Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Thursday, February 09, 2006

 
A couple of quickies:

1.) Doesn't the "shoe bombers flying planes into tallest building in Los Angeles" sound just a bit like the compendium of Terrorism's Greatest Hits, compiled and remastered for this year's elections? One of things I remember from the very beginning of the "War on Terror" is a statement by George W. that there'd be lots of things we wouldn't, that we couldn't, know about the war. Things like covert ops to kill terrorists, propoganda campaigns (he didn't mention that specifically, but it's there by inference), etc. That's the way this administration operates -- the whole thing is a black ops campaign against... Terrorism? The Democrats? Husbands pulling feeding tubes from their permanently brain-dead wives? Several theories (and these are theories in the "Big Bang" sense, not in the "intelligen design" sense) strive to provide answers to why this administration is so obsessed with "enemies" -- it's a political game, because fear is the only political tool the administration has left. Or perhaps it's because fear is the only game they play, being children of Reagan and the Cold War. I tend, however, to believe that the time for the Great Reckoning is here. The Administration broke international law by flaunting the U.N. and invading Iraq even though the U.N. resolution (and the U.S. bill that supposedly authorized the war) explicity stated that it was up to the Security Council to decide when such an invasion should occur. That's a big legal debt that hasn't been paid yet. Abu-Ghraib has never made it all the way up to the superiors in the Bush administration who authorized torture, it's about time for that debt to come in. The many domestic political disasters, from No Child Left Behind to the Medicare reforms to various illegal activities by the administration and Republican members of congress -- that's another bill that's past due. I do think fear is what motivates this Administration, but I think it's the fear of all the bad karma that's going to be returned upon their heads, whether that be losing a number of Republican seats to Democrats in November or getting sentenced to do hard time in jail or getting impeached for violating federal law.

2.) Considering the history of this Administration, and examining the way they've worked in the past, I think that all of the "big stuff" that happens will, as it has in the past, happen outside the normal political channels. We've heard two stories like this in the last 24 hours -- President Bush has oh-so-quietly slipped his entire Social Security plan into the latest budget and Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert recently hijacked a defense appropriation bill, changing its language _after_ the vote to include legal protections for pharmaceutical companies. If we are to have a draft, the laws authorizing it will come as a midnight ammendment to some random appropriations bill, and probably targeting only a certain subgroup of people so as not to look suspicious. Or it will come in some arcane rule change. Either way, that's how it'll happen. There's no public support for a draft? Fine, the administration will just bypass Congress and do it some other way. I think this extends to many other areas of concern, including possible military action against Iran. We strove for a long time before the official start of the Iraq war to pursue it -- firing not just on surface-to-air missile batteries that fired on NATO warplanes, but taking out _any_ surface-to-air missile batteries. Sneaking across the border to "soften up" border security, etc. All of these happened before the war, and when they start happening in Iran we'll know there's trouble.

I do not look forward to the next few months, it's gonna be a rocky ride.

Andrew 3:02 PM : |

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