Your View 9/2: War is wrong

Before and during World War II, Adolph Hitler successfully silenced all opposition by burning books and controlling the media. This eliminated the intelligent community and with total control, look what he did.

I have noticed the Bush administration has successfully used patriotism to silence opposition to his war. You support Bush or you're unpatriotic, bordering on traitorism. No one wants that label hung on them, so for his critics, silence is the safest way to go. They (with almost zero success) told other countries, "You are with us or against us." Ninety percent of the world opposed our invasion of Iraq.

In 1917, Hiram Johnson, a U.S. senator (World War I) said the first casualty of war is the truth. Facts tell us the truth has no place in this administration.

Some years later, Edward Bernays (referred to as the father of public relations) said the media has become so powerful we can make the masses believe and do anything we want, and they not even know we're doing it, and that unscrupulous politicians can do the same.

Newt Gingrich said language is the key mechanism in controlling the people in a democracy. He said when speaking of your opponent, use pathetic dishonorable words, but when speaking of your own party, use honorable and highly moral words; and that will be the public perception of the two political parties (so he says).

Richard Nixon said the average length of voters' memory is two weeks. Coming from him, I don't even feel insulted.

This war with Iraq is a Bush family war. President Bush and his father are foolish leaders. For this great nation to fight two wars with the same little country in only 12 years is stupid, stupid, stupid and the world knows it, and the Republicans are working overtime with their whitewash brushes. This would be a good time to own stock in a whitewash manufacturing plant.

President Bush avoided combat by flying a fighter jet over the friendly skies of Texas. He has surrounded himself with draft dodgers, men who never wore the uniform, but are in charge of the military might of a nation they would not themselves defend; men without any military experience, but once in power, are eager to start throwing grenades, having never dodged one, and the soldiers under them are bleeding and dying.

Meanwhile, here in our homeland, our national treasury is hemorrhaging and is only kept alive by daily transfusions of ever-increasing truckloads of borrowed money, much of it from foreign countries.

President Bush, a baby boomer and former booze hound, is lost in the White House in both foreign affairs and domestic. We're going down fast. Is this nation large enough and strong enough to survive him?

History tells us great empires and small minds go down together.

I wish they had tied Barbara Bush's tubes when she was 10 years old. In my view, her untied tubes were weapons of mass destruction.

W.T. Woods Bertrand