As we all know, this week is the last of the G.W. Bush Administration. Given a national Democratic landslide election and George W. Bush's recent approval rating, there is little doubt that there is more than a tad of dancing taking place in a plethora of streets throughout the U.S. and the world.
For much of their eight year term in office, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have remained tightly entrenched behind iron gates. They avoided the press and media as much as possible. They steered clear of the public and chose to helicopter in and out of their homes and offices whenever feasible. And yet for the past two weeks both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been parading around on the Sunday morning talk and political news circuits. In their final days in office both men desperately tried their darnedest to re-write history. I imagine at this time, after Bush's farewell address, both men are securely ensconced back in their delusional bubbles in undisclosed locations.
With regard to Presidential exit interviews, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is one of many who offered commentary on Bush's farewell address.
"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have tarnished our government's moral standing in the world," McClellan said. "If you look at the speech it was really a feel-good farewell speech. It was designed one final chance to burnish his legacy by highlighting his humanity, showing his humanity, his compassion, his inner decency and good intentions."
But "there are really two problems they don't seem to get," Bush's ex-press secretary remarked. "First of all, the public trust. The president long ago sadly lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. Unless he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people they are not tuning in."
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The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin contributed a more ironic assessment yesterday in his article "Bush Ends with a Whimper":
Bush smirked and twitched while delivering a highly defensive farewell address in which he tried to hearken back to his glory days right after 9/11, sought credit for having made "tough decisions" and insisted his intentions were good.
There was no real attempt to bind the wounds he leaves in his wake. There was no apparent awareness of irony when he held up his administration as a champion of moral clarity and human dignity. He even gave himself credit for his response to the financial crisis he didn't see coming: "When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them," he said.
My two cents worth of opinion is plain, simple and direct. Good riddance too all Bushes and all who support Bush and right wing Republican, conservatism and neo-conservatism anything.
On Thursday afternoon during the U.S. Senate Attorney General hearings, Designate A.G. Eric Holder declared in no uncertain terms that waterboarding is torture. He also clearly stated that no one is above the law.
Asked just minutes into his confirmation hearings whether waterboarding qualified as torture, Holder was unequivocal in his response.
"If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture," said the former deputy Attorney General.
Holder and Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy subsequently went through a checklist of sorts as to where the legal limits of interrogation measures stood.
Would other counties have the authority to torture captured U.S. citizens if they deemed it a national security threat?
"No, they would not," replied Holder. "It would violate the international obligations that I think all civilized nations have agreed to, the Geneva Conventions."
Could the president, if need be, use his authority as commander in chief to override acts that prohibit illegal interrogation practices or torture?
"No one is above the law," said Holder. "The president has a constitutional obligation to faithfully executive the laws of the United States. There are obligations that we have as a result of treaties we have signed and obligations to the Constitution."
CIA Director Hayden disagrees with Holder on torture. Concerning the investigations and inquiries into the actions of CIA officials, Hayden said:
You can't do this to people.
Why? Because certain lawmakers and government officials are above the law?
Speaking of the law, Nobel Prize winner and economist Paul Krugman said we should not "forgive and forget." To do so would mean the President and others serving in the White House are above the law because there are no consequences for them if they do abuse power.
Let's be clear what we're talking about here. It's not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation's security. The fact is that the Bush administration's abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.
At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for "right-thinking Americans" - their term, not mine - and there's strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.
Krugman insists the reason the Bush Administration felt it could do whatever it wanted, let the Constitution be damned, is precisely because Bush I pardoned the Iran-Contra conspirators. There were no consequences for those who violated the Constitution.
In fact, we've already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it's giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off - which isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.
On Wednesday I learned that Brad Scholzman, formerly in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. DOJ, may be prosecuted for criminal misconduct.
.... in an e-mail on July 15, 2003, to a former colleague, Schlozman wrote, "I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys." As part of the same e-mail exchange, on July 16, 2003, Schlozman wrote, "My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs rights out of the section."
Scholzman, like most in his Party, has a problem with the people's right to vote.
Under Schlozman's influence, the voting rights division neglected civil rights in favor of upholding discriminatory laws and pursuing bogus allegations of voter fraud that were used to purge voting roles.
Sarah Palin made the news again this week. In her interview with Esquire Magazine Palin includes bored and pathetic bloggers who lie on her blame-anyone-but-me sore loser list.
While Palin preens in front of the cameras and promotes yet another one of her self-serving whining and bellyaching pity parties, she continues to ignore Alaskans who find themselves in utterly dire and desperate straits. A humanitarian crisis, similar to that of Hurricane Katrina, could very well strike some of the remote, rural Alaskan villages. People need heating fuel and food immediately. If Palin does not stop her whining and get back to work these folks could literally starve or freeze to death.
The situation there is heartbreaking and beyond appalling.
Four days ago, a cry for help went out via the Bristol Bay Times. Many of us have known that residents of Alaska's rural villages are having a hard winter. The weather has been unusually cold, and prices of heating oil and gasoline have been astronomical. Add to that a disastrous collapsing salmon fishery in Bristol Bay that left residents in that area heading in to winter with less than usual, and you have the makings for a humanitarian disaster.
So in desperation, Nicholas Tucker, from the Village of Emmonak sent out a cry for help. With 21 days left in the month, Mr. Tucker had only $440 left to feed and keep his family of nine warm, with heating oil at $7.83/gallon. As Emmonak runs out of fuel, it will have to be flown in, potentially raising the price to $9/gallon or more. While contemplating his own plight, he wondered how many other families of the 800 living in his village were having similar hard times. So he sent out a message on his VHF radio, asking his neighbors how they were doing. Twenty five answers came.
Hats off to all bored and pathetic bloggers who have been diligently raising money to help the near desperate Alaskans.
Back down in the lower 48 a judge orders an email search of all White House computers.
Today's order also granted plaintiffs' requests that a full inventory of all backup tapes and portable media containing White House e-mail be delivered to the Archivist of the United States and filed with the court, and that the full administrative record and all other evidence related to the White House e-mail be preserved under the custody of the Archivist.
"From the outset, the White House has fought tooth and nail against having to preserve sources of missing e-mail as well as other evidence relating to this case," said Sheila Shadmand of Jones Day, counsel for the Archive. "For the umpteenth time, this Court has commanded that they do so. We expect they will yet again object to the terms of these Orders, when instead they should be busy complying with it. The clock is running out."
Concerning the ongoing saga of the Wall Street melt down, thanks to deregulate, baby, deregulate, the Huffington Post revealed that bailout firms used off shore tax havens.
Eighty-three of the nation's 100 largest corporations, including Citigroup, Bank of America and News Corp., had subsidiaries in offshore tax havens in 2007, and some of the companies received federal bailout funding, a government watchdog said Friday.
The Government Accountability Office released a report that said Bank of America Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley all had more than 100 units in countries that maintain low or no taxes. The three financial institutions were included in the $700 billion financial bailout approved by Congress.
Insurance giant American International Group Inc., which has received about $150 billion in bailout money, had 18 subsidiaries. JPMorgan Chase & Co. had 50 units and Wells Fargo & Co. had 18; both financial institutions received government bailout money.
Krugman is right. If the Bush Administration is not held accountable for its deeds other Presidents and their Administrations will also believe they are above all laws. Abuse of power will become the accepted norm.
Moving along from the devastating and wretched evil of the Bush years and looking forward to a new era of desperately needed transformational change:
On the eve of his inauguration Tuesday, the poll found that 65 percent of those surveyed believe Obama will be an "above average" president or better, including 28 percent who think he will be "outstanding."
This girl is headed into the streets to do a little dancing of my own because we are free of one more Wicked Wizard who hails from West Texas. And, finally after eight years of abject and criminal lawlessness we will have a U.S. Attorney General who actually believes we are nation of laws instead of one based on the needs and desires of self-serving and evil doing politicians.
Dance across the nation with all Obama supporters.
