COUNTDOWN: ONE MORE YEAR!

Oh, I would just love to be able to sit here on this cold winter morning and tell you that we only have 365 days left to endure what's left of the administration of the disgusting, half-witted, murderous little guttersnipe the American people were foolish enough to inaugurate as their chief executive seven years ago today. Alas, that was not meant to be. Just our luck: 2008 would have to be a leap year. Shit!

366 days left of this unprecedentedly corrupt and incompetent White House. I wouldn't be writing these words had the Democrats shown some profiles in courage and removed George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney from power via the constitutionally mandated means of impeachment. Never before in our history has the overt criminality of a president and vice-president been so blatantly and perfectly obvious. The "high crimes and misdemeanors" of these two make the misdeeds of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew a generation ago seem like harmless, school boy pranks.

The very fact that the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate allowed this dreadful situation to continue (virtually unchecked) should be held against them - and no doubt will be. What people have got to realize is the fact that the once-great party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is no longer part of the solution - they're part of the problem - and they're now in the process of cheerfully proving this point. They seem hell-bent on handing the nomination to the only candidate in their ranks who is almost certain to lose at the polls in November. The fact that Hillary Clinton can't win the deep south and large parts of the mid and northwest (and quite possibly her home state of Illinois), the fact that every opinion poll has her losing handily to every potential Republican opponent (unlike most of her Democratic counterparts) - the fact that most people can't stand her - seems not to have paid even a courtesy call to their brains. But that's another topic for another day....

The general consensus of opinion is thus: Why impeach the First Fool and Dead-Eye Dick at this late stage in the game? How much more damage can they possibly do in one short year? The answer to that question is somewhat of a no-brainer: They can and will do more damage - a whole hell of a lot of damage - between now and January 20, 2009. It is not going to be "one short year" as some seem to be suggesting. It is going to be one, very long, extremely long, EXCRUCIATINGLY LONG year. We cannot be expected to wait 366 days - 8,784 hours (I did the math!) - to begin cleaning up the mess these criminal jackasses have made. We need to begin as soon as possible. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, as they say.

And what of the crimes too numerous to even cite? From the violations of the Geneva Convention to the war profiteering; from the looting of the National Treasury to the political persecutions; from the assault on the First Amendment to the desecration of the Constitution....The next president of the United States needs to remember the political price that Gerry Ford paid for pardoning Dick Nixon in September of 1974. Serious, criminal investigations need to be initiated the moment the oath of office is taken one year from today. This country's very salvation depends upon nothing less than we, the people making damned sure that George W. Bush is remembered in history as the first former chief executive to go to federal prison and that he will die there.

No man or woman is above the law. An example must be made of the hundreds of people - within the Bush/Cheney administration and without - who willingly committed crimes against the American people during the last seven years. The evidence of criminal wrong doing is voluminous; the smoking guns are so plentiful they've blocked out the sun. If these crimes go unpunished, our former standing within the international community of nations will never be regained. If these crimes go unpunished, our creed of being a nation of laws and not men will be exposed as a fraud. If these crimes go unpunished, The Constitution of the United States will be forever tarnished. If these crimes go unpunished, we we'll never be forgiven by the world - nor will we ever be able to forgive ourselves.

I cannot emphasize this enough, campers! What you have here inside the Executive Mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a cabal of some very hideous bastards and one extremely nasty bitch (Hello, Condi!) The damage that they have done to this country can't even be assessed. The youngest people among us will be paying for the Bush Mob's dreadful mismanagement of America's social and economic infrastructure for the rest of their lives and, more than likely, the lives of their children as well. This is a problem that is not merely going to go away with a change of administrations - this is a problem that we'll be dealing with forever. If you are unable to perceive the repercussions of George W. Bush's stupidity by now, you will by January 20, 2009 - count on it. As Maureen Dowd astutely observed in this morning's New York Times:

"Next to the cool, strong euro, the dollar is a comparative runt in the world's currencies. The weak dollar lets foreigners snap up real estate in Manhattan. It is striking that the Bush scion, who tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office. Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered in the Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction."

Indeed we might have. It boggles the mind imagining where we might be today had a President Albert Gore taken the oath of office on January 20, 2001. That he actually won the election of 2000 and that the presidency was denied him because Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris were able to illegally remove 57,000 black people from the list of eligible voters in the state of Florida only compounds one's rage.

It's a sure bet that a President Gore would not have ignored the warning: "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In The U.S." and might very well have prevented the carnage of September 11, 2001.

It's a pretty safe wager that President Al Gore would not have committed the stupidest foreign policy blunder in American History by invading a country that was a threat to no one.

It's fairly safe to assume that President Gore would not have foolishly squandered a multi-trillion dollar surplus with a tax cut for a class of people who already had more money than they possibly knew what to do with.

It's not too much of a stretch to conclude that President Gore would not have built up a debt so astronomically unmanageable, it would have to be taken over by the Chinese.

It's not an unreasonable guess to conclude that President Gore probably would not have ordered persecutions of his political enemies nor would he have filled the Department of Justice with third-rate, ideological hacks.

Yeah. One doesn't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to conclude that the world in general and this country in particular would be a much happier place today had we never known the names of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The very thought of enduring another 365....I mean, 366 days (SHIT!!) of this nightmare of an administration is almost too horrible to even comprehend. The fact that all the pundits are predicting that this will be a Democratic year is of little solace. They have forgotten the Dem's positive genius for taking a fine bottle of twelve-year old scotch and turning it into donkey piss.

Maybe the party of FDR will finally show some courage and end this outrage that is being committed against the American people. Maybe this year pigs will finally learn how to fly.

Don't hold your breath.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY.
tomdegan@frontiernet.net

AFTERTHOUGHT:
Yesterday I visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. If you're ever up in that neck of the woods, it can't be recommended enough. There is a link to their website here on "The Rant". You'll walk away from the place feeling better about America. It's therapeutic!

Hello, Christina.

peace....