THE BUSH MOB FOLLIES OF 2007

 

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

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Gather 'round, children! Time now for our end-of-the-year round-up of the unintentional comedy that makes the administration of George W. Bush such a joyous laugh fest to behold! For all of the damage that these foolish and unenlightened people have done to this country, they're certainly providing us with "interesting times" in which to live, aren't they? Gerry Ford was boring. Jimmy Carter was boring. Bush 41 was as boring as they come. These people are anything but! Watching this hideous administration literally implode during the last year has been more fun than words can accurately describe. I'm giddy. Please forgive me.

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2006 ended with all of us contemplating, ominously enough, what the aftermath of the execution of the Butcher of Baghdad might bring. On my New Year's Eve posing on The Rant, I speculated that nothing would change and that the carnage would only get worse in 2007:

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"The only thing that the killing of Saddam Hussein has accomplished is this: Tonight one more lifeless body lies in Iraq."

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Well, it turns out I was wrong on one point and I humbly concede as much. Facts are facts and they must be faced honestly: The death toll in Iraq did in fact go down somewhat in '07, but Saddam's execution had not a thing to do with it (and neither did the so-called "surge"). You see, the body count will always go down when there are three million less people to kill (a million dead civilians thus far, and at least two million refugees this year alone). It's all a simple matter of mathematics. War has a nasty little habit of producing lots of dead people and lots and lots of refugees. Go figure.

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The year started out with so much hope and why not? With the election of the 110th Congress the previous November, we had every reason to be optimistic. Surely, we thought, the opposition party would do right by the country and by year's end, Bush and Cheney would be impeached and the country could begin the long and difficult process of regaining its standing among the international community of nations. Leave it to the worthless, pathetic Democrats in the House and Senate to cave in - on almost every point - to the demands of the most corrupt administration in American History. Every time they had a chance to show even a little courage, they folded up like deck chairs on the Titanic. Many of them cynically felt that the more damage the Bush White House did to the country, the easier it would be for them at the polls next November. The Democratic Party was - without question - the biggest disappointment of 2007. And now they appear to be on the verge of handing their nomination over to Hillary Clinton, the Queen of the focus groups. The party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has descended into the ideological sewer. I don't regret leaving the Dems almost a decade ago and am now only embarrassed by my twenty-year association with them. They're sickening.

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One of the highlights of the first month of the new year was the First Fool's riotously comical State of the Union address on January 23. Referring to the endless slaughter in Iraq, he said toward the end of the speech (with a straight face, so help me):

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"This is not the fight we entered, but this is the fight we are in.

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As I remarked at the time, "The 'fight we entered' was a fight to rid Saddam Hussein of a weapons of mass destruction program that every thinking person in the United States (all twelve of us) knew wasn't there."

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The following day, in his column in the New York Times, Bob Herbert put it perfectly (as Bob Herbert has a tendency of doing). The address, he said, was "a study in government dysfunction. The audience kept mindlessly applauding - up and down like marionettes - when in fact there was nothing to applaud. The State of the Union is wretched..."

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The following month saw the revelations of the atrocious conditions under which some wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were forced to live. The situation was merely a microcosm of the problems facing the United States as a whole. The painful and awful truth is this: the social infrastructure of this country is deteriorating because the richest two percent of the American taxpayers have been hoarding so huge a piece of our national treasure for over a quarter of a century - a situation that only accelerated under Bush 43. On top of that, the war in Iraq is costing the American people roughly 1.3 billion dollars a week. 2008 will be remembered as the year our entire economy collapsed. Take that to the bank (so to speak).
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Then in the early summer came the Gonzalez testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the revelation that US Attorneys were being fired for not conducting the political persecutions ordered by Karl Rove. In order to avoid a perjury rap, poor, pathetic little Alberto was forced to answer, "I don't remember" or "I can't recall" hundreds of times. It was theater of the absurd at its finest. After what can only be described as the worst performance in front of an investigative body since mobster Frank Costello wrung his sweaty hands before a national TV audience over a half a century before, Bush expressed supreme confidence in his Attorney General. I'm not making this up.

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From that point on, it was straight down hill for these clowns. By mid summer, people were fleeing this White House like rats from a sinking ship. August saw not only the resignation of Bush's beleaguered and incompetent Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, but also the Rasputin-like creature who has come to be known as Bush's Brain: Karl Rove. They all knew that the trillion dollar shithammer was about to come crashing down and they didn't want to be caught anywhere near Washington when that happened. While the corporate media - with a small handful of notable exceptions - continued to act as mere stenographers for these criminals, the blogosphere and courageous political websites like the Huffington Post, MoveOn.Org and AlterNet continued to stand up and speak out. We are the new Edward R. Murrows. We are the Upton Sinclairs of our generation. We are the people who are going to save this country....OK! OK! OK! With a little help from Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, and Keith Olbermann....Sheeesh!

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An entire can of deadly vicious worms was opened in 2007 and it doesn't look the least bit appetizing for Bush and Cheney. They can spin it any which way they like, but the nasty fact of the matter is this: They're going down. The American people are waking up from the drunken orgy of the last twenty-seven years and are starting to see the real face of the Reagan Revolution - without the makeup and lipstick. What they see is not the lovely and polite girl they thought they brought home last night, but just some crude, painted-up whore with a hideous smirk and a Texas twang. It's not a pretty picture. Nope, not a pretty picture at all.

The middle class, once the driving force of the American economy, is now in danger of extinction. The United States Constitution, the blueprint by which this country was formed, has been assaulted by people who have probably never even read it, let alone understand it. The "American Experiment" might indeed turn out to be a colossal failure. The next twelve months will tell.

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It's a safe bet that the final hours of this administration will see the shredders in the White House and the Executive Office Building working over-time. They may think that they'll be able to escape history's judgement, but that is merely a sign of their unprecedented arrogance. Eventually we'll know the whole truth behind the crimes that were committed by the most overtly criminal presidency in the history of this once-great nation. People are going to start talking - and very soon. Keep your eyes wide for the publication of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book in April. That will be only the first of many. The incredible thing is, we've barely scratched the surface. But of this you may be absolutely certain: We're gonna keep scratchin' - DON'T YOU FORGET IT!

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Happy New Year, Everbody!
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Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
tomdegan@frontiernet.net