Nick Colin 4.26.2006

Stop the presses! According to a Yahoo.com news page story, Canadian Neil Young thinks that U.S President George W. Bush should be impeached.
Young, 60, is releasing an album titled “Living With War,” which features the song “Let’s Impeach the President.” Where would we be without another political message from an uneducated rock star with no more knowledge and insight than the average Joe.
Good ole Neil, former drug addict and alcoholic, and author of lyrics like the suicide mantra “it’s better to burn out than fade away” and “Fourteen junkies to weak to work” has taken up the Bush bashing duties of his fellow musicians, who tried and failed to rally support around the doomed Presidential campaign of John Kerry.
The sheer worthlessness of his opinion brings me back to my days at the state’s liberal mecca, Richard Stockton College.
Every class acted as a venue for leftist professors to preach to the uninformed, who in most cases, shrugged their shoulders and agreed in order to get on the teacher’s good side. My old girlfriend and I used to go to class ready for war, knowing full well that we would certainly be outnumbered.
We came across one conservative teacher in the Stockton days and he was relegated to adjunct status and later accused of some benign accusation that cost him his job. There was always some jabroni set up outside the library with peace pins. He smelled of spoiled milk, looked like a hobo and never shut up. “Impeach, impeach, impeach… save the trees, blah, blah, blah,” he would ramble.
Stockton was like a military base in Switzerland where soldiers anxiously paced; awaiting word that there was a reason for them to exist. Since I had been in college President Bush was hailed as a hero, post 9/11, and no one dared run their mouth about him.
Then, the 2004 presidential election came along with that flash in the pan, Michael Moore and the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. It was a coming out party for the liberal masses. All of sudden Bush wasn’t a hero, but a liar and thief.
That fall, my last semester before graduating, Stockton invited Moore to speak. He was popular at the time and the move made sense, but there was no counter argument to his one-sided cheap shots. No Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh to educate the ignorant before the election. It was a disgrace!
I was a member of the misled Republican club, who decided to protest the event, but did very little else. In retrospect, it would have been wise to reach out to local Republican leaders and the media, asking for at least a conservative verse Republican debate. Imagine, Moore and Coulter going at it before a wild crowd of voters. Instead, all that came of it was my letter to the editor in The Press.
Moore spoke his propaganda, Bush ultimately wiped the floor with Sen. Kerry in the election, and that was that. I left college war weary and utterly sick of politics. Bush was no hero and Kerry was a zero.
Now, the Bush Administration is under siege and disgraced. It will be a phenomenon if they survive the year. The backlash will sweep a Democrat into office, no matter how corrupt and inconsistent.
Ugly times a wait my generation. The late Hunter S. Thompson wrote it best, “The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks. The time has come for loyal Americans to sacrifice.”
Young, like Bruce Springstein, The Beastie Boys, and other musicians, is really making a difference by complaining about our nation’s leader. They smell blood and attack with the same old punch lines and gripes. Mean while, the rest of us just want to feel safe and find a way to be happy.
The president may be an ignorant, rich kid with debatable intelligence, but the next president will still have to deal with the same problems that Republicans and Democrats failed to answer in 2004 and thereafter.
Will our country improve with a new president or does the problem go deeper than that? What can be done? I don’t know the answer and Neil Young doesn’t either.