Ok, so I have been trying to write a mighty essay called something like….Portrait of a Criminal Administration. Something that truly spells out in the most shocking and impact full way possible just exactly how bad/criminal/rogue the Bush Administration was.
Should be pretty easy right?
But I just haven’t had the energy or concentration (going through a little relapse) to do the research and pull it together. Then it finally penetrated my thick head that this would be the perfect collaborative, epic piece….but I had just been asking for help in the wrong way. So…here is a different way!
Pick your favorite Bush crime and write about it. A couple of paragraphs or a full essay or even just a couple of sentences! Especially if you can tackle one of the lesser known crimes….other than the big three, Illegal Invasion of Iraq, Torture, and the Plame treason….but if you have something to say about those, let it out! Reworjing or just re-pub’ing something from your archives is perfectly acceptable, and much appreciated.
If you do want to contribute, just remember to put “Portrait of a Criminal Administration” in the tags. Then we can comb through and assemble something magnificent by editing all of them together or pub’ing them as a series. Either in timeline form, or a greatest hits kind of deal. An epic essay or a series we can put up to coincide/directly follow Holder’s confirmation. (Which looks like Monday, but who knows what those wily Repubs will pull next!)
What do y’all think?
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One of the biggest crimes that has yet to be investigated is what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina.
The Army Corps of Engineers is still lying about their role even after a court found them negligent. Bush and his cronies headed immediately to the cash register after the hurricane hit and gave big fat contracts to each other, the head of HUD at the time, Alphonso Jackson, did the same, giving his cronies big development contracts, and New Orleans ended up demolishing their housing projects because they couldn’t get federal aid otherwise.
The graft and corruption that took place after Katrina, the obscene profits made off the suffering of others has still to see the light of day. Lieberman decided not to investigate.
And to this day when folks think of Katrina they think more about “heckuva good job Brownie” and the fed’s incompetence than they do about the fact that fortunes were made by corruption.
The blogosphere exists because the United States press corps is no longer doing it’s job.
They spew out propaganda and lies as the day is long. To this day, Rove, Rice, Cheney and Bush are walking around free while the front pages are full of stories about Blagojevich and (still!!!) Spitzer.
People who have been brave enough to step in and try to do the job like Amy Goodman have been systematically harassed and intimidated until they, too, play the game.
No other war in the history of the United States has seen the death of so many journalists, both ours and our allies.
The Fighting 69th and the Italian government are STILL at odds over just what happened when an Italian intelligence agent was killed while rescuing one of their journalists. The US troops claim the car didn’t stop at a checkpoint, the Italians claim that there was no checkpoint or warning and the soldiers opened up on the car with machine guns which left it riddled with over 200 bullet holes.
Press information lockdowns around natural disasters began with hurricane Katrina and continued with several other incidents – the flooding in the midwest, wildfires of suspicious origin (Blackwater again, very likely) in SoCal, and hurricane Ike in Texas. There were also rumors of leaving prisoners to die in this last case.
We must take back our press corps. Our citizenry deserves accurate, impartial news reporting. As an IT professional who understands the need for communication from a military standpoint, it is well understood that there has to be a certain responsibility the press bears when reporting the news to ensure that classified information does not get out to the general public – but the balance and the self-policing of these entities upon each other no longer works.
The press have become a pack of terrified gimps under the control of the same sadistic, thuggish intelligence branch who have made torture a household word in America in this century. Bloggers work heart and soul from the keyboard to fill in the gaps, but heart and soul and limited funding only goes so far, and an unmarked grave in the forgotten land still waits for anyone who crosses the iron fist of the military/industrial complex.
Obama needs to grab the reins on his people and start doing THEIR dirty laundry, release the press corps from their collective fear and let them do their goddamn jobs. Starting now.
And if this does not happen, reporters need to start taking martial arts classes and packing heat. And that very well might include the bloggers.
If you are in Europe, and you go out for a walk alone in the evening to see the sights and look at things, there might be these guys from the US who think you’re an Enemy Combatant. Their information might not be too good, but no matter. They will grab you, beat you, take your clothes, inject you with tranquilizers, blindfold you, tape your arms and legs together, throw you on an airplane for hours, offload you someplace in another country you’ve never been to before (and probably don’t know where you are), throw you in a cell, torture you, interrogate you, hurt you, and hold you indefinitely without notice to your family, the Red Cross or anybody else. They will do this until they get tired of your company. If you are ever released, which means that you would have to survive being their captive, they’ll say that they didn’t really do that to you or that you deserved it or they don’t know who did it or that we cannot discuss it either in person or in Court because it’s a State Secret.
My Country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Tehre is so much, but, certainly, as mentioned above, Katrina, is a huge topic.
In the meantime, I wanted to call your attention to this, as I think it may interest you.
A N D, TA DAH! I don’t know if you, Edger, or anyone else has seen it, but I received this today.
Call for Special Prosecutor for Bush War Crimes
RACE 4 2012
Hiring unqualified people b/c they were right-wing Xtians; firing people who were prosecuting GOP criminals (yes, I’m thinking of Carol Lam, here) and allowing others to persecute Dems (yes, Don Siegelman comes to mind; so does that woman in I think MN who served 7 months in jail before a court threw out her conviction). Aside from the NYT & LAT archives, the best I’ve read about this issue was at firedoglake and tpmmuckraker. Oh, and I think Glennzilla had a few things to say about it, too.
Ignoring FISA and just spying on all U.S. citizens, too. And then destroying the only ISP that resisted the illegal acts by the government.
No account of the past 8 years and the evil thereof is complete without those two.