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Exodus

November 16th, 2004

First, the big news most people know about is the game of musical chairs going on in the Bush administration. While Ashcroft’s resignation was welcome, his replacement is no great consolation prize. Alberto Gonzales is getting the job not because he’s the country’s best lawman (same as Ashcroft), but because he’s been Dubya’s best bud since his governorship, has been helping him get out of jams and fixes since then, probably has a load of dirty laundry on Bush, and his ethnicity will make his confirmation somewhat bulletproof. Among Gonzales’ early work that ‘qualifies’ him for the top law enforcement official was cleaning up Bush’s messes:

And then there was the infamous 1996 juror incident. At that time, Bush was randomly selected for jury duty. Wanting to make a PR stunt out of it, Bush made a big deal about how he was just an ordinary guy, and of course, he would do his duty and serve on the jury. He claimed to the press that it is “a feeble excuse” to say he’s too busy or important. When he was given the forms for jurors to fill out, there is a section where jurors are required to detail prior arrests and court proceedings they experienced. Bush left that section blank. Apparently, the court did not want to bother the governor with such legal niceties, so he was not required to fill it out as everyone else is. But then Bush ran into a bigger snag: by chance, he was assigned to a drunk driving case, and, as a potential juror, he would without doubt be asked, under oath, if he had ever been arrested for drunk driving before.

Time for a feeble excuse to come to the rescue. Bush asked to be dismissed from jury the night before the trial, and was helped by Alberto R. Gonzales, his legal counsel. (Bush later appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court, and later as a legal counsel in the White House.) The excuse? “It would be improper for a governor to sit on a criminal case in which he could later be asked to grant clemency.” Huh? How often was Governor Bush asked to grant clemency for drunk driving? He was obviously taking positive action to hide his past from the public.

Since then, Gonzales’ record has been less than spectacular.

Meanwhile, the only moderately good man in the Bush cabinet, Colin Powell, is leaving, and will be replaced by Condi Rice–though everyone saw that one coming miles away. You have to wonder what in the name of all that is holy Powell was thinking about when he decided not to run for president but instead served as a futile voice of moderation in this chimpanzee’s cabinet, constantly and consistently run over by morons and fanatics. While he remains far more respected and legitimate than those he is leaving behind, his credibility is nevertheless decimated by his willingness to prostitute himself for Bush’s agenda (at least publicly). What a waste.

One thing the new appointments make clear is the fact that this will not be a moderate second term for Bush. Flunkies, fanatics and loyalists are the people in charge now, no more voices of moderation. At the CIA, Porter Goss is busy purging the agency of anyone not completely loyal to Bush (good to see that he has his priorities straight).

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  1. Tim Kane
    November 17th, 2004 at 01:34 | #1

    Powells departure is the final straw for me. I am deeply frightened about the future. I’ve talked alot about getting out of Dodge, but this latest event motivates me.

    Why? Basically because Bush is both incomepetent and a pathological bully (this is blatently obvious to anyone who is moderately objective and moderately informed observer – I say this as someone who didn’t like Bush when he was appointed to the job in 2000, but didn’t really care as most Presidents don’t screw up the really big things too much, like foreign policy and econonomic policy – a moderately informed and objective observer stays objective for a very short time).

    What Bush did with hardly no mandate is extraordinary. No he has a slight mandate percentage wise, and by controling all branches of government, has an absolute mandate institutionaly. There are no checks and balances to protect us, or me, from this bully. I have no guaranteed rights and he has no competence, save for the grace and intervention of God himself (which is the fundementalist position) disaster is as assured as a drunk falling into the gutter – we don’t know how long or when, but we do know where he will ultimately end up.

    There are no real checks and balances against either Bush’s incompetency or his Bullyness. Not institutionally and increasingly not in the soft tissue of Government. Powell’s exit and the changes being introduced by Bush means that there will be no dissenting voices. At some point I will not be surprised if the global community sends special agents to assisinate these guys, but the movement is so broad in this country that it will take more than that, massive trade boycott’s and embargoes, a cold war and perhaps even a hot war.

    The issue comes down to ideology. Bush’s ideology is freedom-without-fairness. Such an ideology allows for him to pursue his real agenda, ever increasing concentration of wealth and power (as suggested by Clinton at the DNC). Never mind that this sort of thing is a root cause for such collamities ranging from the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Collapse of Byzantium in the run up to the battle of Manzikurt (only 75 years prior to Manzikurt the Byzantines stood at the threshold of reconquest of what today is modern day Irag and the Levant [Syria, Lebanon, Palestine] which would have brought with it eventually Egypt thus restoring these locations to Christain civilization when they still had 50% of the population Christian – thus eliminating the source for the war on terror and religating Islam to points east and south of Iraq: Persia, Pakistan, Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula) the collapse of Medieva Japan and most recently the collapse of the liberal economic order in 1929 triggering the great depression and the rise of fascist government in Europe, WWII and the Holocaust (some 40 million premature deaths).

    Europe, indeed the rest of the first world’s ideology, is Freedom-with-fairness, i.e. social democracy. Bush hates social democracy much more than he hates BinLaden and the Falangist system in Saudi Arabia. Why? Because Social Democracy is a bigger threat to his ideology than Falangism Fascism. In essence Bush is a falangist Fascist, the same as Saudi Arabia, the only difference is Bush is fundementalist protestant christian and S.A. is fundementalist Islam. The idea is you have an economic elite that controls all the resources and has the power to exercise complete freedom, but the masses are controled by repressive reactionary fundementalist religion – freedom on paper, repression in fact. Because Social Democracy is a better idea, that produces better results it is a huge threat to Bush.

    The best example is Canada. American’s flock to Canada to get around a repressive drug scheme held in place by the government on behalf of drug corporations interest at the expense of the broad majority of people. Because Canada is a more equitable Social Democracy they have fair drug prices because the government on Canada acts on behalf of the people – i.e. a true democracy. Canada embarasses the United States and is evedence of the corruption and patent unfairness of the American system. If Neocon America further metamorphs into a fascism similar to Germany in the 1930s, look for Bush to at the very least “Finlandize” Canada, and perhaps all of Latin America.

    In the end, Bush ideology is inferior to Social Democracy and he will have to bring those societies down or Bush’s ideology will have to surrender to the same tide of history that Communism surrendered to. I don’t want to bet that they will. I believe that the last election was rigged to guarantee success for Bush, and perhaps also the 2000 election.

    Concentrations of wealth and poverty combined with Tax anullements to the same concentrated class triggered collapses that lead to multicenturied dark ages in Europe and Japan – to many of us, we are now entering into a dark age of unknown duration and depth, though not likely to be akin to the epic events in the past.

    Europe, Asia, Russia would do well to distance themselve from the America to avoid or minimize the effects of a possible American collapse as quickly as possible. And that’s what I feel compelled to do for myself as well. It has already begun. They say it took 50 years before people realized that the Roman Empire had collapsed, what ever your cognizance of the current situation is, it is probably behind the occurance of real events.

    This is bad news from a global perspective really .

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