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Bob Stevenson: Criticisms unfounded

Cal Thomas criticizes President Obama as not measuring up in Thomas’ war-monger contest (Wednesday’s Steamboat Today). Thomas seems to prefer the right’s Cheney/Bush “let’s make up and sell wars to America” approach.

If Congress (gerrymandered fascist tea-baggers that they are, in the House in particular) doesn’t like the tenor of the administration’s request for war powers, let them make the rules more bellicose. But let’s not lose sight of the imagined Iraq situation which son-of-Bush and his puppeteer Cheney sold to America, and the resulting instability in the Arab world. The Iraq fiasco directly led to ISIL and groups like ISIL. (Yeah, I’ll use Obama’s acronym [“ISIL”], which seems to bother Thomas. Really? Thomas can pick a fight over “ISIL” versus “ISIS?”)

Thomas criticizes Obama’s observation that he was elected to “end wars, not start them.” Thomas contrasts Obama’s statement to FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Let’s recall that Dec. 8, 1941, followed the Japanese surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor and virtual elimination of our Pacific fleet.



Thomas closes by calling Obama (albeit quoting Shakespeare) “…an idiot, full of sound and fury.”

“Idiot, full of sound and fury?” Sounds more like the combination of Bush 2 and Dick Cheney to me. In any case, this sounds like the kind of divisive disrespect for the U.S. President that American centrists have come to expect of the Tea Party and its toadies like Thomas.



Can Steamboat Today find no more logical and reasoned spokesperson for the right than the gas-bag Thomas? Is Steamboat Today really comfortable with calling the sitting U.S. president an “idiot?”

I thought that some village in Texas was missing one of those for a while.

But in that earlier case, the guy sold a fabricated war to the U.S. that has resulted in about 4,500 U.S. dead, 320,000 U.S. servicemen with brain injuries and 500,000 Iraqi dead (source: antiwar.com).

It’s easy for Thomas to bang the drum and accuse Obama of being an idiot. But really, who’s the greater idiot here?

Other than ending economic reliance on the Middle East (read: end oil dependence), let the person with the formula for ending U.S. involvement in the Middle East stand up. That’s the game-changing statement of the kind of “idiot” who observed that the emperor had no clothes.

Unfortunately, it’s easier for Thomas to keep selling buggy-whips to the Tea-Party, fossil-fuel, military industrial, war-business as usual crowd. But I think the majority of Americans have seen through that approach.

Idiots promulgate needless wars. Wiser heads avoid the needless ones, and know the difference between the two.

Bob Stevenson

Steamboat Springs


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