With Howie in D.C., do you suppose Rahm's minions have spirited him away for safety? But who will protect us against the alligators—and Karl Rove?
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As I write, Howie should be in Washington, D.C., and I'm half-awaiting news that the administration has taken steps to do something about it. If not them, maybe Rahm Emanuel? Unless maybe Rahm's stooges have tactfully hustled him out of the District. We don't want Howie and Rahm hooking up, do we? It's bound to get ugly. Well, we'll just have to hope for the best.
I don't know about you, but the news I'm really waiting to hear from Our Nation's Capital is the eternally awaited indictment of Karl Rove. While we wait, unless you count Michael Jackson's missing millions, the news seems to be mostly about alligators. This sudden rash of people-eatings seems to have grabbed the nation's notoriously short attention span away from the oh-so-recently-panic-worthy TV avian flu.
The best speculation I've heard so far about the alligator alarm was Rachel Maddow's this morning on her Air America Radio show. She seems quite certain that it's just a matter of time before our Karl comes up with a way to turn the people-eating alligators into a political attack weapon. Her personal suggestion was that the alligators may be part of President Clueless's about-to-be-revealed plan to seal the borders against—gasp!—those immigrants who're overrunning the country.
Why, it was just this morning that Bob Herbert was reminding us in his column, "America the Fearful," about the insidious way the Bush administration has waged a war of terror on its own unsuspecting citizens. "In the dark days of the Depression," he began, "Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset." (As usual with hostage-held NYT columnists, I'm posting the full text as a comment.)
Or maybe it's just a matter of time before Rush and Little Annie Coulter are warning us that godless Democrats are soft on person-eating crocodilians. Let's hope "Prosecutor Pat" Fitzgerald can get to Karl before he unleashes the alligators on us.
(Whew! I just double-checked, and there is indeed a Yankee game on the tube this evening, to spare me any temptation to tune in to the crud-spewing crocodilian from Crawford. Not that there's likely to be much temptation. Since the days of Dickie "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon, I've learned not to watch Republican presidents on the TV. Those TVs are expensive, and I can't afford to keep replacing the damned things.)
posted by KenInNY @ 12:41 PM
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Here is the full text of Bob Herbert's column:
May 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.
Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.
The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.
Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.
The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.
Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.
The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.
If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.
So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.
The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.
There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.
I'm laying here with a stiff drink, laptop and cat, watching the Yankees, and I don't envy Howie at this moment.
I was about to email him Herbert's (great) column, but you beat me to it.
Thanks for the update.
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