In early April, 2007, the US intel agencies held a critical meeting with President Bush, Condi Rice, and Dick Cheney and reported on Iran’s weapons program involving nuclear technology.
The response was a Bush/Cheney classic:
Hunters know all too well the look that spilled out of our television sets like political diarrhea Tuesday: The look of a cornered animal, the most dangerous time to face a desperate predator.
You saw it in the eyes of George W. Bush, America’s too-often discredited President, caught in yet another lie.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, like the President she wants so desperately to replace, is getting caught in too many lies.
Her campaign can’t even be honest about how many endorsements its gets from from black ministers.
To be fair, politicians have longed stretched the truth in campaign propaganda but Clinton leads a long list of Democratic contenders who claim they will restore honesty and integrity to a White House where President George W. Bush has destroyed credibility and flushed it down the toilet.
One of the basic tenets of the American legal system is the time-honored concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Not in George W. Bush’s America. Under his “the Constitution be damned” concept of justice, those arrested as suspected terrorists are considered guilty even if proven innocent.
A case in point involved a German man busted in Pakistan and shipped off to Gitmo, the prison facility in Cuba where torture rules and rights of the accused don’t exist.
Even though authorities later concluded he was innocent, it didn’t matter.
They got their man.
Poor Bill Clinton. Whatever he may or may not have accomplished as President was forever tarnished by his inability to keep the First Member in his pants or his hands off a White House intern (and God knows who else).
Now he says the media is paying too much attention to his wife’s foibles and not enough to her record as a public servant.
Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, the current scandal-du-jour on Capitol Hill, offers the same lament. The question, he says, is not whether he is gay or not but rather what he does as Senator.
In a government originally designed to be “of the people, for the people and by the people,” America’s political system today more “of the special interest groups, by the special interest groups and only for the special interests.”
Nonprofits, supposedly created to educate voters on issues, are the new power players in the upcoming Presidential primary season and their issues are as narrowly-focused as any fatcat special interest group.
The former chief of staff for Congressman Curt Weldon copped a plea this week for helping a firm get federal money and then hiding the fact that the same firm paid his wife a fat consulting fee.
In the real world, such actions are called bribery and conspiracy.
On Capitol Hill, it’s called business as usual.
Weldon’s top staff member is not the only one on Capitol Hill to get rich from playing fast and loose with the rules.
He’s just one of the few stupid enough to get caught.
Oh dear, oh dear, pity poor Americans, because, you see, the system is rigged against the vast majority who were not born filthy rich. No less an authority than presidential candidate John Edwards says so, and he says so firmly.
Others chime in, telling us that the poor just keep getting poorer and that most of us are frozen in place in ever-worsening circumstances. Upward mobility is done for, they say. The middle class is disappearing. You don’t believe it? Have you listened to Lou Dobbs on TV lately?
I was going to write a column this week about how several people whose opinion I respect have told me recently that my columns have been getting increasingly shrill and vitriolic.
Although the Bush White House tried to put the best face on it, there’s no getting around the fact that a national intelligence finding that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago and that it remains mothballed is a black eye for administration credibility and a blow to its hard line policy toward Iran.