Zeitgeist Zephyr

First of all, today is probably one of the finest moments in American history in the last eight years, the only one topping it is patriotism exhibited by every red and blue blooded American after September 11, 2001.  Today with the swearing in of Barack Obama as President of the United States, I believe one of America’s finest eras of reform and revitalization is ahead of us.  My conservative readers may disagree, but I can assure you that as a former professor of Constitutional Law, Barack Obama has perhaps one of the best understandings of the law of the land of any president inaugurated in quite some time (so you shouldn’t worry too much about him trying to take away your Constitutional right to own a gun.)  But that’s for another post, and I have four more years to do so.

Bush in his rightful place in history, between two other criminal leaders of the Twentieth Century, of which one he led a crusade against.   

Today, more importantly, was President George “Dubya” Bush’s last day in office; what I and many other Al Gore supporters from the 2000 election like to call “the end of an error”.  In reviewing former President George W. Bush’s term (I just get all tickled inside being able to say “former” in his title now!), one will see that the injustices of this presidency are as wide ranging as the decisions he’s made as The Decider-in-chief.  Here’s a brief list of the four that have annoyed me the most the last eight years, and trust me, I can come up with more accusations against him, though they are far more ambiguous.

1. It started even before he set foot in the Oval Office, when it was determined by the Supreme Court that the controversial ballots from the Florida Recount would go to Dubya, despite gore getting the popular vote.  I’ll acknowledge, neither candidate was particularly inspiring in that election, but the fact remains that the man most Americans wanted in the office, didn’t make it there because of the outdated Electoral College.  I’ve taken note of this in every election since, and if you look at the results from this election at various points as it was being reported by the media, Barack Obama had more electoral votes but John McCain retained the popular vote (this obviously was not the case in the finally tally, but still proof of its general unfairness.)
2. The Bush presidency continued into its first year, experiencing a recession inherited from the decline of the Dot Com Boom from the 1990’s.  It was an uneventful first 9 months until 9/11.  Bush, responding swiftly to the attacks, started what I can only interpret as an early effort to drum up support for an invasion of Iraq to finish the job his daddy couldn’t.  It’s called word association, and if you look at the context of speeches following 9/11, you’ll notice he uses Al Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden and Iraq/Saddam Hussein interchangeably and often synonymously with one another.  By the time 2003 rolled around, enough people believed that even if Saddam didn’t have WMD’s, he sure had something to do with helping Osama plan the 9/11 terror attacks.  We now know, obviously, this is not true.  The war in Iraq was based on three pseudo-facts: Saddam had WMD’s, he was harboring and supporting terrorists (including helping to plot 9/11), and he was just a really evil man who killed his own citizens.  The only one that was true was the latter of the three and didn’t pose a threat to the United States as Bush implied leading up to the war.  The simple truth is, intentionally or not, Bush lied.  Clinton lied too (over a BJ), but no one died when he did.
3. In further response to the 9/11 attacks, Bush implemented a series of laws to increase our security.  That’s fine, as long as it’s done legally within the confines of the law.  The PATRIOT ACT is probably the least patriotic passed in recent history.  It strips those accused of terrorism of any other rights granted to common criminals by the constitution, it established the conditions that allowed for warrant-less wiretapping under Bush’s authorization, and in further response to 9/11, Bush advocated the use of modified interrogation techniques including waterboarding, a form of torture banned under the Geneva Convention.  To boot, these “interrogations” were exported to countries where the CIA could get away with torture.  The use of Gitmo as a prison camp has done nothing but breed more hostility towards the US, inside and outside its walls by countries and individuals who oppose its continued operation, again questionable under internationally accepted forms of criminal treatment and justice.  Does this sound like something the President of the Free World would do or something like what a crazed dictator in an isolated country might do?
4. During his presidency, Bush really didn’t live up to his “compassionate conservatism”, especially given number 3, and he didn’t live up to the fiscally sound practices of fiscal conservatism either.  When Bubba handed over the reins in 2001, there was a surplus of Social Security funds.  The large numbers of Baby Boomers retiring over the next few decades were on track to having their Social Security provided for.  Bush’s presidency saw not only that Social Security surplus gobbled up, but the reversal of a decline in the national debt that had been started in the 1990’s.  The national debt now stands around $10.6 trillion, compared to around $5.6 trillion in 2000 according to a Wikipedia table.  

Numbers 2 and 3 I find to be impeachable, and I’m sure there are plenty of more issues and decisions made by Bush administration officials, including the former President himself, which are impeachable offenses.  Now that he not longer holds a position of power, I whole-heartedly recommend the establishment of a Congressional panel to look into the actions made by the Bush administration from 2001-2009 and determine the legality of those questionable offenses.  Anyone who is involved in a questionable offense(s) should be brought to justice so that future leaders (including Obama) will know that Americans will not stand for presidential administrations conducting in an illegal and at the very least an immoral manner.  (Did Republicans cut Bill Clinton any slack for lying under oath about an affair that was of no national interest to begin with?)

Here’s a link to a recent post on Daily Kos regarding why President Bush and his cronies shouldn’t be allowed to get off the hook this easily.  Now is the time to bring about criminal prosecutions… for the sake of the country. 

With this post, pending any criminal investigations by Congress against any Bush administration officials, including the former President himself, I hereby close a chapter in my blog of the angry-liberal rhetoric against George Dubya Bush.  Thank God.

Yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted by a court in Willacy County, Texas, right next to the U.S.-Mexico border.  He was indicted on investing in Vanguard Corp which manages investments for prison companies that run detention centers.  These detention centers are also accused of abusing prisoners, an investigation of which was halted by then Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who is also being charged.

In a statement from one of his spokeswomen typical of the overreaching powers that VP Cheney has gained during the Bush presidency, it was said of his indictment “the Vice President has not received an indictment.”

And so begins the Bush Trials.  If these indictments hold and Cheney and Gonzalez are put on trial, then the door will have opened for other similar trials against other Bush administration officials, including the President.  I’ve been against putting the President on trial before the end of his term for at least the last two years, mainly because the last thing America needs is to have its Executive Branch on trial when it has such a short time left in office.  It would have taken two years before Bush would have even needed to show up in court to face trial.  Now though, he’s out of office, and I do believe America would be doing a disservice to not at least investigate his Administration for any acts of wrongdoing. 

Yesterday it was made public on Politico.com that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir would expose a little bit more than just his own mistakes while serving Bush from 2003-2006.  As several pundits in the mainstream media have noted, the revelations in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington, are not new.  My favorite excerpts (from the book and the Politico article) are:

• “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
• ‘McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.’
• ‘Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.’

In the mean time, current Press Secretary Dana Perino released a written statement today that, among other things, said that “The book, as reported by the press, has been described to the President. I do not expect a comment from him on it - he has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers.”

Today, President Bush will attend two private fundraisers for Sen. John McCain and was at the U.S. Air Force Academy to give the commencement speech for the graduation ceremony.  I’ll let the reader to draw their own conclusions from that.

Here we observe the President chest bumping an Air Force Academy grad.  A busy schedule indeed…

The book hit’s shelves next week.