President Bush again today said he would continue to be in charge of the Iraq war, would “stay the course” until Petraeus’ report in September, threatened a veto on any legislation shutting down the war, and all in a context of eroding Republican support in the U.S. Senate.

And, to give the neocon devils their due, some parts of their present (ever shifting) position has some validity and is reasonable, even if I reach a different conclusion.  Part of the problem, and what the rightwingnut/FauxNews/neocon/partisan/deadenders 27 percent don’t seem to get is that we no longer trust anything whatsoever that the Bush administration and especially the president himself EVEN WHEN THEY TELL US THE TRUTH.  Yeah, I know, I’m shouting.  I’ll take a breath.

Here’s the deal as far as I’m concerned:  let’s say that it’s exactly the right judgment to wait until September and make a judgment at that time about the “way forward.”  We don’t trust Bush to deal with the war issue in an honest and straightforward way when it’s time for new judgments.  Meanwhile, we have to start planning to get troops out now while we still have an operating fighting force.  We simply have not seen enough competency at the highest levels to believe that they are up to the job, no matter what the job may be.  GW and Co. have yet to be right and competent about anything whatsoever from beginning, when they lied about WMDs, to Fallujah, the civil war, the connection to al Qaeda, the number of troops that would be needed, reconstruction efforts, you name it.

We’ve earned the right to make an independent judgment because we’ve given him everything he asked for over a span of time that was enough for FDR to defeat fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and destroy Imperial Japan.  We can’t capture Osama bin Lauden, the most wanted man in the world, because he’s hiding IN OUR MAJOR PARTNER IN THE WAR ON TERROR?!!!??!!!

They had a chance to do that in the past year and Rumsfeld panicked and backed out because he was afraid of what the tyrant and military dictator Musharref might think?

Chickenhawk cocksuckers.  But they blistered Clinton’s ass for just raining a couple of Cruise missles on his believed hiding place.  It’s all Bill’s fault, you know.

they really believed Grover Norquist, antitax neocon nutjob, when he said he didn’t want to starve the government to death, he wanted to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.  They know how to tear things down and criticize and bitch, but they simply do not know how to govern. 

They couldn’t get the Congress to repeal the Food and Drug Act, but they could put in political appointee leadership that had the purpose of keeping the FDA from doing what it is supposed to do.  They couldn’t get the Congress to rig elections, but they appointed folks to the Justice Department whose job was to rig elections.  Same with Civil Rights and Fair Housing. The Environmental Protection Agency became a shill for factories and polluters, miners, timber cutters and oil drillers. 

Their very purpose was to make government disfunctional on every conceivable level. 

We have not yet begun to deal with what it will take to repair the damage wreaked by 8 years of Republican rule under the Bush/Cheney Imperial Presidency.

They have packed the courts with lifetime appointments of men who are determined to change the law to fit a particular religious view as God’s law that “trumps” all other legislation by man including the Constitution.  God help us.  Save us from these self-appointed “righteous” men who pretend to dispense Justice.

We must rebuild our precious Bill of Rights.  I’m not sure that anything short of a new Constitutional Convention can repair the damage that’s been done to our common and ordinary rights and human dignity.  We must act immediately to repudiate torture.  It’s barbaric, unnecessary, brutal, ineffective, a horror to those of us who retain some semblance of civilized thought.

We must rebuild a scientific community for the FDA, NASA, NOAA and dozens of other technical agencies.

We will have to rebuild the Department of Justice from scratch.  It’s mortally wounded as it stands today.

We will have to rebuild our military while continuing some combat-type struggle on a worldwide basis, on some level, against terrorism and other threats.  True defense should be our first priority, which will call for many more domestic safety measures to upgrade port, emergency, airline, immigration, passports.  We should not preclude some offense outside our borders when we can be effective and efficient.  Isolation will not be an answer.

It will take my grandkids’ lifetimes to deal with the financial mess we’ve got on our hands.  Budget deficit, trade deficit, Social Security … intractable issues at best.

Those who don’t want socialized medicine should remember that we had a good private health care system when employers routinely provided coverage to workers, but the reason we have a health care crisis is that they stopped doing that.  Our national standard of living, the day to day struggle for the legal tender that most Americans face, has been slashed by corporations who give their CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars annually and a pat on the back for accomplishing our impoverishment.

The obscene concentration of wealth in the face of rising poverty, bankruptcy, foreclosures makes me want to grab a red flag and go to the barricades except that it isn’t Paris in 1968 and I’m no longer quite that Romantic and idealistic.

We will never be rid of hypocricy, but we must put an end to the bribery and corruption in government.  I suppose there will always be SOME corruption in politics, but there are too many billions of dollars at stake of OUR money to let campaign finance dollars get traded for government contracts.  Of course, Halliburton should be investigated, but we need to look into this mercenary army we’ve created in the Middle East.  Earmarks (‘Nuff said). 

We’ve got to rebuild the CIA and State Departments.

Homeland Security is a complete clusterfuck and it’s taken FEMA with it.  Katrina recovery is also a complete clusterfuck.

Then we come to the environment and dependence on foreign oil.  This is not an easy problem and there is widespread agreement that it’s time to get serious about working on it.  It will be difficult, regardless of any politics, it’s going to be hard.

I think it’s time to save some money by declaring victory on the war on drugs and getting out of Columbia.  Let’s treat it as a public health problem, decriminalize it and focus on something else.

The mind fairly boggles at the enormity of the agenda.

I think what you and I must do is ask the right questions.  We must ask presidential candidates whether they agree with the “unitary executive” theory advanced by Dick Cheney.  We must ask their thinking about judicial appointments.  We must ask what they see as America’s place in the world: hegemon?  good neighbor?  warrior?  Christian?  Will you keep pre-emptive war as a foreign policy cornerstone?  What is your first environmental priority?  What role do you see for your vice president?

We cannot risk another failed presidency like this one.  I only hope we survive this one with enough left to pick ourselves back up.

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