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Bush's Worst Appointment
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Read Jeffrey
St Clair's blazing expose of the new Interior Secretary nominee
, Dirk Kempthorne, and make up your own mind. Even in the dingy
history of Idaho's predators, Kempthorne stood proud as the dingiest
of them all. Now he's poised to seize his place in history. Will
he be the sleaziest Interior Secretary in history, sleazier than
Watt, fouler than Fall?
More on the great Israel Lobby debate! Norman Finkelstein blazes
a new path, asks "Are the Neo-Cons really committed Zionists?" "Bliss was it
in that dawn" Not in Michigan! Raymond Garcia describes
Dem governor's appalling plan to scapegoat youth and teachers. Plus the full print version of Virginia
Tilley's savage dissection on this website of the double-standard
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Now!
It makes sense that President Bush would
propose a "virtual fence" on the border with Mexico.
After all, he is pretty much
a virtual president, fronting for the real powers behind the
administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
For that matter, we have a
virtual Congress. It looks like a Congress, with representatives
from 435 districts and all 50 states, but it doesn"t do
anything. Well, let me correct myself. It passes virtual legislation,
which the virtual president then ignores by quietly issuing "signing
statements" along with his signature. That is to say, he
puts a virtual signature to the bills, and actually files them
away under "inactive."
Then there"s the virtual
opposition, the Democratic Party, which despite having 45 votes
in the Senate, and 203 votes in the House, cannot bring itself
to make an effective challenge to the Republican majority on
almost any issue.
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the House
minority leader, is claiming to be the Decider of her party in
the lower chamber, saying that it will be up to her whether impeachment
gets considered after the November election if the Democrats
manage to take control. But if she is such a leader, surely she"d
have been able to get her caucus to vote as a block and prevent
such horrors as the bankruptcy "reform" bill, the oxymoronic
"No Child Left Behind" act, the even more cynically
named USA PATRIOT Act, and other outrages.
In fact, Pelosi is a virtual leader of her party in the House,
unable to get the troops to stick together on anything of consequence.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is the corresponding virtual leader of
the Democrats in the Senate.
Between the two of them and
their predecessors, we have a real war of virtual liberation
in Iraq, which has led to the very real death of nearly 2500
American troops and 100,000+ Iraqis, and to a virtual government
in that country, while the real government resides in q $1.5-billion
complex in the heavily guarded Green Zone of Baghdad"a mammoth
building which is a virtual embassy"the largest "embassy"
in the world.
We also have a virtual "war"
on terror, which our virtual president and his all-too-real handlers
are using to frighten the public silly, so that they can turn
the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights into a virtual document,
suitable for framing and for torturing students in mandatory
civics classes, but useless in terms of defining a system of
tripartite government with checks and balances, or in protecting
individual liberty.
This effort to render the Constitution
and Congress vestigial is being assisted by the U.S. Supreme
Court, where real jurists who took their job of defending the
Constitution seriously have been replaced by recent appointees
like John Roberts and Sam Alito, and much earlier by Clarence
Thomas and Anthony Scalito, all of whom are virtual jurists"hard-right
Republican partisans posing as impartial justices.
As we head towards November,
we will have a virtual campaign for Congress, in which the virtual
opposition has systematically worked to eliminate real candidates
with real oppositional views in favor of cautious drones who
can be expected to play the role of virtual opposition during
the final two years of the Bush virtual presidency. If this
weeding out process works as planned, we will have a virtual
election in November, which will leave Republicans in power in
Congress until 2008, when we can have another virtual election
for a virtual president.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
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