Little Hans and the Bubble Boy

Sometimes you just can't buy a break. This week could have ended triumpantly for the Shrub with a 70 percent voter turnout - one Americans can look at with a modicum of shame, we're too busy, it seems, to tend our own democracy - and relatively little violence, at least until today. The economy is up, at least if you're a stockholder and his poll numbers even rose a bit from abyssmal to merely terrible. Unfortunately, the cracks in the dykes just won't hold long enough for the Shrub to crow about his limited successes.

First the Senate rebelled against the USA Patriot act. Rammed through Congress by the Republican leadership in the days following 9/11, it basically trashed the fourth amendment and made spying on U. S. citizens business as usual. Thirty thousand times the FBI has used so-called National Security Letters to spy on you and me. The Senate this week had enough, Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the original Patriot Act became the voice of the Senate and led a successful filibuster to keep the law from being extended. Adding to the Senators' rebellion, the very day of the vote the New York Times reported that the Shrub had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on us, citizens of the country, in the hundreds over thirty times. This one was enough to get the Shrub angry: "You can't handle the truth," was his battle cry. Then he justifies it: We broke the law and spied on Americans to save Americans. What happened to that minor inconvenience called the fourth amendment?

That's two fingers in the dyke. Through mouthpiece Condi, the Shrub, two fingers pinned, is now trying to say that disclosing the information damages efforts to stop terrorists. That's Bush tactic number two, by the way, shoot the messenger when the message is uncomfortable. Of course, somewhere some Administration shyster has written a multi-page legal brief about how this is somehow legal, despite the fact that Nixon resigned over it even before the law against wiretapping without a court order was law. Bush was caught this time with his legal briefs down and should be prosecuted.

Can you imagine Frist and Co actually doing the right thing and calling impeachment hearings?

The Congress also rebelled against the Shrub's destruction of our image abroad by outlawing the Administration's practices of torturing prisoners and rendering them to countries that approve of torture. The jury's still out on that one: Republicans keep trying to attach poison pills to the bill to kill it before the Administration actually has to account for its deeds. One of the pills is that the prisoners in Guantanamo have no right to U. S. courts and any evidence obtained under "coercion" (read torture) may be used in the kangaroo courts we're offering them. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling provision may find its way into the defense appropriations bill, although what that has to do with national defense is beyond me.

And just as he was about to start crowing over his victory in Iraq, nineteen more are dead there and Cheney sticks his foot in his mouth by calling the Iraqi elections ours. This Freudian slip really tells us how the administration feels about Iraq and the Iraqis will notice the slip. Now we have two hands and a toe in the dyke.

I guess he could crow about the 57 percent of Americans who think we shouldn't immediately withdraw from Iraq. That represents the common sense of Americans, not the success of the Shrub's politics. A majority of us think the war was a mistake as well but we know we can't just run off and leave the Iraqis in the mess we created.