An Election That Will Live In Infamy


By Paul Craig Roberts


The following excerpt is from an essay called

An Election That Will Live In Infamy

which can be found at http://www.vdare.com/roberts/041105_infamy.htm.

The writer is Paul Craig Roberts, a senior fellow in Stanford's
[notoriously conservative!] Hoover Institution, the John M. Olin Fellow
at the Institute for Political Economy, and research fellow at the
Independent Institute.

A former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and columnist
for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a
nationally syndicated columnist and a columnist for Investor's Business
Daily. In 1993, the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of its top
seven journalists.

Roberts was a distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to
1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in
Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.

During 1981-82, he served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for
economic policy. President Ronald Reagan and Treasury secretary Donald
Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act
of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious
Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of
United States economic policy."

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An Election That Will Live In Infamy

On November 2 Americans blew their only chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world.

The entire world is stunned by the Bush administration's abandonment of a half century of US diplomacy in favor of misguided, unilateralist, "preemptive" naked aggression on totally false pretenses against Iraq.  America's allies are amazed at the ignorance manifested by the Bush administration. They are resentful of Bush's "in-your-eye" attitude toward friends who warned Bush against leading America into a quagmire and giving Osama bin Laden the war he wanted.

The world was waiting hopefully for the sensible American people to rectify the ill-advised actions of a rogue neoconservative administration. Instead, Americans placed the stamp of approval on the least justifiable military action since Hitler invaded Poland.
In the eyes of the world, Bush's reelection is proof that Ariel Sharon's neoconservative allies in the Bush administration speak for America after all.

The world's sympathy for America that followed the September 11 attacks has been squandered. If the US suffers terrorist attacks in the future, the world will say that America invited the attacks and got what it asked for.

Europeans and Asians will never be able to comprehend that Bush was reelected because Americans were voting against homosexual marriage and abortion.

The world is simply unable to believe that Americans, so enamored of family values, would vote to send their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers to unprovoked war unless Americans valued empire and control over oil as more important than their family members.

The crude propagandistic Republican campaign against John Kerry is shocking to Europeans. The childishness of American conservatives scares them.