A Surprise

Day before yesterday I sent a long letter to the editor about Martin Luther King and President Obama's inauguration . It came out in yesterday's newspaper on the front page and took up fully a quarter of the page. I was shocked. I figured it might appear Sunday in the letters to the editor.

I think the American people will see very soon the difference between an intelligent and thoughtful president and the one we have endured for eight long years. Hopefully, they will vote more carefully in the years to come. An informed electorate is vital to sustain a free nation. It's bad enough that the people allowed the Supreme Court to select Bush in the beginning, when Gore plainly captured the popular vote by half a million votes but to re-elect him was almost unpardonable. I would have thought they would have noticed how many mistakes and bad decisions he had made in his first administration. And the fact that he allowed Cheney to really run the show and Rumsfeld to run the army, was incredible. Well, it's over...it's finally over. Now we can sit back and see if this new president really has a handle on how to get us out of the messes the Bush administration created for us by all that deregulation.

And the unspeakable Cheney...whatever the reason for the wheelchair yesterday, he won the last battle concerning his papers. The historians sued to be sure he would not destroy his papers upon leaving office and the courts ruled they trusted him to do the right thing and choose which ones to leave to history.

"The Court expects," the judge said, that White House officials "will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case." As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House's behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney's records.

One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that "when the Archives goes to open Cheney's papers, they are going to find empty boxes."

Cheney "spent most of his time making sure he left no footprints," said Kutler, who has written two books on Watergate and President Richard M. Nixon's White House tapes. "Why did he fight this order so much if he did not have the intent to leave with these papers? I'm guessing that a lot of it will not be there."

Well, what's done is done now. I have no doubt we will never get the entire picture now. The man that nominated himself for vice president so he could run the country from that position (knowing full well he could not be elected) won this last battle after all.

Another thing that the new president needs to do is to stop calling this war "The War on Terror". That gives fuel to the Islamic world who feel we are labeling them all terrorists and is not a smart idea at all.

The Nation explained "War on Terror" was useful only for the President, but irrational for the nation. Terrorism is not an enemy; it is a method of using violence to gain political objectives. Its tactics are usually employed by weaker, irregular groups against governments that possess organized armies and the modern means for waging war formally and more destructively (both methods of violence may target and destroy the lives of innocents). Terror campaigns are cruel by nature but in some instances are regarded as righteous, when the violence is used to liberate oppressed peoples from colonial rule, as in Vietnam or Ireland, the creation of Israel or even the United States".

After all, the British considered the American patriots to be terrorists.

The new administration needs to come up with another term to use to describe what we are confronting.