The Perpetually Puerile, Piously Perverted Presidency

The Swift Boating of America
By Greg Grandin

An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal.

(Left Foggo, then top to bottom, indicted DeLay (former RNC Chair) and Abramoff the man who bragged that the only way to get to Bush was through him.

This one is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and -- wait for it -- the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians a good time.

Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good reason -- they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's résumé.

A New Right Mecca

Dusty, of course, is not the only veteran of Reagan's Central American policy who has resurfaced to help fight George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The list includes John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter, John Bolton, Oliver North, Robert Kagan, and Michael Ledeen. They can also be found in the highest levels of the White House: Dick Cheney cut his political teeth in Congress in the 1980s plumping for Reagan's Nicaragua policy, thundering that any attempt to prohibit Contra aid was a legislative "abuse of power." And on the frontlines, James Steele, who led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with North to run weapons and supplies to the Contras, was sent to Iraq to help train a ruthless counterinsurgency force made up of ex-Baathist thugs. (Steele is batting two for two: As in El Salvador, such training has produced not security but widespread death-squad atrocities.)
Central America became a New Right mecca because it was the one place where conservatives could match words to deeds. Reagan swept into office promising to restore America's pride and purpose in the post-Vietnam world. ...
But in the wake of Vietnam, ...Congress now claimed the power to regulate presidential decisions related to military aid, arms sales, and the sending of troops abroad; it also demanded that the CIA inform up to eight committees of its activities. Banned were peacetime assassinations of foreign leaders, as were covert operations against American citizens at home.
...
It was twenty years ago this November that a story broke in the press revealing a secret sale, brokered by North, of thousands of high-tech missiles to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran at a greatly inflated price, with the profits laundered through a rogue's gallery of unsavory middlemen – Iranian expatriates, Israeli-arms dealers, right-wing mercenaries, anti-Communist client states like Saudi Arabia, Moonies, and drug runners -- to bypass a congressional prohibition on military aid to the Contras.
It was over Central America that New Right ideologues first began to junk multilateralism. When the International Court of Justice ordered that the United States pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations for mining the country's principle port and for conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington balked and withdrew from the Court's jurisdiction. It was a "watershed moment," according to legal scholar Eric Posner, in the U.S. relationship with the international community, one that Bush's Ambassador to the UN John Bolton has cited as evidence for why the U.S. should not support the new International Criminal Court.



In the field, Reagan's Central American wars provided a way to reactivate CIA and Pentagon counterinsurgency operatives, desk-bound since the U.S. was kicked out of Southeast Asia, coordinating their work with private mercenaries, conservative (often evangelical) financiers, and a rising Christian fundamentalist movement.








Scalia doing to reporters what he did to the country. What a deal - you can break the law, even be a traitor and if you are President - you just classify the information.
...
Like the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra started out as a small, back-page newspaper story only to explode into a major constitutional crisis. Yet unlike Watergate, which yielded a broad consensus regarding the dangers of unchecked executive power, Iran-Contra produced no closure. The Tower Commission, appointed by Reagan, focused on procedural issues related to presidential control over the NSA; Congress's investigation turned out to be a mess; and the Special Prosecutor's inquiry dragged on for years, stonewalled by the Department of Justice, with none other than John Bolton taking the lead in playing defense.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20911 (the entire story can be read here)

What gives one pause is the fact that these criminals simply recirculate through the system.
Convicted criminals are working within the Bush administration, operating exactly as they have previously. Like John Negroponte who was barely appointed head Intel in Iraq when the death squads showed up, his signature from South America where they refer to him as "Dr. Death."

When Bush declared war on terror, one CIA agent summed it up best:

"What are we going to do - declare war on ourselves?"

One would think America had declared war on itself. A budget surplus is squandered and the country is in a state of bankruptcy, while American jobs have been wiped out by businessmen going for the lowest common labor rate in the world and then offering less - such that people in third world countries cannot even live on what they pay.

Ignorant, rigid, right wing patriarchs attack women's reproductive rights and smear homosexuals while distracting from two pedophile rings associated with both administrations.
And it would be all so easy if this were new, but it is not. It has gone on for YEARS and will continue to go on unless Americans stand and decide what kind of decency they DO stand for.

Like hel-lo...what is brave about bombing the shit out of a country of 21 million people, half of whom are children? Worse, paid off reporters and news stations lauding "shock and awe" terrorize an entire population, modeling a bizarre psychopathic naricissim, devoid of empathy with a complete dehumanization of whomever they wish to exploit.

The Presidency is puerile and until it is corrected - the public is merely reflecting the image and trying to make it pretty. The world doesn't buy it. If America hasn't noticed it - we have - and we are tired of the same old thugs and dead enders - posing as decent, moral human beings - when they are the lowest common denominator. They are paranoid psychopaths, with a bottomless need for greed. These empty, empty "men" who can never have enough -
are left unaccountable before God, country and the world. If America is to save herself it is time to expose the entire ugly lot and bring them to justice.

Until then - thugs and dead enders are recirculating through the RNC and DNC to
RULE us and terrorize the world, while running a ridiculous war on terror from the moral ground of a Mugabe. Make them face their own heart of darkness, and quit projecting it onto people of color, women and homosexuals.

Because darlin, we are tired of being the whipping boy for people who cannot deal with their own shit.