directly. It's a "safe" way to take Bush/Cheney down (or, in any case, to curtail them), without seriously threatening our monstrous "military-industrial complex," or the phony "war on drugs" and its prison-industrial complex and its filthy operations in Latin America*. The real scandal in the DoJ may be the "war on drugs," with the political scandal (the firings) being only a side scandal (or a connecting scandal). But the "war on drugs" has--at least in the past--been a bipartisan sacred cow (milk cow, boondoggle). That Rove and Gonzales would be firing US attorneys for political reasons, pressuring US attorneys to prosecute on a political basis, and planting Bushite political operatives in US attorney positions to (among other things) cover up vast Bushite wrongdoing, is not all that surprising--and, although it involves crimes like obstruction of justice and lying to Congress, and although it rapes and ruins any ethical tradition in the DoJ, these offenses pale into significance next to Bushite war crimes, Bushite theft, and the Bush Junta as a criminal syndicate and terrorist organization itself--involved in illicit weapons profiteering, drug trafficking, torture for profit, death squads and assassinations. And this is the problem for politicians who support the "military-industrial complex" and the US "war on drugs": The Bush Junta doesn't play by the rules. It is giving war and the police state a bad name. And all the filthy global corporate predators who are connected to these US federal boondoggles--and to whom many of our politicians are in thrall--don't want THEIR activities exposed or their power threatened. How to curtail Bush/Cheney--who are making them all look so bad--and RETAIN global corporate predator control of our government?
Nixon slaughtered about a million people in Southeast Asia. That crime pales into insignificance next to the Watergate and Ellsberg burglaries. The burglaries are related to that slaughter, of course. (They were apparently intending to plant bugs in the DNC headquarters during the antiwar presidential campaign of Democratic candidate George McGovern; and they were trying to find dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Vietnam War whistleblower.) Nixon was impeached and forced to resign because he was involved in providing hush money to the burglars (caught on tape in the Oval Office), not because he was napalming and bombing and shooting a million people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. That was a highly lucrative activity for the war profiteers, and was not permitted to come under serious scrutiny. Too bad. We might have stopped all this--the manufacture of unnecessary war--back then.
In that sense, you could regard Watergate as a whitewash. It preserved and protected the war machine--so that it could make a comeback under Bush/Cheney. And, considering the range and horror of the Bush Junta's crimes, you could regard this US Attorneys scandal in a similar way. As a distraction.
But history doesn't repeat itself, not really. It is a more like a gyre (W.B. Yeats' metaphor) with repeating themes, giving us repeated opportunities to solve certain problems in the human spirit. What would Yeats--an Irish rebel--think of the startling peace accord we saw the other day, between the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland? The end of a 500 year war. The human race, on the whole, is on an upward progressive trend. And, if we don't destroy our planet--which I think may depend on restoration of democracy in the US--we are headed toward a better world, as to human progressive values (equality, social justice, higher consciousness). Our biggest problem is our very success as a species--too many people for earth's limited resources, given the global corporate predator organization of the exploitation of resources for the profit of the few. This problem--the biggest crisis that the human race has ever encountered--may override and completely smother both the many scandals of the Bushites AND the efforts of the corporate rulers to limit the damage. The biggest scandal of all may be what the Bush Junta and its corporate ruler puppetmasters have NOT DONE to prevent the loss of our planet.
THIS scandal--the scandal of profiteering in a time of maximum peril to all life on earth--only barely grazed our consciousness, back during the Watergate era. Some were concerned about the environment. Virtually no one knew just how bad things already were. So, where do we stand on history's great gyre? How to place this US attorney firings scandal--and all the other even worse, and, indeed, mind-boggling, scandals of the Bush Junta--in context NOW? Watergate is an interesting precedent. We can learn a lot from it. But this is a different time. We have a much bigger problem to address than the Bush Junta tyranny, although it may be that destroying the Bush Junta with exposes and punishments is a necessary part of restoring democracy here. One lesson of Watergate is that--gratifying as it was to see that Vietnam war criminal Nixon go down in flames--the impacts of that impeachment were only a temporary setback to the war profiteers. The war machine survived it. As Yurbud so rightfully points out, the powers-that-be (war profiteers and associated global corporate predators) are trying the same tactic now--letting a little steam out of the system, letting a few scandals emerge, throwing some meat to the dogs. But will they succeed with lesser-scandal-as-distraction this time? Are we not at a very different place on gyre than we were 40 years ago? Are we not now looking at one of those repeating opportunities to solve problems of the human spirit? Is it not time for the American people--with its magnificent history of rebellion and social justice--to finally throw the war machine off our backs, and begin to address this overarching problem of our impacts on the natural world, with all the creativity and passion of which we are capable?
Maybe what we need is a Peoples' Congress, which exposes and indicts the Bushites (and any Democratic colluders), and sentences them all to lifetimes of cleaning bedpans in veterans' hospitals, and then organizes the democratic revolution that will be needed to enforce those indictments--to take over the actual Congress, and the White House--but with the goal of disposing of the past, and moving on with the positive goal of saving the planet. War is insane. Killing people to control the last of a resource is the old way and it is unacceptable. We need firmly to reject it--forevermore. Violent revolution is also insane. Killing people to create justice is the old way, and it, too, is unacceptable. But one thing we can retrieve from the past, for our use now, is the notion of our sovereignty as a people, and our right to say what's what and who shall rule, and that includes our right to dismantle all these bad actor corporations, and start over.
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*(I think we've got another huge Bush/Cheney scandal boiling beneath the surface in Colombia. Their pal President Uribe and his chief of intelligence and also the head of Colombia's military--which the Bush Junta has larded with billions of our tax dollars--are involved in a major scandal in Colombia involving rightwing paramilitary drug trafficking, mass murder of leftists, union organizers and peasants, and a plot ot assassinate Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Disclosures so far--amazing though they are (amazing because they are BEING disclosed)--may be only the tip of the iceberg of a fascist/Bushite plan to destabilize South America and reconquer it for the Global Corporate Predators who are running the Bush Junta. Stay tuned on this one. Considering the huge democratic revolution that is occurring in Latin America, this scandal may be the means both of gaining allies in our struggle against US militarism and corporate rule, and ridding ourselves of the present evildoers in a more comprehensive way, than with the US attorney scandal. And the two scandals may in fact be related. One of the US attorneys involved in purging other US attorneys--Johnny Sutton, in San Antonio--has been involved a coverup of DEA-sanctioned murders in Juarez, another US "war on drugs" scandal/horror. For the Sutton connection, see:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2007/3/26/205547/411.)
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