Dear President Bush,
If justice and common sense have anything to do with it, then you are just a day away from joining the ranks of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Like the aforementioned gentlemen, you will have become a living former president.
As enraged as I was at the 2000 election results, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. Your promise to change the tone in Washington gave me hope in light of all the excitement during the Clinton years. A little less than four years later, I still have hope. I hope this will be the second successive election you lose.
I should have guessed it when you ran commercials in the 2000 South Carolina primary informing people that John McCain had a black baby. The tactics a man uses to get elected to office tell us something about how much he deserves to be elected.
Nobody could have guessed it at that time, but you suffer from a critical entitlement syndrome. You seem to believe you are entitled to govern since God wants it to be so. In your view, the Democrats are traitors for even putting a candidate against you.
I find it amazing that each time you are in a close election, an "independent" group shows up to challenge your opponent's credentials. I don't think politics could sink any lower than when GOP delegates at your convention used purple-heart bandages to mock Kerry. Have you no sense of decency?
You are not in the habit of offering explanations for your actions to the people who elect you. When you returned to the scene of the crime (Florida) for the first debate, your displeasure at having to account for your failures was hard to miss.
I could still overlook your occasional arrogance, but it is hard to pardon your intransigence. You accuse your opponent of being a flip-flopper. This leads me to expect certitude from you. Unfortunately, closer inspection of your record reveals that your certitude severely alters your view of the world. You are in the habit of manipulating the facts to impose upon us your version of the sublime truth.
In the run to the last election, you promised huge tax cuts since the economy was booming. Your argument was simplistic but attractive. Taking a page out of the Newt Gingrich playbook, you resolved to use "good times for great purposes."
Time proved that your tax cuts were doing nothing to jumpstart the economy, but you remained resolute. However, you did change your rationale for the tax cuts. Your minions camped on FOX News to suggest the economy had been in recession before you got elected and that your tax cuts saved the day.
A few days back, you offered a new explanation for not taxing the rich. You said: "The rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason. That's to stick you with the tab." Going by your logic, it's OK to tax the poor since they are too dumb to evade taxes. Mr. President, it's one thing to change positions, but changing justifications for the same position is worse than flip-flopping.
On the road to Baghdad, you, Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz promised that Saddam Hussein had weapoms of mass destruction and connections with al-Qaeda. You resuscitated the fear and alarm the nation felt post-Sept. 11, 2001. The affable Cheney also promised a war on the cheap. After the coalition found no weapons or evidence of the "grave and imminent threat," you blamed your opponent for his vote in favor of the war.
Mr. President, it was not your opponent who threatened the possibility of a mushroom cloud over New York City. Instead of sticking with your initial rationale, you now make this a war for freedom and liberty. Seventeen months after you proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" and after your pre-war scenarios stand discredited, your belief that the war was justified exemplifies the pinnacle of stubbornness. Your version of the larger truth involved the need to remove an evil dictator, and you distorted facts to achieve your end.
I admire your convictions, I really do. Your imperviousness to the contrary reality is what really scares me. When you reflect on the denouement of this election, I hope your assessment is something other than "So what if I jumped off a cliff, at least I did not blink."
Nishant Bhajaria is a computer science graduate student. Reach him at Nishant.bhajaria@asu.edu.
