(This column appeared in THE LONE STAR ICONOCLAST, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com the week of September 18, 2006.)
I'd like to think the worm has finally turned. It would really be nice to have enough faith in the good people who are taxpayer-funded for taking four months or so out of each year to burn sound bites on Capitol Hill will finally cut the Bush Regime off at the knees.
I truly hope the attempted reversion of our government into one of Fuhrerprinzip is at an impasse.
Save for the usual Senate and Congressional Bush Automatons, ain't nobody gonna make any effort to catch his sorry ass when it falls, either.
Even with approval ratings lower than whale feces, this White House refuses to perform the will of the American people.
When a Federal Jurist, Anna Diggs Taylor, with more than 45 years of legal expertise denounced the Bush Regime's warrantless wiretapping scheme as illegal, every member of the cabal without a law degree cried out that she was wrong. Despite an order to cease, they're still listening in our conversations and reading private e-mails while awaiting an appellate court decision.
At the personal insistence of King George, the most hardcore of RoveBushCheney lapdogs on the Hill are trying desperately to circumvent the opinion of Judge Taylor. As of this writing they're not getting a lot of support.
After the Supremes decided that the basic Constitutional ban against "cruel and unusual punishment" applied to captured terrorist suspects, as did Common Article III of the Geneva Convention, extending such prisoners proper tribunals, the Regime sought methods of reversal. On "Meet the Press," Dark Lord the Dick Cheney professed to know more about law than Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy. In his opinion, they were wrong while the three dissenters - Bush's boy Alito, Scalia and Thomas - were correct.
How much more corrosive could a vice-president get? The guy never spent any time in the military, so he has absolutely no concept of the actual weight of the Geneva Convention, or the perpetual impact ignoring this 57-year-old treaty would have on America's fighting forces. No, the Dick just doesn't give a damn.
Apparently, neither do the three dissenting Supremes, not one of whom was a military man, yet all of whom made a purely political decision.
So, King George proposed a law to override more than 200 years of existing laws, and an international treaty dating back to 1949.
Three of the most high-powered Republicans in the Senate have led the charge against the Bush tribunal bill that would allow what is tantamount to "torture" and "cruel and inhuman punishment" of prisoners - John Warner (VA), John McCain (AZ) and Lindsey Graham (SC). The White House and intelligence leaders want a law that gives them and field operatives enough latitude to do whatever they want without fear of personal legal reprisals, and to hell with how it comes crashing down upon the common soldier.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell weighed in on the issue, agreeing with the Supremes' majority decision and letting the Regime know it was backing the wrong horse. The Senate rejected the Bush bill.
King George is insistent that the overly abrasive John Bolton be our Nation's ambassador to the United Nations. This is a schlemiel who treats his Harvard- and Yale-educated staff as though they're serfs; a clown among diplomats who publicly expresses his utter disdain for the U.N. Bolton is a tactless clod, and at the U.N. he would be like a bull in a china shop, a fact the Senate was well aware of.
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