cause such a public uproar - well for instance, (according to the US justice department), requests for commuting a prescribed jail sentence are not generally accepted until a person has commenced serving the sentence given, and as Mr. Libby had lied to the Grand Jury, which is a major criminal offence, a large number of the American people were of the  opinion that he should have served the sentence given.

On another subject: A short time after President Bush commuted Lewis "Scooter" Libby’s prison sentence he invoked executive privilege and denied requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides concerning the firing of several federal prosecutors, (who apparently had not support this President’s political programs), but the President did offer to make a former counsel Harriet Miers and one time political director Sara Taylor available for private, off the record interviews, providing that their testimony would not be given under oath.
This President obviously believes that he answers to no one except himself - and can do whatever he wishes whenever he wishes.
So is there one law for the ordinary American citizens and another one for the President and his cronies - you’re damned right there is - and in general this has been proven by the extraordinary unilateral decisions that he has made over the passed seven years.
These are only a couple of examples of the extraordinary decisions that this President has made.

A suggestion as to what could be done about the situation.
The good people of the United States deserve better from this President and his Administration and perhaps the time has come for some drastic changes to be made - such as the impeachment of the President and the Vice President, (and the disciplining of other leading members of the United States government), for committing crimes against humanity and dereliction of duty by not faithfully performing the sacred oath of office that they gave at the time of the swearing in ceremony which lead to them being installed into some of the most powerful governmental offices of this land.

A proposition to dissolve Congress and start from scratch may get some support from certain sections of the American general public but it would be a very drastic solution.  Such a drastic solution may not completely solve our current problems but it would at least show to the world in general that a large number of the American public are not comfortable with the current
go-it-alone attitude of this President, and also are disturbed by some of the decisions that have been made by certain members of Congress which have left Congress unable to operate efficiently as a unified governing body.
At least some sort of action should be taken in order to indicate to the people of the world at large that we the people of the United States recognize that we have problems and that extraordinary actions have to be taken to solve those problems.

I of course have repeated myself many times on the subject of the Presidential dictatorial actions and I apologize for the repetition, but I do not offer one single apology for the personal comments that I have made renouncing some of the actions taken by this President and his close associates - whom I believe have done more damage to the United States as a country and the American people as a whole since this current administration came into power than any other administration in living memory, and have damaged the goodwill of the American people to such an extent that it will take many years to regain the trust that the world once had in this country and its people.

I’m sure that the forefathers of these dis-United States did not intend when they wrote that magnificent Constitutional Document, that one person, namely the President of the United States, should have the power to unilaterally start a war by the United States against so called foreign adversaries for all the wrong and false reasons, disregard the Geneva Convention in principal, antagonize the leaders and people of many parts of this world by issuing threats against them, override legitimate bills passed in the House and in the Senate by vetoing them, and above and beyond everything else consider that he has the power to override the will of the American people.

These are pretty drastic comments on my part - but drastic problems require drastic solutions, and I feel that the time has long since come for the people of the United States to re-think their countries involvement in world affairs and recognize that the United States cannot police the world at large, and although it is not my objective to preach isolationism I certainly think that this President and his supporters are creating an open door to further acts of Muslim extremism around the world that will create a far more disastrous situation than the one that currently exists.

The Romans, the Greeks, the Turks, the British, the Russians, the Chinese, and other leading nations of this world, have had their days of power and glory and all eventually succumbed to the over extension of their resources and a lack of available manpower required to control their conquests, and became nations in decline - and it now appears that the United States ambitions to be a world power will be short lived as they are following in the same path of decline as the other great nations once did.
An interesting situation that now appears to be occurring is the possibility of a newly combined Russian/Chinese world power, which if it ever comes into being will certainly be aimed at the domination of the people of this world.
Perhaps such a world power would have the manpower and resources to counteract and combat the current Muslim attempt at world conquest.

A different but equally important subject: The financial state of the Union.
In the past week or so we have seen a landslide decline in the American stock market where the DOW Jones Industrial Average slid from a figure of above 14,000 to a new figure below 13,000.
This sent investors running, (no stampeding), to the banks and brokerage companies to cash in whatever monetary financial investments they held.
This precipitous decline of around 10% in the value of the stocks and shares, named by the financial wizards as a "normal correction" became a "financial disaster" for many investors who sold off their current holdings. 
Apparently this precipitous decline in the value of stock market holdings was initiated by a fall in housing prices in the United States which had peaked several months previously, and the decline was in some way due to the inability of many people who had purchased property with very little collateral and low to zero initial down payments, and who were only paying off the interest on their mortgage loans without gaining any equity, being unable to come up with their large monthly mortgage payments

Many of these people, mostly of the younger generation, who took out substantial mortgage loans from banks and mortgage brokers to purchase houses, were unable to make their monthly mortgage payments due in many cases to several increases in mortgage interest rates.
Subsequently the banks and mortgage brokers foreclosed on the properties making many of these unfortunate individuals virtually homeless.
The inability of many of America’s new homeowners to make their monthly mortgage payments, which were named sub-prime loans, (which can be freely interpreted as low to zero down payment loans), apparently started the stock market landslide decline which had many investors running for the exits.
Apparently many overseas investment banks, and property mortgage brokers, had been participants in the American housing market boom and they too were badly affected financially when the United States stock markets went into a steep decline and the sell off spread to the overseas equity markets which also saw precipitous declines.

I must remind you the reader that President Bush continues to declare that the American economy is strong and resilient, even though the United States is the largest financial debtor nation in the world.
As of the 22nd of August 2007 the outstanding public debt of the United States was $8,977,768,969,162.
So - If we estimate the population of United States to be 302,779,216 , then each and every citizen’s share of the national debt is $29,651.

As I have said, the time for a drastic change is long overdue, and the first change that has to be made should be the removal of the current President, his Vice President, and also certain other members of his administration, which should immediately be followed by a complete reorganization of Congress and the way that Congress conducts, or in many cases fails to conduct, the business of the American people.
 
As this is an open forum where everyone has the right to express their own opinions, good, bad, or indifferent, readers are encouraged to state those opinions by contacting me at the e-mail address provided.

Eric (Bill) Sykes. (Southern California).
bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk
August 2007.

Disclaimer.
Some of the information gathered for this news letter has been gleaned from American and International media sources, (including the Internet), and as such is quoted as accurately as possible. I try to obtain confirmation from several outlets, so the text is a mixture of composite news items and personal comments and therefore the reader must make his/her judgement as to the reliability and degree of accuracy of the subjects discussed.

We welcome feedback about any of the contents of these articles. Please send all correspondence to bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk