August 10, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


KARL ROVE'S MACHINATIONS

It's disturbing to realize how many people who are not elected and not even on a ballot have so much influence in our domestic and political affairs. Even people who are elected, such as Senators, hold undue sway over my life and yours. A Senator from Wyoming or Alaska or Rhode Island has as much influence in the Senate as a Senator from California. Sure, the House has representation based on population, but it is the Senate and the Senate alone that has the filibuster, where a minority group can block the will of the majority. It is the Senate that confirms appointments to the Supreme Court, another institution that is not democratic. It is the Senate that ratifies treaties.

Even worse than the undue influence of people in the Senate, though, are aides to the President such as Karl Rove. Rove has exerted great and mostly malignant influence since Bush stole the presidency in 2000. Rove has had a major role in the Iraq war, in the insidious plan to privatize Social Security, and such asinine proposals as medical savings accounts. This article by John W. Mashek is at www.usnews.com:

In the 2004 election, aided by Democrat John Kerry's mistakes, Bush won another narrow victory. Rove acted like it was a landslide from the start.

With his new prominence for policy matters, Rove had a master plan. In an excellent piece by Joshua Green in the latest Atlantic, the author points out the collapse of that plan. Rove's first call for action was to privatize or at least partially privatize the Social Security system. It flopped, as did immigration reform and changing Medicare to include private accounts, other Rove ideas.

Amid all this, the war in Iraq grew more unpopular by the day as a backdrop to the domestic problems. Bush's popularity numbers went south and have remained in the mid- or low 30s for months.

Rove's negative campaign tactics have gone on for years, and his arrogance in the White House has left him and his boss with little to show for nearly seven years in power.

BERNSTEIN ON BUSH

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke one of the most important political stories in our history. They fought through the obstruction tactics of the Nixon administration to reveal the truth about the Watergate break-in and, even more, the long list of crimes that were related to Watergate. Now Carl Bernstein says that Bush is worse than Nixon. This article by John Nichols is at www.commondreams.org:

Carl Bernstein will always be known as the journalist who brought down a president whose disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law disqualified the errant executive from completing a second term in the White House. And Bernstein still gets a round of applause when mention is made of the role he played, as part of a Washington Post investigative team that also included Bob Woodward, in exposing the high crimes and misdemeanors of a president named Nixon.

But 33 years after Nixon resigned in order to avoid an inevitable impeachment — on August 9, 1974 — Bernstein is more concerned about a president named Bush.

When we appeared together recently at The Aspen Institute’s first symposium on the political reporting of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Bernstein recalled the old stories of when he and Thompson were busy revealing the sordid details of Nixon’s presidency.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author was under no illusions regarding the extent of Nixon’s wrongdoing as compared with that of Bush and those around the current president.