Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [71]
• He started a new Cold War with Russia by actively preparing to violate the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaties of the 1970s.
• He threatened to unilaterally reduce our presence in the former Yugoslavia, resulting in renewed violence between the ethnic groups in the region.
• He defied UN human rights agreements, resulting in the United Nations removing the United States from its Human Rights Commission.
• He bombed civilians in Iraq, just like Daddy did.
• He stepped up the drug war in South America, resulting in the United States helping the Colombians to shoot down a plane full of American missionaries, killing a Michigan mother and her child.
• He cut off any hope of reducing tensions with North Korea, guaranteeing not only that mass starvation there will continue but that its leader, film-nut Kim Jong Il, will never return his overdue videos to Blockbuster.
• He turned basically every country in the world against us by stating he was going to go ahead and build the nutty “Star Wars” missile defense system.
All this was accomplished in less than 120 short days—and that’s just in between bouts of knocking the wind out of our domestic policy, as we’ve already seen. Those of us who thought Junior was an underachiever have certainly been impressed by his get up and goad.
So now the world is back to hating us. At least we’re back on familiar ground.
But on the other hand, it’s a damn shame we’ve reverted to the role of the pariah. It was nice having foreigners think we were the good guys for once. Clinton’s charm allowed us to get away with a lot: quietly increasing the use of sweatshops and child labor in the Third World by American companies, dumping unsafe products in poor countries, and exporting even worse Hollywood movies abroad.
In fact, Clinton did many of the same things Bush is now doing—he just didn’t rub people’s faces in it. You see, Clinton was cool—so cool that most of the time few even knew what he was up to, Clinton gave us such good cover that for a few years Americans could travel safely in most countries without the threat of a mob chasing us down and beating the Ho-Ho’s out of us.
But now, thanks to Bush’s “Bite Me” foreign policy, it’s a lot harder to justify why we in the most arrogant 4 percent of the world’s population should own more than a quarter of its wealth. If we don’t watch our backs, all those uppity emaciated foreigners are going to start thinking they deserve their own digital pagers and recessed lighting. And the doubters and naysayers who abound in oppressed countries may catch on that just the three richest men in America own more personal assets than the combined assets owned by the entire populations of the sixty poorest countries.
What if the teeming billions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America get to thinking that the one billion of them without clean drinking water should actually have it? Do you know what that would cost? At least 25 percent of our “Star Wars” program!
And what if the 30 percent of the world still not wired—to electricity—suddenly wants to screw in a light bulb and read a book? Whoa! Look out!
My greatest fear comes from the 50 percent of our fellow Earthlings who have never made a phone call! What if all of sudden they get the idea to phone home on Mother’s Day, or start tying up the lines with calls for sushi take-out? Haven’t they heard there aren’t any more phone numbers to go around? There’s no reason to heap more anger onto these people; they’re already mad enough at us, thanks to Bush’s sorry performance. Plus, we got bigger fish to nuke.
Whose dumb idea was it to ignore the Russians’ offer fifteen years ago to get rid of all nuclear weapons? Has everyone forgotten they were willing to disarm unilaterally after the old Soviet Union dissolved? Way back in 1986 (before the breakup of the USSR), at the summit in Iceland, Mikhail Gorbachev put on the table a goal of “final elimination of the nuclear