When you see those people with a “Support Our Troops” bumper sticker, does it really confuse you when they also have a “I Voted for Bush” bumper sticker? It simply isn’t possible to support both, unless you are completely uninformed and/or a idiot.

Here are a few samples of how the Bush Administration supports our American troops in Iraq:

BUSH HAS ABANDONED NATIONAL GUARD AND RESERVE -
Today President Bush will speak to members of the Idaho National Guard, which has almost 2,000 soldiers currently serving in Iraq. But he won’t talk about how the war in Iraq has stretched the nation’s forces to the breaking point, forcing the military to ask America’s citizen-soldiers to put their lives on hold for increasingly extended periods of time without giving their families the support they need. Bush owes the soldiers and families of the National Guard and Reservists an explanation and an apology. [Wall Street Journal Online, 8/24/05]

GUARDSMEN AND RESERVISTS OVEREXTENDED -
Reservists Make Up Growing Percentage of Active-Duty Troops. In the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Reservists and National Guardsmen made up about 25 percent of troops in Iraq. Currently, Reserve and National Guard members make up an estimated 35 percent of the troops in Iraq. Acknowledging a harsh reality, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton, said that the military is becoming heavily reliant on reservists and national guardsmen to maintain commitment abroad. He said “I don’t think we can sustain that much longer.” [Dallas Morning News, 7/31/05; San Francisco Chronicle, 5/9/04; AP, 5/12/04; AP, 5/17/04]

MEMBERS OF NATIONAL GUARD TOOK PAY CUTS TO FIGHT IN IRAQ, THEN HAD TROUBLE GETTING PAID AT ALL -
A January 2004 GAO report studied six different Army Guard units and found Army Guard soldiers were being denied timely and accurate payroll payments. The report found that, “Overall, 450 of the 481 (94 percent) Army Guard soldiers from our six case study units had at least one pay problem associated with their mobilization. In addition, our limited review of the pay experiences of the soldiers in the Colorado Army Guard’s 220th Military Police Company, who are currently deployed to Iraq, indicated that some of the same types of pay problems that we found in our six case study units continued to occur.” [GAO Report, "Army National Guard Personnel Mobilized to Active Duty Experienced Significant Pay Problems," 1/28/04]

Surveys in 2004 showed that 40 percent of reservists and National Guard soldiers make less money while mobilized than they earned in their civilian jobs. Surveys of all Guard and reserve personnel found that among mobilized troops whose pay was cut, the average reduction was $3,000, although some took pay cuts in the tens of thousands. [Washington Post, 11/11/04]

NATIONAL GUARD AND RESERVE SHORTED EQUIPMENT -
In July 2005, the GAO found that “Army Reserve units are not generally allotted all of the equipment they need to deploy.” Since September 11th, commanders have required deploying units to have 90 percent of their required equipment, yet in February 2005 the Army Reserve reported it had about 76 percent of the equipment it requires, an estimate that includes older equipment. [GAO, "An Integrated Plan is Needed to Address Army Reserve Personnel and Equipment Shortages." Rpt # GAO-05-660, 7/12/05]

Already suffering from manpower shortages, the National Guard’s overstretched forces are being confronted with another problem: not enough equipment to supply Guard troops at home. “To fully equip troops in Iraq, the Pentagon has stripped local Guard units of about 24,000 pieces of equipment. That has left Guard units at home, already seriously short of gear.” [Detroit Free Press, 6/13/05]

“Some Army maintenance chiefs, in desperation, are using their own credit cards to make purchases. One soldier, who asked not to be identified, listed boots, goggles and protein bars as particularly coveted items.” [MSNBC.com, 4/15/04]

HEALTH CARE FOR RESERVISTS LIMITED -
Congressman Douglas Hunter, Republican Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, removed a provision from the Defense Department budget that would extend health coverage to all reservists and their families. In an attempt to justify his actions, Hunter stated that, in fact, Reservists and their families have coverage from 90 days before mobilization until at least 120 days after they return, so extended coverage was not needed. [Biloxi Sun Herald, 5/28/05]

If you want to support our troops, please
don’t support them the way Bush does…

Messages From Our Troops To Their Families

George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein, who do you think has killed more innocent Iraqi citizens? It would seem that Hussein is the greater murderer having been in power for many years, but with Iraqi civilians dying at a rate of more than 800 per month between August and May I have to believe that Bush’s numbers must be closing in – perhaps exceeding the damage Saddam Hussein inflicted. I’m sure the people of Iraq probably understand that, while tragic, their family members deaths are simply the cost of freedom according to the Bush administration…

I don’t think the U.K. press is believing the bullshit Bush spews any more than I do.

Copied and pasted for your reading pleasure, from sfgate.com:

WORLD VIEWS: U.K. media keeps pressure on Bush
_____

As President Bush gets ready to deliver another carefully stage-managed televised speech to the nation from an army base in North Carolina tonight, commentators and news analysts in the British press are cutting through the White House’s rhetoric to ask, in language that often sounds much stronger than that of their counterparts in the United States, some hard questions about the Republicans’ Iraq-war policy and the future of the post-Saddam crisis.

“U.S. public opinion on the Iraq war dips with every dead soldier and plummets at the first sniff of defeat,” commentator Gary Younge writes in The Guardian. Citing a recent Gallup poll of Americans, Younge notes that “[m]ore than half [of those surveyed] believe the war has not made them safer, and 40 percent believe it has striking similarities to the experience in Vietnam.” (A separate CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted June 16-19 shows that 59 percent of adult Americans nationwide are now opposed to the war. (PollingReport.com))

“The word ‘quagmire’ has returned to the debate …” about Iraq, a news report in The Independent noted with alarm. It added, “More serious is a decline in public support for the war, which proved fatal to the Vietnam enterprise three decades ago.”

An analysis in The Observer pointed out that Bush, who “is starting to sound desperate” as he “watches as support ebbs away,” already “seems a lame duck.” The British weekly warned that “[t]he talk in Washington is of the dreaded ‘tipping point,’” that is, a crucial point at which “Iraq’s insurgency deepens into uncontrollable crisis at the same time as American public opinion collapses. That could spell the unthinkable: American defeat.”

It was the sober Times, however, that really lowered the boom, dismissing Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent feel-good pronouncements about what is obviously a fast-deteriorating situation as “weasel words on Iraq.”

Under that headline, the paper’s editorial reaffirmed that “[t]he liberation of Iraq from the murderous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein” was a “good deed in a sorry world.” But citing the “daily horrors” occurring in occupied Iraq today, it added that it has become indefensible “to argue,” as Bush has done, “that every course [of action] that followed [since Saddam's ouster] has been right.”

Citing its own ground-breaking reporting on the Downing Street Memo, The Times noted that Bush and Blair’s governments “were less than frank with the people in the countdown to war.” At this point in the Iraq crisis, it proposed, “it is counterproductive to respond with Panglossian assurances that everything in Iraq is now for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The cameras and the documents may not show the whole picture, but they do not lie.” (Times)

The generally centrist-to-conservative British daily even advised Bush to follow a page from Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership playbook and level with the American people. Its editorial reminded the current U.S. president that in February 1942, FDR addressed his countrymen and said, “Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us.”

However, as the latest polls indicate, many Americans have not bought the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line on the war they started in Iraq, so Bush’s team might not be able to obtain the “complete confidence” of many Americans now. In the president’s speech tonight, The Guardian’s Younge predicts, Bush will tell his U.S. Army audience and his television viewers “that America needs ‘resolve.’” For the White House right now, Younge added, “Iraq has become the latest faith-based initiative.”

As the president’s war on terror Saddam Iraqi insurgents high oil prices continues, Bush delivered a prime time national address last night to try rally the growing number of non-believers in his illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq – not to mention those dropping poll numbers, in a safely selected environment free of annoying questions from the liberal press and unbothered by radical judges or other free thinking Americans.

The White House’s current resident said “terror” or “terrorism” 34 times last night during his speech to pump up his poll numbers, and invoked September 11 six different times in a pathetic attempt to make a connection between his Iraq War and terrorist attacks on American soil.

This redirect back to a previously successful propaganda tact linking two actions that are otherwise unrelated supercedes his previous proclamations that the Iraqi war was all about the spread of democracy. That worked for a while, but with the war dragging on and over 1,700 dead American soldiers in the ground, Bush is returning to what has always worked for him in the past. Terror…

Of course Republicans echoed the terrorist rhetoric to stay the course and not “allow the terrorists to shake our resolve,” while Democrats called the policy “adrift, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in need of major mid-course corrections.”

The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that 61% of Americans say that Bush lacks an efective strategy, 53% said that going into Iraq was a mistake, and 56% disapprove of the President’s handling of the war. And for the first time, a majority of those surveyed felt that Bush deliberately misled them on the WMD excuses for going to war in the first place.

Last month the London Times dropped an atomic bomb on the Bush administration, the Downing Street Memo – a copy of the minutes from a meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and English Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002—eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. You may not have heard much about this memo yet, the Downing Street Memo is of course largely ignored by our country’s “corporate-owned” media, however the memo states that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

In other words, Bush lied his ass off to manipulate the American people into supporting an illegal and immoral war against the nation of Iraq. WOW! What a shock, eh? The memo’s content, authenticity and accuracy remain unchallenged by either Bush or Blair.

The Bush administration went to work on removing Hussein from power as soon as took office. When Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn’t want to discuss terrorism, or Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about “regime change” in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later. If you don’t believe that Bush had a hard-on for Sddam Hussein even before he became President then I have some property at Neverland Ranch to sell you.

The majority of the “corporate-owned” media in America may be trying to keep the Downing Street Memo hush-hush, I mean why would they bite the hand that feeds them as well as the Bush administration has, but the rest of the world is talking about it – and they want answers…

Britain
Russia
India
Aljazeera
Taiwan
Italy
Italy 2
Turkey
Phillipines
Australia
Canada

It goes on, and on, and on, and on…

AMAZINGLY, even here in Texas, the reddest of states, Bush country – Where Dubya could fry up a toddler then eat him on live TV and the ignorant inbred fucks here in Texas would STILL vote for the worthless bastard.
New York, East Coast
Palm Springs, West Coast
Kansas City, Mid-America
Democracy Now!
Daily Kos
OpEd News
FAIR

and on, and on, and on, and on…

The information revealed in these documents demand a response.
The American People deserve to know if we were misled into war.

As I watched this presentation, titled Instantly Orphaned, my mind kept wandering back and forth from “oh my God, what if this were happening to my kids” to “why can’t this happen to George W. Bush’s kids instead“?

These innocent Iraqi children became instant orphans as they watched their parents being gunned down by soldiers in fear for their lives by what could have easily been a suicide bomber attack. Who is to blame, who is guilty for this atrocity? George W. Bush is guilty, George W. Bush is to blame.

This is but ONE small example of the horribly sad and pathetic events taking place on the streets of Iraq each and every day of this illegal and immoral war that George W. Bush has lead us into. We have several more years of innocent dead American soldiers and innocent dead Iraqi citizens, thanks to an evil man being elected president of the United States.

Thank you President Bush, long live your wonderful legacy.
I only hope we can survive 4 more years of your leadership.

Thank God! Literally!

Finally, a group of Christians have actually come to their senses and started acting like, well, Christians. One of my biggest concerns regarding trends in the American political climate today is the large degree that evangelical thought has become influenced by the conservative movement. It’s good to see that there remain believers who are still Christians before they are “patriots”. I am a Christian however, in recent years I have been embarrassed, no, ashamed, of how so many American Christians have allowed themselves to be played and taken advantage of by evil politicians under the guise of religious conservatism. I like to believe that most true Christians are not as ignorant and simple-mined as the so-called Christians regularly on display in the media. The staff and faculty at Calvin College are apparently Christians who also hold education in high regard.

President Bush’s “handlers” carefully selected a nice Christian college for a nice photo-op of their stooge delivering a commencement speech to this years graduates. Ooops, it appears they did not do their homework as this college is choked full of Christians who think for themselves as opposed to conforming to the current conservative media brainwashing. Large anti-Bush ads that ran in the local Grand Rapids, Michigan newspaper by both faculty and students alike, protests outside the graduation event and buttons worn on graduates’ robes made it clear that many Christian students and faculty objected to Bush’s policies.

Many of the graduating students and one-third of the professors at the Calvin Evangelical Christian College are taking out a full-page ad in a local newspaper Saturday to protest President Bush’s commencement speech. “As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort,” the ad says. “We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq.” “No single political position should be identified with God’s will,” says the ad, which also chastises the president for actions that favor the wealthy of our society and burden the poor.

This story just plain feels good and helps replenish my faith. I just wish the real Christians, the moderate ones, would reclaim a hold on their image. I’m talking about tolerance, helping the poor, caring for each other, turning the other cheek Christians – like Christ wants Christians to be. Not regulating morality, shunning down the poor, starting wars and holding grudge Christians. Those are not true Christians.

My Christian beliefs tell me that Jesus came, made null and void the previous “contract” between God & Humanity and established some new ground rules. Now if you really believe in Jesus Christ, if you really consider yourself a Christian, you have to live by the rule of the New Testament, not the Old Testament. There is no more “eye for an eye” but rather “love and forgive each other as I love and forgave you “. If you are a Christian then you must follow what the Christ said. God doesn’t play with politics. “Render unto Caesar things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” doesn’t mean “war”, folks.

I hope, for the sake of this great country, our people wake up and realize this, soon…