November 06, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

A SMOKING RUIN

The grandiose plans of George W. Bush and his neocons to transform Iraq into a compliant puppet state of the United States, especially with its oil, now lies in a smoking and smoldering ruin. The slag heap contains tattered American credibility, the respect we once enjoyed around the world, and thousands of needless deaths. This article by David Olive is at www.thestar.com:

Let it not be said the neo-cons are without a legacy, despite the brief zenith of their influence.

Long after the days of "The smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud," "Shock and awe," "Mission accomplished" and "Bring 'em on" are mercifully past, historians will chronicle an early 21st-century America so distracted from its real enemy that Osama bin Laden and even the perpetrators of the 2001 anthrax attacks against Congressional leaders are still at large.

An America, too, whose diplomatic influence has cratered, due not only to the unilateral belligerence with which America went to war in Iraq, but also the incompetence subsequently exposed in almost every particular of its Iraq occupation: intelligence breakdowns; acrimonious relations between the civilian and military U.S. occupation leadership; rampant theft by contractors; and the failure to provide Iraqis with security, power, fresh water and other essentials even now, 43 months after the invasion. The resulting diplomatic void has been filled by China and Russia, now resisting U.S. calls for their imposition of sanctions against North Korea and Iran, respectively.

NO MORE RUBBER STAMP CONGRESS

One of the great beauties of the United States Constitution is its system of checks and balances. The legislative branch is there to oversee the executive branch, and the courts are there to oversee the other two branches of government. But since the attacks on 9/11 Congress has been like a puppy dog rolling on its back to have its stomach rubbed. Overseeing the executive branch has been a foreign concept to this Congress. Let's hope for the sake of the country and the planet that Democrats regain Congress tomorrow, and that Congress will live up to its Constitutional responsibility. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com:

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future.