Lying and incompetence are good

Once again it is proven that the way to success and promotion in the Bush/Cheney Administration is by lying and incompetence. Condoleeza Rice confirmed as Secretary of State by a Senate vote of 85 to 13. I don’t know who the 13 were but they should certainly be commended for their honesty and good sense. The truly disturbing thing about this is that there is no doubt whatsoever that she did, in fact, blatantly lie about going to “war” with Iraq. This is not a matter of interpretation. She lied repeatedly and everyone knows she lied. But our Senators are apparently not concerned with lies anymore, as long as they don’t concern some Democrat’s sexual behavior. How anyone, let alone a Democratic Senator, could listen to Byrd, Kennedy, and Boxer, and then still vote to confirm Rice absolutely boggles my mind. They just don’t care. I guess they all worry about being on the Bush/Cheney hit list. In other words, they are scared silly and more concerned about their jobs and perquisites than fulfilling their duties to the electorate. They are just like Republicans who have made it quite clear that their loyalty to party far exceeds their concern for the United States and its citizens. We need to get rid of the whole sorry lot of them with perhaps a very few exceptions, and start over from scratch. This will require an enormous amount of grass roots pressure and protest because our elitist millionaire Congressmen and Senators will not go gracefully. It is, indeed, déjà vu all over again, right back to the 1920’s and 30’s when the robber barons tried to maintain the slave wage system for their own greedy benefits. Corporate power and greed has to be muzzled, it’s the only way out of this sorry mess we have allowed to grow like a neglected cancer. Time is running out for the United States, indeed, for the world. Nothing much can be accomplished so long as the U.S. believes they uniquely know what is right and proper for everyone. Nothing positively can happen in the Middle East until the United States stops supporting and defending Israel’s defiance of every U.N. resolution and insists on stealing more and more Palestinian land. Nothing decent can happen until the Bush/Cheney Administration is gone for good. That means Jeb as well as George Dubya.

The real test of America’s character will come next week when the confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales occur. If he is confirmed it will certainly send a message to the rest of the world that the United States is repudiating not only the Geneva Convention but even the most basic of democratic and human values. It doesn’t even matter how good a lawyer Gonzales is, or how he has risen from his Hispanic background, or even if he does not in fact believe in torture or his Kingship. The world knows that he did everything he could to allow Bush/Cheney and their henchmen to abandon all principles of national and international law, to incarcerate and torture at will, to set themselves above all law and decency, and to violate even the semblance of civil rights. This is not the message we should be sending to the rest of the world, especially at this moment in time when we have already alienated virtually all of the known world. Call and write your Senators that this abominable appointment should not be confirmed.