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Contempt

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This is a week of spring vacations with Congress gone back to the people the members represent or out into the world to gather information and to give a slightly different slant on positions held by Americans to world leaders and the world press.

It is a week when pundits and columnists reach back into that bag of items that the daily news cycle cannot easily digest, that get lost in the hue and cry of new scandals and strange doings around Washington and the rest of the country.  It is the week when at least two prominent articles appeared describing the fecklessness and dishonor of Republican appointees to positions of authority and responsibility. One of these is a piece by Elizabeth de la Vega in TomDispatch subsequently republished by CommonDreams.  Perhaps you already read it.  I have to quote from it, because Ms. de la Vega has nailed the essential truth of this disastrous take-over by radical Republicans of our government.


Listening to Sampson, however, and reading the careless, often juvenile emails he exchanged with fellow loyal Bushies, 33-year-old Monica Goodling (Gonzales' top aide, now on administrative leave because she pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress) and Scott Jennings (another thirty-something aide to Karl Rove in the Office of Political Affairs), I felt my stomach beginning to roil again. In the end, what really got me was the realization that none of these Republican-politicians-in-training had any concept of public service. Worse, they were entirely contemptuous of the very government they had been entrusted to run. [emphasis added]

It is the truth that this new brand of Republicans nurtured in the "kill the beast" philosophy of Grover Norquist and others, have no interest in leaving office with their trusts still respected and their offices still competent to do their jobs.  Instead, as ugly and vicious as it sounds, their mission has been to destroy over a half century of federal authority and responsibility for the welfare of Americans.  It extends from the FDA and NIH feckless capitulation to Big Pharma, by passing without a fair trial and inspection drugs that have killed scores of Americans in the name of corporate profits.  It goes to FEMA, the mismanager of the recovery of New Orleans.  It goes to the federal prosecutors who either were fired for their "chafing" at illegal political control of their agendas, or, caving, carrying out a vendetta against Democrats across the country as if this were Stalinist Russia and this but a classic purge.  It goes to the Pentagon short-changing the military on defensive armor, on hospitalization, on training, on recuperation time, on the truth of how our men and women die in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It goes to a decrepit infrastructure they let decay, believing as they do that "market forces" will replenish that which is necessary to the functioning of the market, and all else is a waste.

The other article I noticed was by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post called "Fox-in-the-Henhouse Government."  Her article names names that do not appear on the front page or in the breathless first moments of the media newscasts.  She describes the Texas style of regulatory agency, the kind that borrows people from the sector being regulated on the theory that no one knows the territory better.  She says,


If your faith is more in the operations of the private sector than in the capacity of government, if you have scant commitment to the laws you are pledged to enforce, if you see government less as a trust to be administered than a force to be used for the benefit of political and ideological allies, then this kind of behavior is the inevitable result.

It is a good expression of how the Rule of Law becomes a joke and the respect that people have for it is destroyed.

The Bushites and Cheneyites, the cynical Roves and Delays of this universe of corrupt and evil men, none of them care about our Constitution.  They cross their fingers when they take oaths of office.  They wink at grievous injury done to political adversaries.  They destroy reputations and honest argument with lies piled on lies. They have led this country into a disastrous war in Iraq that has utterly destroyed the goodwill this country once enjoyed across the planet.  It now appears they have lost the war in Afghanistan as well, allying themselves with the unfathomably corrupt regime of Musharaff in Pakistan, which in its evil incompetence gives shelter to the al Qaeda terrorists that threaten our world.

People question our call for impeachment of Cheney and Bush.  We are fully aware that it is unlikely to happen, if only because the U.S. Senate in which they would be tried, probably would not convict them.  But, impeachment is not a process to disgrace these men; they have done that already to themselves.  We need to remove them from office so that we may begin the task of ridding ourselves of their incompetent appointees and advisers, these dishonest men and women who have trashed our beloved country and all but destroyed our government.

JB

 

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James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History before (and during) a long stint as an academic administrator in faculty research administration. His academic interests are the modern period of Russian History since Peter the Great, Chinese (more...)
 

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