Fw: Good things do come out of Niagara Falls

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Tuesday, October 12, 2004 8:47 PM

Good things do come out of Niagara Falls

 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter

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SNIFF SOME MERCURY; YOU'LL FEEL BETTER

By Bill Gallagher

 

" I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land. The quality of the air is

cleaner since I've been the president. " -- President George W. Bush.

" Well no wonder you're late. Why, this clock is exactly two days slow. " -- The

Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's " Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "

 

DETROIT -- George W. Bush is totally unhinged and the American people better

wake up to the truth that the commander in chief is out of touch with reality

and getting more dangerous every day. Down is up. Up is down. Failure is

victory. Inversion and absurdity make sense to him.

 

 

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At Friday night's debate, he'd jump out of his chair and dance around the stage

spewing ridiculous nonsense like the Mad Hatter setting up the tea party in

" Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. " George W. is a champion of the environment.

The war in Iraq is an act of international charity and the violence helps spread

democracy in the Middle East. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, but if

he'd had them, he would have provided them to al-Qaeda. The economy is humming

right along, and the job market is growing everywhere. Tax cuts for the rich and

huge deficits are helping the middle class. The only problem with health care in

America is trial lawyers, and we better watch out, because prescription drugs

from Canada may poison us. And finally, the only damn mistake George W. ever

made in his presidency was appointing people who disagreed with him.

 

You can't make this stuff up. He's mad. While reflecting on his physical

movements and his ability to say the nonsensical with such ease, his certitude

about everything and his obliviousness about his own clear failures, I had a

eureka moment and understood why. It's mercury vapors! The president and the Mad

Hatter have the very same affliction and they are incapable of clear thought and

making any sense of reality.

 

Felt hats were the rage in Europe and North America in the 19th century, when

Carroll wrote the Alice books and created the Mad Hatter character. A

complicated process turned furs into the finished hats. Cheaper furs were rubbed

with mercurous nitrate to roughen the fibers. The fibers were then shaved off

the skin and turned into felt, which was then immersed in a boiling acid

solution to thicken and harden it.

 

The acid treatment decomposed the mercurous nitrate to elemental mercury and the

poor hatters, working in poorly ventilated workshops, would breathe in the

mercury vapors, unaware of how dangerous and toxic they were.

 

Mercury is a cumulative poison that causes a host of maladies, including

permanent brain damage. Some of the symptoms are uncontrollable shaking,

anxiety, slurred speech, loss of memory and irritability.

 

The president doesn't want to run the risk of allowing more affordable

prescription drugs from Canada to come into the United States because he says

they might kill us. At the same time, he wants us to breathe more mercury fumes

that are already causing birth defects at an alarming rate and have made eating

fish from about 40 states dangerous to your health.

 

Let's see. Cheaper prescriptions, no. More mercury-contaminated air, yes. Only

the Mad Hatter and George W. Bush would say that.

 

Bush's order-relaxing rules on mercury emissions from coal-burning electrical

power plants were made to pay political favors to polluters at the expense of

public health.

 

Felice Stadler, a mercury pollution expert at the National Wildlife Foundation,

says that Bush's gift to the corporations " is a dream come true for energy

companies and a nightmare for children's health. "

 

The " good steward " also withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, a

treaty to combat global warming that requires industrialized countries to reduce

greenhouse emissions. The United States is the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter on

the globe, but Bush's boys purged the phrase " global warming " from the

Environmental Protection Agency's annual report.

 

If the Mad Hatter says it doesn't exist, it doesn't. Those rising temperatures

are really falling. Inhale enough mercury and you'll think that way.

 

Over the last week, more rattling truth emerged that didn't seem to make a

difference in George W.'s contaminated mind. He's sticking to his lies and

mercury moments, so he'll never be accused of flip-flopping or being the kind of

president who shifts positions.

 

" I don't see how, in a time of war, in a time of uncertainty, you can change

your mind because of politics, " Bush twanged in Friday's debate.

 

He must have forgotten about his opposition to the creation of the Department of

Homeland Security and the 9/11 Commission, and how, under political pressure, he

did a complete about-face and supported both. Take another whiff of mercury and

that might make sense. George W. and his minions used the argument that aluminum

tubes Saddam Hussein bought were evidence he was planning a nuclear program.

That stretch of the facts got a serious dose of truth, but that doesn't faze the

lie-merchants. Remember, in the 2003 State of the Union address, Bush claimed,

" Our intelligence sources tell us he has attempted to purchase high-strength

aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. "

 

Condoleezza Rice earlier sounded the dire warning that the aluminum was " really

only suited for nuclear weapons programs, " and she followed that false claim

with her chillingly infamous line: " We don't want the smoking gun to be a

mushroom cloud. "

 

In a masterful article, The New York Times showed Energy Department experts told

Rice's staff and the C.I.A. that the tubes were probably intended for small

artillery rockets and not nuclear weapons. That was in 2001.

 

Now we learn from the chief weapons inspector that Saddam had no stockpiles of

biological and chemical weapons and his nuclear program had decayed long before

the contrived invasion.

 

Charles Duelfer, the man the Bush administration picked to head the Iraq Survey

Group (ISG), wrote in his report, " The analysis shows that despite Saddam's

expressed desire to retain the knowledge of his nuclear team, and his attempts

to retain some key parts of the program, during the course of the following 12

years (after 1991) Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed. "

 

Former U.S. Viceroy in Iraq L. Paul Bremer told the Washington Post, " We never

had enough troops on the ground, " and, referring to the looting, " We paid a big

price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. "

Bremer later said he thought he was speaking " off the record. " Oops.

 

The author of the war " on the cheap " plan made a candid admission himself that

he then retreated from. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had doubts

about possible links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. On Oct. 4, he told the

Council on Foreign Relations, " To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard

evidence that links the two. " Quickly, the Pentagon's Web site declared there

was " credible evidence " that al-Qaeda leaders had sought contacts in Iraq to

acquire weapons of mass destruction, and that Rumsfeld's statement was

" misunderstood. " How do you misunderstand a simple, declarative sentence in the

English language? Sniff mercury.

 

At one point in Friday's debate, Bush babbled, " I thought the moderator was

telling me my clock was up. " The Mad Hatter couldn't have said it better.

 

 

--

 

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city

councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is

gallaghernewsman.

 

Niagara Falls Reporter

www.niagarafallsreporter.com

Oct. 12 2004