For all of U.S.in the U.S.A.- Are we experiencing harder times because of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

Question

Is it causing U.S. to not like our country anymore?I notice many people leaving to live overseas.

Answer 1

The attached information I received should help you decide -

Some of you are not old enough to remember that nearly every family in America was grossly affected by WWII. Most of you don’t remember the rationing of meat, shoes, gasoline, and sugar, no tires for our automobiles, and a speed limit of 35 miles an hour on the road, not to mention, no new automobiles. Read this and think about how we would react to being taken over by foreigners in 2007.

This is an EXCELLENT essay; well thought out and presented.

Historical Significance

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America taking food and war materials.

At that time the U.S. was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans w anted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 , and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan , and the following day on Germany , who had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing; we had few allies.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy Government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia.

Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico , as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

America’s only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was already under the Nazi heel.

The U.S. was certainly not prepared for war. The U.S. had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WWI because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WWII, Army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks. A huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England (that was actually the property of Belgium) given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could.

Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of its Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later. Hitler, first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940 at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

Ironically, Russia saved America 's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the U.S. got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.

Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone; 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 Soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things.

Now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. To them, all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra (goal).

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet known which side will win - the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the U.S., European, and Asian economies.

The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing - in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

WWII, the war with the Japanese and German Nazis, really began with a “whimper” in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years before the U.S. joined it. It officially ended in 1945 - a 17 year war - and was followed by another decade of U.S. occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own a gain; a 27 year war.

WWII cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WWII cost America more than 400,000 Soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 Soldiers still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

The cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism.

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like England , in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them from getting them.

We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran 's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East now; in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

OR

4. We can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold War lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; forty-two years!

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany!

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the U.S. still have troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The U.S. has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The U.S. took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In WWII the U.S. averaged 2,000 KIA a week - for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

The stakes are at least as high. A world dominated by representative Governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms - or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

It's difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.

“Peace Activists” always seem to demonstrate here in America , where it's safe.

Why don't we see Peace Activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most? I'll tell you why! They would be killed!

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.

Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy!

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Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and an attorney living in Northern California that has studied the Middle Eastern culture and religion
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Answer 2

Personally, since I attended college and became a paralegal during 2000, my life has gotten better. However, the number of people living at or below poverty level here in the US has risen. The amount of jobs being outsourced (sent overseas due to lower wages) have increased. The price for necessities has risen, while wages and benefits continue to decrease. The rich have gotten richer, while the rest of us suffer.

As for Dowahdiddy: IN the 1990's I was homeless for months. Ate nothing for two weeks (no hot dogs, no McDonalds, no buddies to mooch off of) and only survived on water and condiment packets (ketchup, mustard, relish and Sweet-n-Low). Lived in a combination of woods, shelter, and abandoned buildings....busted for showering in the closed city pool; busted for sleeping in a park. Everyone has their own "hard" times, which may or may not be harder than other peoples. Don't down someone for not having as crappy a life as you have, or for finding some things unbearable that you consider easy.

Answer 3

This is one of the few countries in the world where people are willing to pay their life savings and risk their lives to come to. I don't think Bush/Cheney have made times harder. There have always been countries that have hated us - - primarily because they envy us.

Answer 4

No. I am actually doing better, as is just about everyone else I know. You notice how many people are still trying to get into this Country. Look at the newly elected people recently in other countries, they are becoming more conservative like the U.S.

Answer 5

ROFLMAO!

Hard times my butt! You're on a damn computer, you know nothing of hard times. I'll tell you about hard times. In 1994, I went for two whole weeks without food. I resorted to eating the sour clover the grows in the yard and the wild onions that grow there too. I was forced to eat the leaves from the sassafras tree. I had two meals in two weeks but only because a friend had sympathy on me and took me to a McDonald's and I bummed enough to get a package of hot dogs which I ate raw.

You know nothing about hard times!

Answer 6

Do you really blame Bush for your awful life?

Can you honestly say that your life has turned a 180 since clinton? bush sr? since reagan or carter? ford or nixon?...

Everyone complains that Bush is so bad for everyone in our country but has anything actually changed for you personally in the last 7 years?

Or are you that young that you just blame Bush jr because he's the first president that you're old enough to pay attention to or understand?

This personal vendetta on Bush and his administration is BS!

Answer 7

Well, for one, Bush and Cheney are leaving in another year and a half and two... this is just pointless... really how bad is life?... 30 years ago we were in an "unjust war" and Americans were being drafted by the hundreds of thousands to go fight and die almost as quickly as they were being drafted... our current military operating in Iraq is the best in the world and is ALL volunteer...
Why don't you join those going overseas? Maybe you'll get to go to France and see how great pseudo-communism has been for them (hope yer car doesn't get destroyed during one of their riots) or maybe you'll get to go to Africa and live in squalid poverty and starvation because the local warlord is using the foreign aid to by guns for his militia instead of food for his people; or maybe you'll get to live in the M.E. under an Islomaofacist regime who tells you what to eat, when to wake-up, when to sleep, when to pray, who to pray too, and what clothes you can wear...
Our you could pull your head out, say thanks to the men and women in uniform, and join the rest of the adult population of the U.S. who are trying to figure out how to help instead of just b*tching about how "bad" things are...

Answer 8

Huh? We are having a great time under GW Bush. He has the economy humming better than europe.

Answer 9

I blame it on the gas prices... they effect everyone. And for the people who are living paycheck to paycheck it is a big blow to thier life style.

Answer 10

Absolutely not. We have higher personal incomes, higher savings, more rights then ever. The economy is booming. The nation is very safe. Things are going great.

Answer 11

if they are leaving it is in anticipation of the democrats taking over