U.S. lags behind the world

Instead of using our country's resources to strengthen our people and renew our infrastructure, da Bush and his neocons decided to burn our resources in a unnecessary war against a nondescript Middle Eastern country that posed us no threat whatsoever.

Their legacy will be death and dishonor.


In 2003, the Iraqi misadventure was costing us $1 billion per week! In 2008, it is costing us $3 billion per week!

We are not paying for it, however. Bush is, in effect, using your credit cards and my credit cards to borrow money from countries like China and Japan. Your grandchildren and my grandchildren and their children will be required to pay for this monumental stupidity -- if Bush doesn't blow up the world first, or we're not washed out to sea beforehand!

The money, of course, is not the worst part of it. The worst part is defined by all those American soldiers and soldiers from other countries that have been killed or maimed for life, as well as all those innocent men, women and children who lie in unmarked graves under the sandy Iraqi soil.


When I was young, I was proud of my country. I thought my country was better than any other country in the world in every category. Then I learned the truth. I learned, for example, that our life expectancy rate is far below other industrialized nations. I learned our infant mortality rate was considerably higher than other industrialized nations. I learned our health care system is rated significantly less effective than the health systems of other countries. I learned that our foreign aid does not measure up to many other countries who have less resources than we do.

What follows also comes from the July 28 issue of Time magazine. It is a brief report, which by way of introduction, tells us that the U.N., in 1990, began publishing "an annual human development report sizing up nations' progress in ensuring their citizen's health, education and standard of living."

In 2008, a report called The Measure of America was put together by social-science researchers who "used the same standards [as the U.N.] to put the U.S. under the microscope and came up with some striking results."

In terms of human development, the United States is not number one. It is number 12!

Here's why: One of six Americans does not have health insurance. One if four Americans does not graduate from high school on time. One in five Americans lives in poverty.


Those stats are shameful and we have no excuse. The American people may have voted in the bums running our country, but we must now throw them out, for they have co-opted the government for their own benefit; they have failed miserably to serve the people who elected them; they continue to run the government for their own nefarious purposes as if it is their own fiefdom, and they simply don't give a damn about the rest of us!