State of the Union: Stunned (Marie Cocco)

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:



Published on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)
State of Union: Stunned
by Marie Cocco

The state of our union is stunned disbelief.

The condition was best expressed by one of the anonymous citizens in the jury pool assembled for the trial in the Valerie Plame caper. This is the soap opera that revolves around the Bush administration's leak of CIA operative Plame's identity for the purpose of discrediting her husband, who in turn had publicly discredited key intelligence that supposedly pointed to a dangerous Iraqi nuclear program that in fact did not exist.

"I am completely without objectivity," one woman offered when asked if she could fairly hear testimony from Bush administration figures. "There is nothing they could say or do that would make me think anything positive."

Of course this jury pool (the woman was immediately dismissed) is in the District of Columbia, a Democratic redoubt where disdain for President Bush runs so deep that its voters cast 9 percent of their ballots for him in 2004. But things are hardly better in the heartland.

The public has grown antagonistic toward Bush. Disapproval approaches levels once reserved for Richard Nixon during Watergate, and for Harry Truman when he was in the depths of the Korean crisis. By a 2-1 margin, Americans say they want Democrats to have more control over the nation's direction than Bush. Were Newt Gingrich still the political peacock he was in the heady Republican era that began in 1994, he might be tempted to declare — as he did about Bill Clinton — that the president of the United States is irrelevant.

But he is not. The truest and most tragic measure of Bush's continued power is the arrival in Iraq of more American troops, sent into the teeth of a beastly civil war. By defying the considered, bipartisan advice of the Iraq Study Group; by ignoring the results of the November election, in which voters demanded a change of course; by challenging Congress to a constitutional showdown over war-making powers, Bush has all but declared the voters to be irrelevant.

It is much more shocking than Gingrich's preening, and so much more dangerous. .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0124-27.htm

[AndreaCG]

1. Marie Cocco hits it on the head again

She is one of my favorite columnists.