Bush policies catastrophic for America

Will this abhorrent Bush administration never end?

Yes, sure. As Macbeth says: “Come what come may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” But the end cannot come soon enough.

The daily outrages continue. The latest “last straw” among hundreds of “last straws” was President Bush’s commutation of a 30-month jail sentence for Scooter Libby, a felon who perjured, obstructed justice and broke the law by outing a CIA agent.

This is a president who constantly proclaims his toughness on crime. He advocates federal legislation demanding stiff sentences, prosecution compliance with sentencing guidelines and life terms for repeated petty offenders.

Then there is the outrageous firing of nine U.S. attorneys because they refused to push Bush “justice” rather than the law. The Justice Department is nearly dysfunctional because of Bush politicization, undermining the very essence of democracy.

Frank Rich, fine Sunday essayist for the New York Times, wrote recently: “This president is never one to let facts get in the way of a political agenda.”

Example: a former surgeon general, Richard Carmona, was muzzled on stem cell research, teen pregnancy, smoking and global warming. Once again ideology topped science. Carmona was also ordered to mention Bush the Great three times on every page of his speeches. The nation’s doctor, supposedly nonpartisan, was reduced to flackhood.

Improper politicking at government agencies are a constant under Bush. Example: the White House directed the nation’s antidrug czar and his deputies to appear at 20 political events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress before the 2006 election--all at taxpayer expense.

Even the Smithsonian Institution, which you would think would be the last nonpartisan bastion in Washington, was forced to mute its exhibit on climate change. Graphs were altered to show that global warming “could go either way.”

Bush’s two Supreme Court choices led to reaction. Bush nominates a racist from Mississippi to a federal appeals court. He names a homophobe to be surgeon general. His attorney general, totally unqualified, lies to Congress. He calls the Geneva Convention “quaint.”

Bush names a subhack to the Federal Election Commission. He nominates a lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The General Services Administration investigators found that the Bush-appointed head of the agency violated the Hatch Act barring on-the-job politics.

Politics is everything to Bush. The good of the nation is nothing. He even rejects entreaties by Republicans to renew a program providing health coverage for poor kids. Bush says it would be a step toward “government-run health care for every American” at the expense of insurers.

Bush, not knowing of Santayana’s warning that those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it, refuses to see the grim parallel between the quagmire in Vietnam and the quagmire in Iraq. The Vietnam War tore the nation apart. The Iraq War is doing likewise.

Columnist Robert Scheer put it well: “what will go down in history as ‘Bush’s folly’ is that this idiot of a president invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorist attacks on 9/11 or threatening America with WMD.”

The administration scales back guideposts governing wetlands. Political appointees in the Interior Department favor industry and landowners over agency scientists. Bush obstructs worldwide efforts on global warming. Guantánamo remains a national and worldwide disgrace with its denial of human rights and America’s precious due process.

Bush abuses executive privilege, trashing all legal and constitutional restraints on his power. He condones torture in the notorious Baghdad prison, Abu Ghraib, and condones “black site” prisons for torture overseas. Bush authorized the CIA to mount a covert black operation to destablize the Iranian government. The administration threatens to attack Pakistan.

The Bush signing statements on acts of Congress make him a dictator, deciding what the law is. That is hardly what the Constitution Framers had in mind.

The administration is rife with fearmongering, corruption, cronyism, incompetence, abuses of power, stonewalling, Constitution-shredding, lawlessness, empire building, privatization of the military and attempts to privatize Social Security. The list is as depressing as it it long.

Bush has succeeded in getting most of the world to hate America, a nation that has lost the last shred of moral authority.

The administration is without honor, without integrity and without even a modicum of respect. No one with a conscience could work for it. The Bush legacy is clear: the worst president in history.

As essayist Mark Morford wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The country is rotting at its core.” Bush is responsible for that rot.