We have seen this shamelessness in full display this past week. What else but shameless can we call a president who swears on the Bible to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, but then has his people attack the judge who points out that he and his minions have clearly run afoul of one of those laws?
Only shameless people could try to cover up their own felonious conduct by smearing the person who'd found them out, the way these Bush minions have been going around smearing the good judge who has told the nation that the president's warrantless spying is a violation of the law and the Constitution.
But that judge they are smearing was just saying what legal experts have been saying all year. It's just a few months since a task force of America's premier legal group -the American Bar Association-reported that the president and his men were clearly breaking the law.
The Court -in its Hamden decision earlier this summer-rejected the president's claim that, as commander-in-chief, he is above the laws passed by Congress. Yet this president continues even now shamelessly to continue to claim the right to do what the law explicitly forbids
In the face of this pattern of presidential lawlessness, this president now tries shamelessly to change the subject. He defends himself by pretending the issue is whether our nation will be protected or unprotected. But of course America provides the president with all the tools he needs to protect us legally, and this shameless group never explains why they need to act like criminals in order to keep us safe.
Even as the courts catch this Republican president grabbing powers forbidden him by the Constitution he swore to defend, he brazenly stands before us to use fear-mongering deceptions to make us believe we have to destroy our country in order to save it.
But we had already seen the shamelessness of this Bush group from the way they've acted in getting this country into this terrible mess in Iraq.
First they led us into war by telling us things that were not true-the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, the link with 9/11 that didn't exist. And then shamelessly they acted as if it didn't matter that we'd been sold this war on false pretenses, and as if all patriotic Americans should trust their future pronouncements.
Then in Iraq they misjudged one thing after another -that peace was just around the corner, that the insurgency was in its "death throes," etc.-and then shamelessly showed no embarrassment or humility about the disaster they'd created with all their misjudgments.
Shamelessly, they boast about making us safer. But it is clear to virtually all the experts not paid to sell the American people a bill of goods that the net effect of their policies has been to strengthen our enemies and to antagonize our friends.
Half the country worries that this group will embroil us in more wars besides the debacle in Iraq. A majority fears that our liberties are in danger from the power-grabbing of this one-party government. Two-thirds of the American people sense that the country is heading in the wrong direction.
Yet this Bush administration keeps on pushing ahead as if they'd not misled us into an ugly morass. After all they've damaged at home and abroad, they continue to swagger as if only they can keep us secure, and as if anyone who calls them on their errors and their lawlessness and their deceptions is somehow abetting our enemies.
Shameless, that's what they are.
It's time for the whole nation to rise up as one and say to this Bush group, echoing a previous time when power was shamelessly abused in America: "Have you no decency, sirs, at long last? Have you no shame?"
