Absolutely blistering read.....not much more after the edit, so read the whole thing! Summarizes a lot of the crap nicely for those who are still in love with Bushco....
http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=118116&format=htmlSaturday August 13, 2005
What's the Bush administration hiding? Everything
By Robyn Blummer
Tribune Media Services
President Bush has made it a point to bring as much opacity to his administration as possible. To Bush, the public has a right to know . . . very little. His White House is downright allergic to open government.
We saw it with the John Bolton nomination. Bush claimed he wanted his nominee as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to receive an up or down vote in the Senate, but not enough to turn over the State Department documents that would have brought light to some of Bolton’s controversial actions. Had that material been released, the Democrats blocking Bolton’s confirmation promised to let a vote go forward. But Bush would rather snub the Senate and appoint Bolton during a congressional recess than let the public see the truth of Bolton’s record.
No matter where you look, secrecy is the impulse: from the decree by former Attorney General John Ashcroft encouraging denials of records under the Freedom of Information Act by promising that any defensible refusal would be supported by his office; to the president’s executive order overriding parts of the Presidential Records Act, so that records from past administrations can be indefinitely hidden at the behest of past or current presidents and vice presidents.
SNIP
Everything’s a secret except, of course, the identity of a covert CIA operative whose husband went off script.
Keeping the public in the dark allows the advance of a political agenda without messy facts interfering with the administration’s manipulated ones. When Richard Foster, a top government Medicare cost analyst, determined that adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would cost $551 billion over 10 years and not the $395 billion figure supplied to Congress, he was threatened with firing if he revealed the discrepancy. When, last month, an Environmental Protection Agency report on our poor national efforts at fuel economy would have brought inopportune news for the administration just before a vote on the energy bill in Congress, the report was simply pulled until after the vote.
This is all part of a pattern that is illustrative of Bush’s view of the office he holds. Bush’s arrogant swagger is more than a cowboy affectation; it is a state of mind. To Bush, being president is not an act of public service in which you are accountable to the press and the people and are limited by the power of two other governmental branches. It is the anointing of a regent for a four- or eight-year stint. That includes the ability to imprison people at will, to offer untruths without compunction as justifications for war and to spend the entire treasury (and more) without worrying about the consequences. In that now-famous press-conference question, Bush was unable to identify a single mistake he made as president, because monarchs don’t err.
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