Ignore The Rhetoric And Look At The Results

Richard Lander | December 14 2004

In the real world, people and societies need to be evaluated in terms of the results they obtain. Not words, not even actions——results.

In the detached reality erected by the news and entertainment media, the truth, real-world reality of consequences, and practical results are supplanted with abundant words about apparent actions——very few of those words adhering to any kind of truth.

Iraq is being tortured with carnage that it never would have seen under Saddam.
The opium production in Afghanistan has boomed with the US occupation.

Hundreds upon hundreds of US troops are dying. And lets keep these deaths in perspective with a brief thought of the heartache and pain we would feel if our husband or father or brother or son were killed in a far away land. Multiply that imagined feeling by the number of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and that is just one aspect of the tragedy that is being inflicted.

Now multiply that feeling by thousands upon thousands of men, women and children that are being killed in Iraq, often gruesomely right in front of the family’s eyes.

This is the tip of the iceberg of results that George W Bush is obtaining.
Less visible are the greater volume of results and repercussions lurking under the water which give the iceberg its weight and volume that will sink the ship.
Thousand of US citizens are coming home from Iraq disfigured and disabled. These people have been spared their lives but had their faculties for living productively blown off or emotionally tortured from them.

Iraq veterans are already showing up at homeless shelters. The country is being hobbled by having its productive citizens turned into burdens and moral obligations.

And the economic cost is the result that will take on the most water in this sinking ship. Maybe they will say little about the boring numbers on the entertainment driven news, but the US was on a collision course with bankruptcy before the war. Now it is gaining speed and racing even faster towards the day when the central banks foreclose. And that will be the final nail in the coffin of the nation that has already abandoned the constitution that made it strong and noble.

What results will have to be born out before people look past the words of puppets like Bush and see the results for what they represent?