Category: Politics

So President Bush has weighed in on soaring gas prices. His ideas?

– Stop adding to the Strategic Oil Reserve
– Encourage DAs to go after price gouging
– Relax environmental regulations
and
– Tell oil companies to build more refineries

None of which even remotely begins to address the real underlying issues — increased demand, reduced supply and price speculation due to global insecurity. (Gee, I wonder why people are feeling so concerned about the global situation. Could it be his warmongering about Iran?)

As usual, a completely incompetent response to a situation his own incompetence helped create.

Digby calls this an American problem, but actually I don’t think it is all that unique to us. At various points in time, parts of Europe and the Middle East have definitely been afflicted with this set of delusions, and I daresay other parts of the world as well.

Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason.

Who cares?

Bush gets rids of his spokesman? Ooh, big deal. The guy who is ordered to lie for him is going to be replaced by another guy who is ordered to lie for him. And this will significantly change the direction of this disaster of an administration how?

Bush also changed the head of the Office of Management and Budget – that would be his accountant, for all intents and purposes.

So, we now have a new accountant, and a new mouthpiece who simply parrots what Bush tells him.

What he said:

There are well established processes for declassifying information which, in part, involve running the documents by people who supposedly should know whether revealing the information could harm national security or harm intelligence assets or whatever. So, whatever legal right the president has to declassify information at will is separate from the issue of whether any competent president would go about doing such a thing.

Whatever the legal issues, the president bypassed normal declassification procedures – put in place to ensure that revealing information does not threaten national security – in order to wage a political battle. Whether strictly legal or not, it’s an act of a man who puts himself above the country. For shame.

Wow. Strong words coming from the Washington Post this Sunday:

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush’s conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before — in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

I’m not enough of an expert on 19th century American history to make a firm call on whether the extent to which today’s Republican party has become dominated by religionists is unprecedented or not. You can definitely argue that other American political movements and parties have been deeply influenced by religion. Even if it is not unprecedented, though, it’s still troubling.

I’m amazed that the Post had the testicular fortitude to say so, though.