Protesting Bush: If Not Now, When? The Huffington Post
John Seery
The Presidency of George W. Bush will go down in history not just as a disappointment, not just as an embarrassment, not just as a failure, not just as a fiasco. His will be seen, above all else, as having been an administration fraught with corruption and criminality. Surely the eventual verdict, bathed in the coolly discerning light of hindsight, will be devastatingly damning.
But we already know this. We need not wait for the Owl of Minerva to take flight in order to pass considered judgment on this administration. Bush and Company's record of gross incompetence is, by now, long and well documented. Their lawlessness is also, by now, a matter of public record. Their official agents have admitted, defiantly so, to several glaring violations of congressional law and of the Constitution. Very little of this unconstitutional behavior can be fully mitigated, let alone excused, by national security concerns or by originally good intentions thereto. Bush's policies have, in fact, fueled and exacerbated terrorist outrage at the United States rather than effectively combating, countering, and diffusing it. Worst of all, this Commander-in-Chief sent our men and women of the armed services into combat under false pretenses. Whatever the original conglomeration of ulterior reasons for that fateful decision to go to war, it has blown up in our faces. The human cost has been high, and we need not wait for a veritable day of reckoning to insist that those responsible be held accountable.
Pick your outrage: the Iraq War; Abu Graib; Guantánamo; torture; extraordinary renditions; signing statements; Enron; Halliburton; NSA domestic spying; Abramoff-gate; Plame-gate; Katrina-gate; Gonzales-gate; anti-environmentalism; spiraling deficits; the Supreme Court; etcetera. Bush, almost single-handedly, has poisoned the image of America the world over: We are seen as imperialists and hypocrites, not as democratic do-gooders and law-abiding freedom-lovers. Do we have any formidable allies left in the world who believe unshakably in the moral leadership of the United States? We have sunk so low that we're losing a global propaganda war against an underground network of killers who want the entire world to conform to some stone-age fantasy of theirs. How did this happen? And, more important, why do we put up with it?<snip>
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