The BBC says W’s grandfather was part of a plot to overthrow FDR (no, really) and adopt fascism. The GOP’s emails reveal widespread vote suppression. Gonzo is a liar. The past scandals amount to a vast pile of wrongdoing, from torture to vote suppression to plain old lying and unconstitutional executive power-grabs. Yet the congressional namby-pambies go on about impeachment being off the table and are already crawfishing on charging that craven weasel Gonzalez with the perjury he so richly deserves.
Call this a rant, but I can’t bloody stand it anymore. I remember the sick feeling when the GOP succeeded in stopping the vote count in 2000, and I’ve felt queasy ever since. This has been the worst stretch of years in politics I can remember, and I lived through Reagan. At least Reagan didn’t overtly threaten democracy itself. When one of Bush’s first acts was to issue an executive order giving himself the right to keep Reagan and Bush-pere records sealed, I had an inkling we might be in for a rough ride.
Just for review, I have to get it out. In every possible direction, the crimes are clear. But for the broadest overview, I think most everything belongs in a small number of categories. The most egregious sin, for which I blame that amoral Mayberry Machiavelli Karl Rove, is the politicization of everything. We discover the individual sins over time, but they’re always the same: where the government needs knowledge and competence in an appointee, Bush and Rove have reliably chosen loyalty to the dimwit over all else, from FEMA to the EPA and every stop in between, thinking knowledge detrimental. They’ve even put former industry lobbyists in charge of "regulating" the industries they came from. It begs the question: if competence isn’t desirable, what exactly do they want the government to do?
The answer I come back to again and again is the same. I recall Bush’s repeated "joke" that " a dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, so long as I’m dictator." With appointees going before Congress and saying they took an oath to Bush, and with the multiple witnesses who confirm that Bush called the Constitution a "goddamn piece of paper," the danger and their goal are all too clear. Policy should not be only political. The good of the people should trump all. But then, that would require humility and the attitude of a "public servant," a concept Bush would likely consider just as quaint as, say, The Geneva Conventions.
The other broad category of criminality involves repeated and brazen vote suppression. The evidence is clear, and is readily available. This is the stuff that was supposed to stop with the Civil Rights Act.
Then there’s that whole war business, the politicization of intelligence, and the outright lying.
Then there’s revealing an undercover CIA agent for political retribution.
Then there are the endless concessions for big business and the ultra-rich, the people George, in another supposed knee-slapper, referred to as "my base."
I know this is a generalized rant, but my next few posts will cover in greater detail the crimes of which I speak. The evidence is overwhelming, but we seem unable to do anything about it, unless our representatives try a newfangled approach and actually represent us.
I truly fear that, as Paul Craig Roberts, former Reagan appointee, claims, we are but one terrorist attack away from these deeply unpopular criminals claiming yet greater powers, at which point democracy will be but a convenient veneer. We have to impeach them or risk true tumult and a transition to something other than democracy.
