Mum's the Word

Yesterday, I watched the farce that was supposed to be a special hearing on the Bush administration's domestic spying program. A number of senators put on a good show, using fairly strong language to suggest that the current wiretapping program puts the president above the law and must be explained and/or curtailed. Despite their tough talk, however, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales got away with categorizing every single question about the program as an "operational issue" which he then refused to answer for "national security" reasons. The end result: we don't know a single thing about the program that we didn't know before.

When Senator Arlen Specter ended the hearings by saying he "hoped" that "at some point" his questions would be answered, it was as if to say: You know my concerns, now let's hope this all blows over. It was just one more anticlimactic episode in our nation's further decline into apathy and denial. The only thing more disappointing was hearing the same senator say it "wasn't necessary" for Alberto Gonzales to be sworn in before testifying. He might just as well have said that the entire process was an exercise in futility.

Despite the failure of the hearings to turn up anything to appease anyone who has thus far shown any concern, there was no call for a special prosecutor to look into the program. Nor did anybody insist that the program be terminated or sent to FISA for review, even though FISA was created to oversee just such a situation.

Lip service. That's what we got. That's all we got. And there is a good reason for that: the Democrats are helpless; they can't do anything. Republicans have all the cards: they have more representation in Congress, for one thing. They also have dirt on EVERYBODY--and they're not afraid to use it.

We are witnessing a conspiracy to manipulate at the highest governmental level. The combination of numerous well-orchestrated, illegal events (well documented too, for anybody who cares to look into it) that allowed George W. Bush to be proclaimed president in 2000 and 2004, combined with the re-districting scandal DeLay is at the center of (and which contributed to the current Republican power imbalance) mixed with the frighteningly effective propaganda machine Karl Rove has built; and then molded by an increasingly greedy, hypocritical, elitist mentality that is proud of their willingness to smear, lie and cheat to win, and you have a formidable enemy. This is why the Democrats can't do anything: they are overwhelmed on every front.

Osama bin Laden is not the man Americans should fear now--George W. Bush is the epicenter of the current evil spreading throughout the so-called civilized world. What's more, he has a carefully crafted 'out' for every possible contingency, one he will use each time he comes close to being held accountable: I didn't know.

It's a brilliant plan: Bush takes the word of his advisors, period. It's that whole loyalty thing he is so proud of. But it is not about loyalty; it's about culpability and how to avoid it. As long as Bush completely isolates himself and refuses to take in any information he doesn't want to be held accountable for, he can always say, "I trusted the people around me to tell me the truth. I was misled." It's a perfect set up.

That's why he's so cocky--he thinks he's untouchable. It's also why he's ignorant of so many things everybody else knows--like what was going on in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Bush doesn't read the paper or watch anything but sanctioned TV because he HAS to remain ignorant for the master plan to work. It's a "plausible deniability" failsafe and it must be maintained at all costs. He can't act quickly in the face of disaster because he needs three to four days to have the face of disaster brought to him--via videotape or a White House briefing. But first, somebody has to figure out what to brief him on and how to do it. Then the plan has to be implemented and some staged event acted out. By the time Bush is ready to say or do anything, it's several days later and several days too late to be effective.

The problem, as I see it, is that President Bush has a responsibility for being aware of reality by virtue of having been sworn in as the president. It doesn't matter who put him there; he took an oath and now being aware is part of his job. He's supposed to seek information and think about it and understand what's going on around him and then act on behalf of the people: that's us. So this master plan that requires that he NOT be fully aware, is actually a flawed plan--in spite of how well it appears to have worked for a small, select group of conservatives.

While Bush has delegated his responsibility for information gathering and assessing to others, (the center of this group being the Rumsfeld/Cheney cabal), he has also given them all the real decision-making power--power that should belong, at least partly, to the president. Yet, as it stands, should the cabal want Bush to ignore certain information, they just keep that information from him. Bush may be protected from culpability by the plausible deniability scenario, but he is also unable to harness the full power of the presidency. That is resting squarely in the hands of Rumsfeld and Cheney and whomever they are working with.

Based on everything we know about the problems we've had in Iraq (lack of proper equipment for the troops, failure to plan for the post-war occupation or even consider the potential civilian casualties that might result from a war, inability/unwillingness to protect Iraqi museums and ammo dumps from looters, etc.) it does appear as if these men do exactly what they want to do, regardless of the advice they receive from experts who know infinitely more than either of them. Here's the kicker though, and it is the key to how they are still getting away with it: they do what they want, even when they know it's not what the American people want; but at the same time, they say what we want to hear.

There is only one way to fight this kind of blatant deception: we must hold Bush accountable for the actions of his administration, not their rhetoric.

We have to stop basing what we do on what we hear and start fighting with the facts. We have to sidestep their trap of pulling us into semantic discussions and endless interpretive dialogues that end with the "agree to disagree" scenario. This is not about finding the best way to split up a pie--this is about civil rights violations, dead Americans/Iraqis, failure to provide the financial resources necessary to ensure a competitive educational system to our children and an unwillingness to finance nationwide healthcare, despite the obvious failure of private industry to meet the needs of the citizenry. It's about destroying our planet by short-sighted corporate deals that deplete topsoil and destroy the ozone. It's about ignoring information so a small select group of conservatives can control resources and hoard wealth while the rest of us pay for it--with our lives and our livelihoods.

Our soldiers are dying in Iraq so the administration can claim credit for democratizing the Middle East and make money off the rebuilding of a country we destroyed--meanwhile, all they've really done is remove one brutal dictator and replace him with a group of corrupt, incompetent men who have no support from large numbers of Iraqis and are distrusted for their relationship with the United States government. Iraq is in the middle of a civil war now and they still don't have the clean water, employment opportunities and security they need. The entire country has become a dangerous place and the very prison we used to call Saddam's Torture Chamber has become the site of our own Abu Ghraib torture scandal . . . and more Americans and Iraqis die, daily.

As for paying with our livelihoods, economists have attributed the massive lay-offs by companies like Ford and General Motors to the nationwide failure to control healthcare costs. Companies can't afford to pay pensions and insurance benefits anymore. Other civilized nations take their healthcare programs seriously and don't ask corporations to bear the expense. Not here. Here we don't want "big government" so we cut the only really necessary programs--programs low-income families can't pay for in the private market--like education and healthcare, and we give money to rich folks who are already able to pay privately for the best schools, doctors, etc. I guess the theory is that in a matter of time all the poor folks will just die off and the only ones who will be left will be elitists, like them. There's just one problem: we're all part of the same big thing.

Everything is connected. Everything affects something or someone else. People who don't understand this have no business running a government.

MoveOn.org is sponsoring a new TV ad. It equates Bush with Nixon, who was quoted as saying "If the president does it, it's not illegal." That appears to be the Bush administration's rationale for failing to follow the law regarding their wiretapping program. It also appears to be their excuse for holding detainees without cause and for allowing prisoners to be whisked away to Uzbekistan where they will, under torture, confess to anything we want them to confess to. (That's how we get our "evidence." In fact, that's how we all knew Saddam Hussein had WMDs.) Bush can't see how ANYTHING he does is wrong, illegal or immoral because he's the president.

(By the way, why does nobody ask where the wiretapping enthusiasts are getting the information that says the people they're spying on have Al Qaeda connections? They weren't exactly shooting for accuracy when they created the WMDs scare--why should we think they are any more capable of interpreting data now?)

In fact, according to numerous reports, the administration is spying on peace activists and environmental groups and the like. Perhaps that is why they didn't go to FISA--as was pointed out during the hearings--perhaps they knew that if they did, FISA would NOT have approved their requests. That possibility, alone, should make each one of us skeptical of the administration's continuous insistence that we simply take their word for the legality of the program.

Besides, how does that work when mum's the word? What, exactly, are we supposed to do with that?