From Santa Fe To DC

Contributed by our friend Lonna:

My truck and I gave a speech yesterday In Santa Fe at the voting rights event on the grounds of the state capitol. The gist of it is below the initial comments here.

It was a lot longer, initially, but the time element was cut, because of new time alloted to planning aid for Katrina. I wish I could have given more of my original speech. But, oh well.

John Ford and Betty followed me to Santa Fe, to be there in case I had problems with my truck, God bless them!! Traveling 400 miles in one day IS a big deal now, not to mention it is no longer a $20 trip.

JOE has our gray, 1994 Toyota "Sunday go to meeting" truck in Minnesota. The truck I have now is our 1988 NIssan "Saturday, go to the dump" truck. John and Betty had gone to Camp Casey after I did. John is a Korean War veteran and one of the sharpest people I know.

I was hoping George Soros would be there to offer to donate me a new protest truck, but no such luck. I think I will name it "My Republican Truck," because most of what is on it was said by good Republicans.

An Abq. journalist asked me some questions later, I led her around my truck. She asked me why I went to Camp Casey. I told her I had known about Cindy for a long time. Last spring I e-mailed her to ask if I could put her daughter's poem on my truck, and I showed it to her on my truck. I have a picture of Cindy standing by the hood of my truck about where her daughter's poem is located.

She asked me WHY I was against this president. And, unfortunately I treated her as I would a "regular" person who asked me such a question. I was so dumbstruck by anyone asking WHY I would be against this president, I looked at her like she was feeble-minded rather than giving her the concise answer I WRITE about this administration which is "They lied us into a war from which their friends and family are profitting financially. Every aspect of life for regular people has gotten worse under them." The poverty rate has increased every year, and the rich have gotten richer every year. They have done nothing well. NOONE, no matter how incompetent (Rumsfeld) has gotten fired. ETC. ETC. I do not know how ANYONE can continue to make excuses for this administration.

EVERYONE needs to click on this link provided by Dedanna under the article concerning the rich on Ron's blog. http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2005/09/hurricane2.html

Anyway, this was the speech.

"When my friends learned I was going to be making a speech here today, they panicked. They said “Lonna, pick two or three points and stick with them. You will overwhelm people with information, and they will stop listening.” I am going to do them one better. I am going to make ONE point. And it is this: Those of us here today have the misfortune of living under the most arrogant, dishonest, deceitful, secretive, unchristian,(in my opinion) immoral, and perhaps worst of all, staggeringly incompetent administration in my lifetime. They are incompetents who appoint incompetents to positions that matter. Positions like head of Fema. And we all pay the price for their incompetence one way or the other.In Iraq and in New Orleans and elsewhere incompetents were in charge. And people died.Anything else I say after that is just window dressing. One point I need to get out of the way immediately is that the United States can “win” any war it is ever involved in. We can totally destroy any country and kill virtually all its people, and we can do that quite easily. But, WHY would that be our goal against a country which did not attack us?One can hope that IF and WHEN we do the smart thing and get out of Iraq – a country we had no moral or legal right to invade in the first place -- we won’t stay there and kill thousands or tens of thousands more people as we did in Vietnam in an effort to “save face.” Because we don’t want to “lose” a war. To quote Hal Crowther in “With Trembling Fingers,” a piece he wrote a year and a half ago, “The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. How right he was!!I hope in view of what has happened in New Orleans, if the media looked at any of my truck they looked at the driver’s side door. On it I have the cbo chart from 1992 to 2003. I also ask a question on it which is very relevant today: Question? Do you believe members of congress voted for the tax cuts because (1) they believe taking in less revenue will help pay the country’s bills or (2) because most of them, like the president are RICH, and they like the president can’t wait to get their hands on an extra $50 to 100 thousand dollars a year or so, and to heck with the needs of the country? Under Eisenhower, the richest among us were taxed at 90% and corporations at 52%, and against Republican pressure, Ike refused to support lowering those rates. But now, the rich appear to believe they should not be taxed at all, and there are so many loopholes in tax laws for corporations, many of them pay no taxes either.The richest 5% of the people in this country -- the people who have too much money already -- get $110 billion dollars a year from Bush’s tax cuts. If this administration and the congress had not been so concerned with lining their own pockets, perhaps needed money to make New Orleans safe would have been allocated and the tragedy in New Orleans would not have happened. Tuesday I am going to call the white house and my congress people and tell them I do not want to hear one more word about getting rid of the estate tax!! And to pay for the mess in New Orleans, they had better roll back the tax cuts they already got!! But tax cuts are our greedy presidents only real concern.The tax cut boosters are going to say that the tax cuts boosted the economy. Horse puckey. War boosts the economy. It provides jobs in the mic segment paid for by taxpayer money, and in the case of this war, it provides temporary jobs as replacement workers for the guardsmen and reserves who are deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. So don’t buy that particular line of reasoning. I wish Ike were still alive!! I think he would raise hell about all of this!! But that is not all he would raise hell about.

Ike said “A preventive [read that “preemptive”] war is an impossibility. I don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly, I wouldn’t listen seriously to anyone who came and talked to me about such a thing!”

Ike said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launced, every rocket fired is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.

Ike said "IN the councils of government we must guard against the access of the military industrial complex."Besides Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, Condi Rices'former comany, Chevron is far and away winning the oil company war profiteer prize. Its profits are up 294%. BP is next at about 155%. Then comes Exxon.I am letting my congress people know that my vote in 2006 and 2008 will depend almost entirely on how stongly the person did or did not support this worst of all presidents. I will vote for republican, democrat, or independent, black, white, green, striped. I don't care.If this administration is not held responsible for such egregious derelection of duty on all fronts., what president can be held responsible for any crime, ever again??"
www.votetoimpeach.org.