Washington Flood...Of Incompetence

I haven’t written anything in almost a week because I don’t know where to begin. President Bush and the GOP have made a mess of so many important things...

Iraq

Like a circle of toddlers at nap time, Republican Senators whined and pouted last week about two Democrat-proposed timetables for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, one date-certain, the other open-ended.

But the moment Republicans took a break from shouting “Cut And Run, Cut And Run”, General Casey, the top military commander in Iraq, announced...a tentative timetable for withdrawal!

President Bush stumbled into the fray by stating that, unlike the Democrats, Casey’s plan will be “aimed toward achieving victory.” The subtext being that the Democrats are wimps and only withdraw in defeat, while withdrawals orchestrated by military brass are somehow more noble and likely to be characterized as victory.

Of course, neither Bush nor his spineless party articulated what their notion of “victory” might look like. It seems to include chaos, kidnappings, torture, beheadings, assassinations and civil war, which is a mighty strange, if not grotesquely inadequate and dishonest, definition.

And speaking of dishonest, Bush told graduating cadets at West Point that “the war began on my watch but it’s going to end on your watch.” But not if General Casey and the GOP incumbents have their way. Their noble, victorious withdrawals from Iraq are already being timed to coincide with the election cycle. Casey’s plan calls for the first large shipment of troops to arrive home beginning this September. How convenient.

The Environment

The HBO series Real Sports did a piece this week concerning the epidemic rise among young Americans of asthma, directly attributable to power plants polluting at levels that used to be illegal. The show highlighted how the Bush Administration gutted parts of the Clean Air Act and vacated lawsuits that were well on their way to forcing huge polluters to clean their emissions. That’s right, folks--Bush and the GOP just walked away from enforcing the laws, then changed the laws, all in favor of the power companies.

This is old news, but in light of the headline this week from scientists that the earth is at its warmest point in at least 400 years, the story was heartbreaking in an entirely new way.

Republican greed-whores argued that enforcing the laws would have made energy costs higher. But what they really meant was that the lawsuits would have forced their CEO buddies to buy seventy foot yachts instead of the ninety footers. Those plants were quite profitable--at the expense of our nation’s children. It’s a crying shame, and the executives of that industry should be disgusted by their own greed and toxic callousness.

Liberty

The New York Times disclosed last week that the government has been recording and analyzing every wire transfer of every person on the planet. Bush and Cheney were screaming mad at the story, not because it harmed our war on terrorism--it didn’t--but because it was yet another high-profile instance of executive-branch excess and potential illegality. Of damning importance was the fact that Congress was notified of the program only after it was in jeopardy of being exposed by the media.

The spying came as a surprise to most Americans, but the terrorists have known about it for some time--wire transfer traffic among Islamofascists has steadily fallen since the program started because terrorists eventually caught on. “We’re no longer using phones, beepers, smoke-signals...and still we’re getting caught. Duh, it was those wire transfers through Pakistan!”

Wages

Congress recently voted to give itself decent pay raises (in line with inflation) while almost simultaneously voting, for the ninth straight year, to leave the minimum wage where it is. It was their formalized way of saying “f-you” to blue-collar Americans, who should be happy to live in a country where they can buy a lottery ticket giving them the same chance of lifting their economic fortunes as they have through hard work. In other words, virtually none.

If anybody out there still thinks that the Republicans in Washington care about anybody but corporate executives, I’d be happy to laugh loudly in their face. Never in my lifetime have I seen a more brazen group of political pirates than the greedy, money-soaked corporate puppets running Congress.

I’ll leave these other items for later: massive voting fraud in Ohio during the ’04 election; the essential Voting Rights Act renewal being delayed by the meddling GOP; FEMA being bilked out of billions of Katrina dollars; the swing vote on the Supreme Court now seems to be Radical Right Posterboy Samuel Alito; what a pitiful mess.