Viewpoint: Who’s the Bad Guy?
History is repeating itself. Neo‑fascists are shaking the dust off old racist slogans. Nazis are back in politics and gaining ground fast! Madmen are stockpiling enough weapons to blow up the world 10 times over. Another world war is not only possible—it’s inevitable.
And who, do you suppose, is spearheading our plunge into oblivion?
George W. Bush of course!
Greatest Threat Ever
The week before President Bush’s state visit to Britain last month, London’s far‑left mayor, Ken Livingstone, lambasted the leader of the free world for his “illegal war” in Iraq. In an interview with Ecology magazine, Livingstone gave historical perspective to the danger President Bush poses. “I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen”—a comment that says more about his poor education than it does the president’s policies. Bush’s administration, the mayor forewarned, “will doom us to extinction.”
Predictably, mainstream media gave Livingstone’s provocatively timed remarks worldwide coverage. A simple search of “Livingstone and Bush” on LexisNexis generated 105 hits over a two‑day period (November 18 and 19).
The media also went wild about the level of security needed for Bush’s UK visit (exaggerating the law enforcement numbers significantly) and the “waves” of protest he faced all over Britain. (All of my LexisNexis searches for “Bush,” “protesters,” “Iraq,” etc., kept getting interrupted because there were more than a thousand stories on the subject.)
Of much lesser interest to media elites were the results of a poll taken by the left‑wing Guardian newspaper in London. It found that 62 percent of Brits believe the U.S. is “generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world.” Only 15 percent of British voters agreed with the idea that America is the “evil empire” of the world. The poll also found that 43 percent of voters welcomed President Bush’s visit, as opposed to 36 percent who said they preferred he did not come. More importantly, the Guardian’s figures revealed that opposition against the war in Iraq was actually decreasing—down 12 percent since September (to a 41 percent minority).
Judging by the news coverage in America and Britain, however, one might assume that George Bush and Tony Blair were all alone in the war against terrorism.
Opposition in America
The mayor of London is not the only prominent personality who sees President Bush as a threat to humanity. Billionaire financier George Soros now considers removing Bush from office as his “central focus” in life. “America under Bush is a danger to the world,” he said in November. He accuses Bush of exploiting September 11 to advance his agenda for world dominion. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” said the Hungarian‑born fund trader. “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,” he said. In Soros’s mind, Bush’s either/or statement “conjures up memories of Nazi slogans on the walls.”
For Soros, getting rid of Bush and his “supremacist ideology” is—“a matter of life and death.” When asked if he would give up his $7 billion fortune to oust Bush from office, he responded, “If someone guaranteed it.” For now, though, he’s pledged $15.5 million (0.002 percent of his estimated worth) to MoveOn.org, a far‑left activist group that is against the war in Iraq, was against the war in Afghanistan, is against any military response to September 11, in fact.
In August, Al Gore delivered a 35‑minute speech before MoveOn.org. In it, he said Bush started the war in Iraq to “benefit friends and supporters.” He accused the Bush administration of engaging in a “systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.” Presidential candidates Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman were quick to praise the former vice president’s speech.
Writing for the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes summed up the Gore speech by saying, “And so it seems we have the Democratic party’s talking points for the 2004 election: President Bush and his advisers are not only wrong, they’re dishonest. They’re dangerous. They’re virtually un‑American.
“It’s one thing for Al Gore, who insists he’s not running, to make such claims. But it’s startling that all of the major Democrats agree with him” (Aug. 18).
Defending the Enemy
In April, millions around the world watched thousands of Iraqis on television cheer the fall of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad. The images were powerfully symbolic of a collapsing tyrannical dictatorship—a regime change most Iraqi people never thought possible.
During the president’s recent visit to the UK, protesters at Trafalgar Square pulled down a cardboard statue of President Bush, depicting what they deemed to be an even more frightening regime—the U.S. presidency. And once again, these sorts of bizarre comparisons are not limited to a group of far‑left protesters who get naked and lay down across busy intersections.
In his August speech to MoveOn.org, Al Gore mocked the “connection” between Saddam and bin Laden. “The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction.”
Two months after that speech, the Pentagon sent a 16‑page memo to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee exposing the link between Saddam and bin Laden. The October 27 report gave a detailed, 50‑point account of the connection. The Weekly Standard was the first to report on the Pentagon’s memo, saying in its November 24 issue, “Iraq‑al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid‑March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact‑based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source.”
Even still, leading democrats are defending Saddam’s regime. In an interview with USA Today on November 16, presidential candidate Wesley Clark stressed the importance of catching Hussein alive so that he could be tried for war crimes. According to USA Today, “Clark said he hadn’t seen the evidence of Saddam’s war crimes, a comment that prompted adviser Chris Lehane to slip him a folded note. ‘You should make clear that Saddam is a bad guy,’ the note read. Clark glanced at the note but didn’t return to the topic.”
Clark, in case you forgot, was the supreme allied commander of the U.S.‑led nato forces that “liberated” Kosovo in 1999. After President Clinton agreed to the invasion, Clark led a 78‑day bombing campaign against Serbia, of all nations! Clinton bombed from way up high, and most often at night, so as to minimize the possibility of U.S. casualties. This battle plan, however, risked greater losses among Serbian civilians. But it was all done to try to save the lives of Albanians Clinton thought were being massacred in Kosovo.
Hardly anyone protested that war (judging by media coverage), except Serbian civilians running from bombs dropped from 15,000 feet up.
Why is the media’s approach so drastically different today? It’s because a conservative administration is now dropping the bombs! And conservative leaders like President Bush, a number of liberals desperately want us to believe, are dangerous—more dangerous, in fact, than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. Most liberals are now more concerned about winning the “war” against Bush than the one against terrorism. Many of them, though they won’t admit it openly, actually hope America fails in Iraq so that Bush won’t get re‑elected. They would rather Saddam Hussein regain control of Iraq and resume butchering his own people than for Bush to win in 2004.
In analyzing this disturbing trend, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal likens Saddam Hussein to the “O.J. Simpson of the Angry Left.” He wrote, “Just as anti‑white prejudice led many people (including his jury) to insist Simpson was innocent against all evidence of his guilt, today anti‑right prejudice is leading many on the left to mount a spirited defense of Saddam Hussein” (www.OpinionJournal.com, Nov. 17).
Now there’s a comparison worth giving some thought to.
European Opinion
Even though the voice of the far left is greatly amplified by the liberal media, it is still, nevertheless, a minority voice. The majority of British and Americans support President Bush and the war against terrorism, including the liberation of Iraq.
Meanwhile, there is another majority opinion coming out of Europe that is downright scary! Respondents to a recent EU survey were given a list of 15 countries and asked to mark those nations that posed threats to world peace. According to the survey, Europeans believe the tiny nation of Israel to be the most significant (marked by 59 percent of the respondents). It gets worse. Tied for second with Iran and North Korea (at 53 percent) is, you guessed it, the United States of America!
Leaving aside the angry rants of the far‑left liberal minority (and a sympathetic mainstream media) let us again consider the recent UK poll, where 62 percent of the English believed the U.S. was a force for good and not evil. Compare that with popular thought coming out of Europe, putting the U.S. second on a list of threats to world peace, behind Israel.
It is this division, between the majority in the U.S. and Britain (not to mention Israel) and the majority in Europe that we ought to be most concerned about. Bible prophecy tells us that Britain will soon end up the odd man out of the European Union. (Small wonder, in light of these two recent polls.) Prophecy further points to a time, just before Christ returns, when America, Britain and Israel will be completely alienated from the rest of the world—Europe in particular. And the inevitable outcome of this bitter division will be world war—pitting the forces of Europe against America, Britain and Israel.
The worst possible fears of far‑left liberals will become reality. Except the man most responsible for leading the march toward worldwide conflagration is not George W. Bush—but a man somewhere in Europe, biding his time—waiting to seize his opportunity to lead the final, prophesied resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.
