It should be fun (read: nauseating) to watch Congress in the coming days and months.
The days after Election Day 2004 were terribly depressing for me personally, because most of the items below were known problems before the election, and yet Bush still got reelected. A system that is supposed to have checks and balances, is supposed to correct itself, failed to do so and so four years of rampant destruction to the fabric of our society were seemingly endorsed by the electorate. No amount of patching in the years to come can correct this. The damage is done.
Specifically, between Jan 2001 and Jan 2007, our government managed to pull off:
- Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
- Attacking a sovereign country for no reason, with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed, and lying about it all
- Democrats inability to call a duck a duck and offer the clear and obvious answers to the endlessly repeated rhetorical question "why did we attack Iraq"? Answer: to liquidate the assets of our Treasury into private hands, now essentially completed.
- Squandering worldwide goodwill after the Sept. 11th attacks
- Isolating the State Department from the Iraq process and eliminating any hope that we could fix Iraq after we broke it, to paraphrase Colin Powell
- Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
- Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event, leading to a wrecked budget, hobbled middle class and endangered long-term economy
- Passing the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill (hideous,all) and a number of massive tax cuts
- Rolling back and/or refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
- Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
- Defunding the preparation budget of FEMA, leading years later to the disastrous Katrina response.
- Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
- Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment — “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” — to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
- Refusing to face up to global warming and doing pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil
- Distorting elections by the 3 to 1 money advantage of Republicans, an impressive turnout machine driving ultra conservative voters to polls, and election machine fraud obvious to any technical observer
- Violating the wiretapping (telecommunications) laws
- Violating the FISA laws
- Torturing of enemy combatants in violation of everything we stand for
- needlessly capitulating in the Microsoft anti-trust case
- liquidation of our civil liberties as demonstrated by Guantanamo, Padilla, NSA wiretaps, and so on.
- Careful neutering of the mainstream press, using access to "unnamed government sources" to manipulate them into publishing and substantiating the administration's lies, using "embedded reporters" to distort objectivity and serve military interests,
- "Extraordinary rendition" allowing us to see that our enemies (er, the administrations enemies, hmmmm) are sent to foreign countries where they can be tortured in secret prisons. Case after case of citizens secreted away from their home countries to be tortured, on the basis of what rule of law?
Casualties: the rule of law, our civil liberties, our belief in our own democracy.
Drag, isn't it?
I'm just sayin', it's good sometimes to take stock of how far we've come.
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