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[Chris Hedemark <chris AT yonderway.com>]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 04:01 PM, David R. Matusiak wrote:

> since i don't have tv access, i couldn't see Dubya speak last nite.

Delayed reaction since my home is "offline" so my mail pickup & 
delivery is largely dependent on where I happen to be with my notebook 
and if that place has an Internet connection I can borrow or not.

I watched enough of it to see the guy who was previously lauded as a 
"plain talker" reduced to the most greasy sideways political double 
talk.  I'm not surprised.  And yes, I voted for the "other guy" (if the 
other guy you are thinking of is Harry Brown, anyway).

> does anyone have an opinion?

We're going to war.  Dubya has put impossible demands on Hussein.  He 
painted this all rosey as a way out for that dictator but in reality 
there is no way any sovereign leader, especially Hussein, would go 
along with the president's demands.

> do you want to go to war?

No.

I don't like Hussein one bit.  Don't get me wrong.  But as the last 
remaining superpower (depending on whether or not you count China), we 
need to be sensitive to how we are viewed by the rest of the world, and 
we also need to lead the way for other nations to follow.

The President Hedemark plan would actually cost about as much as a 
prolonged war & nation building mission in Iraq, probably, but the 
death toll on both sides would be much lower.  Under my plan, U.S and 
allied oil companies would work side by side with the U.S. federal 
government with financial aid from our government to convert their 
facilities to producing bio-fuels.  Every day we send boatloads of U.S. 
dollars to hostile nations to get back boatloads of petroleum.  While 
our petroleum can be used only once, that money can be used many times 
over improving the livelihoods of the very people who hate us.

If we were able to facilitate an aggressive shift towards the use of 
home grown bio-fuels, it's a win-win situation for the U.S.  The 
boatloads of money we spend on petroleum are kept here, within our 
borders, improving the livelihoods of Americans.  American farmers 
would have a huge new market for their currently undervalued products.  
And while it is not as clean as using fuel cells, bio fuels can be used 
today and have much lower harmful emissions that petroleum based fuels. 
 Not to mention bio fuels are a renewable resource, while petroleum is 
not.

With the majority of our fuel production moving to within our borders, 
our troops can come home and stop representing our interests in that 
unstable region.

Over time, the money saved could be put towards solving more domestic 
problems or perhaps *gasp* give it back to the taxpayers.

> do you think it would help anything?

Nah.  We made Sadam Hussein the man he is today.  We also made Usama 
Bin Laden the man he is today.  Funny how the major news outlets don't 
want to run those stories.  Look back, we have a long proud history of 
paying monsters to do our dirty work for us.

Remember that other really bad man we took out so many years ago?  
Noriega?  Wasn't he on the CIA payroll, too?

> do you think we are being provided sufficient information to 
> debate/decide as a people?

No.  The worst enemy of a politician is a well informed voter.  We're 
not getting much information.  Dubya gets up and say "Hussein is a bad 
baaaad man.  We gotta go get him."

A few days go by, his adjectives get a little stronger, but he 
basically says the same thing.

Then he shows us a picture of a building that was once bombed, and more 
recently rebuilt.  No intelligence reports of what was actually inside 
of those buildings.  Could be a condom factory for all we know.  But 
*gasp* we bombed buildings ten years ago and that bad baaaaad Sadam 
Hussein built them back up again.

Oops, did Dubya forget to mention that Reagan had the CDC in Atlanta 
send over all kinds of "weapons of mass destruction" to Baghdad back in 
the 80's for "medical research"?  Funny how this was going on right 
around the time that Iraq fought Iran (how convenient...).  Looking in 
Hussein's shopping cart you could find such household items as anthrax, 
west nile virus (hmmmm), and other "Really Bad Things" [tm].

Chris Hedemark
Professional Computer Consulting & Videography
Hillsborough, NC
http://yonderway.com

"Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." -Steve Wright