Requiem for a Lightweight

Hi folks, just dropping a few necessary words into this pocket of cyberspace regarding the political doings back here in the States. Currently, I’m here in New York City for three days (before heading back to Paris) and staying on Riverside Drive at an old friend’s exquisitely appointed apartment. She’s allowing me to use her state-of-the-science computer setup here in her state-of-the-art digs.

I’ve been keeping up with the Bushies while in Europe conducting business, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone over there wants to engage me on the subject. A common opening is usually along the lines of, "When are you Yanks gonna wise up and pitch that idiot cowboy outta Washington?" So here’s my preliminary answer on the subject.

The bottom line on George W. Bush is that he is the least qualified man ever to take the presidential oath of office in American history and he turned out to be (surprise!) the worst president we’ve ever had. The only reason he was governor of Texas was because of who his father was, and the fact that he could be trusted to keep the fat cats fat. In every other respect, he was a lazy and inept governor, every inch the prototypical spoiled son of a rich man.

But the shame for him being able to ascend to the top political office in the U.S. falls only partially on those who voted for him, as many of those people were brain-duped by a massively funded lie machine. The real source of this elected (well, semi-elected) travesty is the dysfunctional American political system (and its enabler, the mass media) which allowed this corporate butt-boy to amass over 100 million dollars by January of 2000, then steam-roll his opposition all the way to the White House, despite his singular lack of governmental and world affairs knowledge.

What a sad century we Americans have gotten off to because of this ill-fated Republican takeover – our problems multiplied, our prestige diminished and our financial stability endangered. All this while the super rich have become super richer. The only glimmer of consolation is that we may only have one more year of this sufferance to endure.

The Republicans gained and maintained power for these past 12 years by being in rigid lockstep with the general conservative program, while the Democrats suffered the fragmentation of individuality and squabbling rivalries. It’s quite conceivable that their will be a reversal of this fortune/misfortune for the two parties as the unholy union between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives is straining at the seams, and the Dems are doing their best to mount a united front. Add to that the deep resentments by many elected Republicans against the administration for its arrogant incompetences and the seismic potential of the Abramoff scandal, and it adds up to the Democrats taking back control of the House and Senate in 2006.

This will have many ramifications, not least of which will be the many much-needed investigations which will be spawned and, hopefully, a chance to show the nation and the world a legitimately warranted impeachment.

The only explanation that makes sense regarding the administration’s not getting warrants (not obeying the law) for its surveillance of phone calls and e-mails is that it didn’t want a paper trail of who they were surveilling. Since the FISA court allowed for the warrant to be made after the fact, in those cases where time was of the essence, no excuse regarding urgency can hold water. That the whistleblowers were professional NSA officials who felt they were abusing the legal mandates, one is led to speculate that the Bushies created a dragnet which included the communications of those engaged only in business and political activities, information that the Bushies could then use to serve their other greedy overarching purposes.

The hanky-panky that the administration perpetrated regarding the supposed existence of WMDs is a story that has not yet been fully revealed. If the Democrats put certain former CIA types under oath, there's a good chance that Bush will be smoked out as a blatant liar about the reasons for going to war. If that's not an impeachable offense, nothing is.

The Founding Fathers, especially Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, realized that America would not automatically remain a freedom-generating republic, but that strong safeguards and constant care had to be exercised to maintain it, starting with constitutional checks and balances and an active free press. The Bush Administration has taken vigorous steps to impede and upset those safeguards and needs to be removed from office, ideally in early 2007 by means of impeachment, before they can do much more irreparable harm to the nation.