Ineptitude, Corruption, Deceit:
A November Date With the Woodshed

October 3, 2006

 On the heels of the bleak appraisals of a leaked National Intelligence Estimate and the release of Bob Woodward’s incendiary State of Denial, morally damning revelations about the uberlife of Florida Congressman Mark Foley has whipped up a perfect storm within the electoral prospects of the incumbent Republican party.  From a vacuous legislative agenda to a flawed occupation of Iraq to reverses in Afghanistan, this administration has been buffeted by bad news and held a stiff upper lip as the arbiters of American power.   Yet there is a coalescing umbrella of apparent hypocrisy and virtually willful ineptitude that would appear to unite the wide-ranging themes of the unsteadily standing American administration around the greyish pillars of ineptitude, corruption, and deceit.

Speaker Dennis Hastert was made aware of a pattern of suspicious behavior “several months ago.”  Yet pages were being warned against Foley’s “over-friendliness” by program supervisory staff since at least 2001, and it is becoming clear that there was a fair amount of in-house discussion among the pages themselves about Foley’s attentions, not to mention a formal complaint to Congressman Alexander by the parents of an unnamed page—a minor at the time—that had interned for his office.  The parents wanted Foley’s email attentions to their son stopped.

One page is quoted as having commented to another in 2004:   “If this ever gets out, it will destroy him.”

How prescient.  I wonder why Republican Leaders chose not to follow the trail of marshmallows themselves to head this off at the pass, years ago instead of allowing  themselves to be swarmed in foreseeable and avoidable calamity

Foley will enter the annals of his equivalent fifteen minutes of historical fame as a pedophile and candidate for the Hypocrisy Hall of Shame for his legislative leadership on issues regarding the online sexual predation upon children.  Foley’s life story has essentially ended, except for its progressive unraveling in clinical review.  Foley is so monstrous a character--so unworthy of sympathy--that he is not even the face of the political maelstrom sucking at his party.  Foley has become a disembodied archetype, and protestations that alcohol made him do it is an unprovoked and unmerited insult to alcoholics everywhere.

While the House leadership’s decision to condone the outrageous behavior of its fellow Republican in a secure seat is either cognitively reprehensible or else grossly negligent, one or the other.  Speaker Hastert and his leadership cadre are a clear and present target for voters’ displeasure in November.

However, there are human and political stumbles and reversals of far greater consequence than the whole sordid Foley affair.

Bob Woodward’s book brings to national attention a burning question that has been dogging America for years.  Why doesn’t Bush replace Rumsfeld?  The president’s intransigence on this makes it feel like the president is loath to release a self-made scapegoat, a notion which doesn’t particularly bolster confidence in the president’s own level of spinefulness.  Claims that the vice-president prefers to have the Secretary of Defense within the administration as a kind of human deflector screen are unflattering to the whole neoconservative movement, presumably now mostly in scattered hibernation.  The whole state of affairs begs the equally obvious question.  Why has the president not replaced the Vice-president?  There is a feeling on the pulse of the leadership that the president’s dependency on his obviously dysfunctional staff is predicated in some underlying subornation of him, yet the only thing they have on him are war crimes that they engineered.  Why else would the president continue to tolerate such profound incompetence and such a black mark on his own eventual legacy?  Instead, we have long gotten the feeling that Bush depends on Cheney for policy direction owing to his own intellectual limitations and the national imperative to fill the void.  You saw him try to bring Rove in closer, but that appointment blew up quickly.  You saw the push-backs in the departure of Card.  You saw the PR machine scramble itself up a much-needed voice and lucked out with Tony Snow.  Cheney has an unhealthy symbiosis with key individuals like Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, without whom he is exposed in the buff as little more than the fat aging petulant rich arrogant white man that he is.  Secretary of State Condi Rice rises as a vestigial suggestion of what could have impossibly otherwise been, but she is so thick in the morass of governmental nihilism in its prosecution of the war in Iraq as to be increasingly a comical figure in her heightened profile as Secretary of State.  A blossoming perception of incompetence within the entire administration has fully opened its petals with the publication of State of Denial, and the administration’s preoccupation with misleading and false rebuttals over fine points in light of this nation’s priority of two international wars in progress is an additional troubling domino, this one that of arrogance and pretension--wobbling on the national scene.  The most generous perception of the current American administration is one of gross incompetence and prideful negligence.  Less generous perceptions suggest the administration as unapologetic purveyors of fascist leverage toward the legitimization of unconstitutional spying, torture, abrogation of international treaties, revocation of constitutionally secure rights, and the authorization of arbitrary interpretation of federal law by the nation’s leader.

The issues raised by the executive’s incompetence to manage its confectioned war in Iraq and its national obligation in Afghanistan are beyond the scope of the average American voter to realistically understand, hence all the spin on both sides.  But good-ole American-style graft is something we can sink our teeth into from the rich traditions of our history.  While Republican congressman Ney of Ohio and Delay of Texas have fallen dutifully on their swords to allow prospective Republicans to bid for their seats, Conrad Burns has resisted calls and will hand the Democrats an unlikely Senate seat from a predictably conservative state.  While the maturity of this scandal inures many voters from outrage simply from sensatory deadening, the recently revealed extent of the contact of Abramoff with Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman are reminders to the voters of the intimacy of the black-winged lobbyist with the highest levels of Republican power.  

In the realm of deceit, Senator McCain’s cowardice seems particularly noteworthy in this season of the sellout.  While Hastert may be able to carry his betrayal of the public trust off as a momentary reflection of incompetence on his part, McCain knows about that which he speaks.  McCain is authoritative and now on the record as a bombastic caver.  McCain now says the president can draw the line as he sees fit, precisely what two days earlier he was fighting against.

McCain gave voice and hope to an overwhelming majority of the American electorate upon objecting to the institutionalization of torture within American policy.  Next, he sold out to anoint torture with his own personal good housekeeping seal of approval.  Skeptical independents surely withheld judgment when the senator went courting the religious right in his rapprochement with Jerry Falwell.  Selling out American principles and handing the president his mandate to torture--on the other hand--particularly after authoring a resolution passed overwhelmingly less than one year earlier against torture, should be a political death-knell for the former maverick, lately suck-up and lapdog to totalitarian voices maddeningly and unforgivably loose across this American landscape.  McCain’s political surrender would be forgivable were it not on such a morally impregnable beachhead and following such loud protestations on his part.  It would be forgettable were McCain not one of the proportionally infinitesimal fraction of living Americans actually tortured by agents of foreign states.  McCain’s accommodation for presumed political expedience can spell only trouble with independents like myself that have always valued his independence, courage, and fortitude.  By buckling, McCain surrendered American values that I believe he once truly held as inviolable before bowing to the shekel.  At the same time that he caved to values endearing him to a vast multitude, he cannot have possibly allayed in the expedience of the moment conservative suspicions concerning his eleventh hour conversion and his perennial conservative unreliability.  McCain engineered a big stink for his own party and then did not hold out on principle for the very real American values girding him.  He caved for presumptive political expedience.  It was the death knell for his aspirations toward the presidency.

As advantageous as recent developments have been for the prospects of the Democrats this November, personal rectitude is hardly the province of either party.  Discounting scandals that preceded this sitting congress, many leading Democrats are hardly immune from the sirens' enticements of fringe benefits and the concomitant need to protect power at any and all cost.  In terms of Democrat ineptitude, think:  the entire Democratic party.  But if you are a stickler for names, then, the try on the leaders:  radical party line cross-dresser Harry Reid, liberal firebrand Nancy Pelosi, and rabidly bugg-eyed Howard Dean.  In terms of corruption think Bob Menendez and William Jefferson.  For deceit, Hillary Clinton reigns as the Grand Madame, with John Kerry merely a hopeful smear of deceit on her vainglorious coattail.

Incumbency and majority rule may be toxins to conventional political morality and ethics in government.  Just as the Democrats were swept from the House in 1994 and the Senate in 2002, so too does the Republican Party appear posed for an unpleasant November 7^th date with the woodshed.

There are some leaders of government who need to be urgently sidelined for ineptitude, corruption, and/or deceit and consequent governmental malfeasance.  While president George Bush and his staff tops this list hands down, the American electorate unfortunately has no direct electoral recourse to our highest elected official in this off-season election.  The American electorate must settle instead for the indirect minions that rubber-stamped the whole train wreck into America’s otherwise rosy prospects.  Following is a list of serving politician that have earned their pink slips from the electorate:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL.  The Speaker should resign immediately, if not for moral and ethical abrogation of responsibility, then for managerial incompetence.  Having arguably surpassed Kennedy’s elephantine girth, the Speaker might be most profitably placed to graze on the placid verdant pastures of enforced retirement where he might most productively spend his glory years.

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-OH.  Ibid.  This partisan hit man is looking mighty deer-like into a November 7 crosshair in the flood lamps.

Representative Thomas Reynolds, R-NY.  This congressman’s timidity in pressing a morally persuasive scandal in the making—the sexual exploitation of minors by the House’s lead-man on legislative activity on missing and exploited children—makes this congressman either complicit in condoning child abuse or spineless in the face of political machinations by an immoral leadership.  Either way, If the toll booth has bells, they will surely toll for him.

Representative John Shimkus, R-IL  This Congressman oversaw the congressional page program and knew first hand of the incandescence of Foley’s “over-friendliness” to young boys.  Congressman Shimkus is culpable in the same sense as Speaker Hastert, as he too was in a position of leadership and oversight.  This was his baby, and he knew and understood the nature of the warning signs on Foley that were then part of the incontrovertible record and apparently had been for years.  That he let this lie silently fester is a condemnation that no vote for or against any issue could ever exceed in gravity and consequence.  This congressman asks only that you hand him his head in November.

Representative Rodney Alexander, R-LA.  This was the congressman in whom the first acknowledged written complaint was registered, four years after the problem was first exposed and known by the congressional page program.  Alexander was arguably the fate-anointed steward of reform yet abrogated his intrinsic responsibility to instead condone perversity among his peers over a moral issue completely transcending party loyalty, political expediency, national identity, one that defied even universal human principles.  At best Alexander coddled a pedophile whether from personal convictions or from pressure from the leadership.  This congressman must be shown briskly to the door under armed escort.

Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ.  The sitting senator of New Jersey is an advocate of the kleptocratic wing of the Democratic party.  Credible allegations of strong-arm extortion and Cosa Nostra style conspiracy would hopefully spell death for this excrescent appointee of Jon Corzine.  Throw this bum out, even if he looks to be in the waning hours the tipping point of the senate.  The dude reeks.

Senator Conrad Burns, R-MO.  The senator from Montana is a cascading ember from the Abramoff forest fire gaining new breath in the revelations of Abramoff’s extensive access to the president’s chief advisor, Karl Rove, and Ken Mehlman, now director of the Republican Party.  Burn’s corruption is an uninspired, unimaginative one, and in his interpersonal gaffes in blaming firefighters for the fires and in his awkward and retreating defense of himself, it is clear that the senator is a bit challenged not only morally and ethically, but also intellectually and capacitationally.  The electorate should allow this incumbent senator an opportunity to spend more time with his family.

William Jefferson, D-LA.  This guy is simply an elective vortex for graft.  Instead of young boys, his inspiration is in briefcases filled with money.  This bum is on the electoral launch pad.  Obviously.

DeLay and Ney.  The good voters of the constituencies of these two Abramoff associates have a signal to send in November, and a a Republican nod in either district would be a reversal of national standards toward decency and balance in governance, though the voters ultimately know best.  The woodshed is in the backyard, and it is there that divergences from local values must be addressed by the electorate to allow this nation to address its quandary over the corruption of power and power's comparative and superlative absolutes.

Tossups.  Between personally unindicted candidates for close congressional elections in both the House and Senate, the local electorates have decisions to render that transcend local boundaries.  The American electorate knows its values and recognizes when its governmental leadership contravenes against them.  The acting administration has subverted the most basic tenets of Americanism in favor of a vague and unproven presumptive tool of a war of ideas that is not even recognized as an actual military war by a sizeable portion of the American public, and against which the United States under its present direction is clueless and adrift.  As a nation, we have surrendered expectations of privacy, gutted protections against search and seizure, unilaterally and without measured debate abrogated longstanding treaties, and embraced a hateful and widely excoriated stance against an entire civilization, one fifth in fact of the world’s population.  We have now also tipped a tenuous balance in Iraq and arguably destabilized societies throughout the Middle East for reasons that have yet to be clearly explained to the American people.

Conflagrations smolder all around, and the sitting president and his staff explain that it will all be for future administrations to resolve.

It’s time for a vast correction in course, and unless the American administration has somehow engineered a “Supreme Court-type” intervention for correcting the November damages, then this nation has an opportunity to begin a very difficult path back toward its rational position as leader of the free world. 

The first most important step lies in the hands of American voters’ on November 7^th.  Go to the polls.  Cast your vote.

Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica

October 3, 2006

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.

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