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mburbank · #1

He's my great white whale, Preech. The Kirk to my Kahn.

No, seriously, though, and I've said this before. If I read you right, you think the levels of corruption and danger to the nation posed by this administration is on a par with the general, permanent background level of corruption of most administrations.

I think W's administration (and the administration I hate, not just it's dimwitted, churlish carved wooden figurehead) has lept ahead into a whole new area of thuggish manipulation and has attempted things that would have made Nixon blush. Well, no, not exactly, since I think Nixon had many similar long term goals (and I think a large part of the flavor of this administration is directly related to things the old Nixon hands failed to achieve that time around). But Nixon would never have dreamed of going where W et al have gone.

That's my opinion, and it's why I hate them so much. Now no one has to agree, but I'm not really out in the wilderness on this one. A large group of renowned presidential scholars actively debate whether Bush is the worst President in American history.

The AG scandal is in some ways ridiculous. I think it shows a massive level of completely uneccassary lying, and there are so many, many areas more important to me. But I think this admin. has been so bad, it's like a massive underground oil field. Anywhere, anywhere you choose to drill, huge gouts of cronieism, cynicism, contempt for the rule of law and the constitution, grotesque levels of personal enrichment etc. etc. etc will come gushing up.

The AG scandal to me is emblematic of the administration. Expose it to the light of day and the very, very best you can say is it's a case of massive incompetence, the kind of shit anybody would fired from their jobs for on a daily basis. That's if you buy there was no corruption and no lieing at all.

Yes, politics is ugly, and there are always similarities between this admins bullshit and others. But there are similarities between breaking your finger in a car door and a fatal collision that forces your indentifaction via dental records.

Preechr · #2

I don't deny that Bush pushes limits and breaks rules. I agree that his administration has been full of bad actors that have been pulling our government into the dark abyss for 30 years or more. Every elected administration is subject to mostly the same set of shadowy cigarette-smoking-men with disturbing agendas. Government of any kind has always been and always will be extremely suseptible to corruption. The original American Republic was built with protections against that known threat, but We The People traded it for pork-filled Democracy.

I have been accused of being naive many, many, many, many times. I guess I come off as overly optimistic somehow, though I share a similar sort of brooding cynicism to your own. You would use the unique power of government guns to tax the hell out everybody in order to equalize all people on the belief that one man's money can be used to abuse other people. Government is the one entity in our society with which we entrust the power to kill in our name. I think we need to SEVERLY limit where, why, when and how we utilize it, and by we I also mean presidents. All of them.

You don't like one form of government abuse, yet you'd love to see government abused in other ways. It's all the same thing. The government you could abuse to equalize us is the government that can also be abused by Dick Cheney. In for a penny, in for a pound.