Should there be anyone out there who reads my rants here, I apologize for the seemingly endless tirade against the administration of George W Bush. If you read closely, I hope you can see that the tirade is really against the republican party as it presently is constituted. And I’m very afraid that President Elect Obama is going to “move ahead” without dealing with the corruption and lawbreaking that will have proceeded his administration come January 20th, 2009. In my view, this will be a huge mistake and I’m doing everything I can to encourage him to reconstitute the justice department of the United States of America with lawyers committed to the pledge they take to enforce the constitution once their service begins. The damage from the George W Bush administration is deep, but it is just a furtherance of what started under Richard Nixon and was put into high gear by Ronald Reagan.

Make no mistake, Ronald Reagan is still the “darling” of this republican party. If you don’t believe me, just go back and listen to any republican debate during the previous presidential primary season. Hardly a reference to George W Bush (likely because he was even more effective in destroying government than Reagan and happened to be “at the wheel” when everything started to crumble) during the past year of republican politicking, but a sickening number of references to Reagan – who, while I agree that GW Bush is the worst ever – will be close to the top of horribel presidents once history has a chance to truly digest the consequeces of the so-called conservative revolution.

Quite simply, their goal has been to destroy government as we knew it coming into the seventies. The republicans hated the New Deal, despite the fact that it brought this nation out of the worst financial collapse in history (of course, Bush may have outdone Hoover – time will tell) and set the foundation for the healthiest middle class in the history of the world. They hated the legislation of Lyndon Johnson which empowered Blacks and minorities in the voting booths, in the courtrooms, and in the workplace. The idea of government “watching” what business does and regulating it “for the good of the many” was, and is, antithetical to the “conservative movement.” Now, I was one who read Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” and, while I didn’t agree with many of his positions, I always looked at him as the “Father of the modern conservative.” But, as I think back to what he wrote (and, the book is out of print, so I have been unable to find another copy to re-read) I have to think he’s “rolling in his grave” at what has become of the conservative movement and the republican party. They have become so brazen and arrogant in their actions, daring Congress to intervene apparently knowing it won’t happen, that as the government, the economy, and the nation is heading toward third world status, they want more!

I have watched in horror as government agencies were headed, one after another, by people whose intention was to tear it down. I remember when Reagan was first in office, he named James Waat to head the Interior department. Waat was widely known to be a staunch opponent of the interior department and his job was to essentially destroy it. The only thing that stopped him, as I remember it, was his foul mouth – something he said (I can’t remember exactly what it was) was brazen enough, even in that atmosphere, to force him to resign. But in the ensuing years that’s what the republicans have been doing – trying to destroy the very institutions they are supposed to be running. And they’ve done a remarkably good job of it. It’s taken a virtual total collapse of our economy to get people’s attention, and it remains to be seen what Obama does with the opportunity that he has to rebuild things.

The way government has worked under George W Bush (and this is just kind of like a ball rolling down a hill – after the example set by Reagan – they’ve just picked up the momentum, so to speak) is that he brings his cronies in to head government agencies, they get rid of anyone who is a lifetime civil servant they can while finding ways to undermine the very intention of the agency they supposedly serve. These agencies then become, instead of watchdogs on private enterprise, enablers of businesses that want to avoid regulation and, more importantly, want to lower their obligations to the lowly workers. The agencies look the other way as safety standards are reduced or removed altogether, benefits are taken away, and companies are allowed to force workers to do more for less. In fact, in the last 8 years productivity has significantly gone up in this nation while workers salaries and benefits have gone down. This is like Christmas every day to conservatives. Then what happens is that the crony that screwed up the government agency at the benefit of the corporation gets a job paying many times over his/her government salary at the very company that benefitted from his/her intentional incompetence! And what is really incredible, until the economy finally collapsed under the weight of all the incompetence and corruption, PEOPLE KEPT VOTING FOR THESE THUGS!

A good example of what I’m trying to point out here would be New Orleans. It has been at least three years since the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Now, I remember well the advance notice that this hurricane was potentially going to do what it actually did, yet there were no emergency personel there to help with the evacuation of the people who needed it most, with the end result being something like 2000 fatalities. As there should have been, there was a lot of angst about the incompetence of the Bush administration, and I do think that this was the beginning of the end of their charade – but the outrage should have been much greater. FEMA, which was a very effective agency just a few years previously under the Clinton administration, seemed almost non-existent. And I’ll never forget the words from President Bush, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie” referring, of course, to the now infamous Michael Brown who had no business being the head of any government agency let alone one with this importance, but this was just one of the best examples of the results of 30+ years of conservative rule in Washington DC. Brown was the heir to a guy I believe named Joe Allbaugh who was also not qualified to lead FEMA except that he was a loyal Bushite (which we later learned in the US attorney scandal – was the main requirement for employment in government) and he was committed to destroying the very agency he was in charge of.

Now Allbaugh had moved on to the lobbying business and turned the reins over to Brown. This is how it works for our great conservative philosophy. Allbaugh had done as much as he could to neuter the agency he was in charge of so it was time to get into the private enterprise system to “cash in” on all his good work. Well, after the hurricane, you didn’t see a bunch of the locals who had been lucky enough to survive doing the cleanup and reconstruction work (as in the past, to prop up the economy of the disaster area) – you saw the private contractors who had been giving money to the republicans swoop in with massive no-bid government contracts to “rebuild” New Orleans like a bunch of scavengers who had just discovered some prime road kill. And, of course, many of the companies that benefitted from this “reconstruction” were the companies being represented by Allbaugh. It shouldn’t be too surpising that the poorest neighborhoods of New Orleans still lie in ruins as I write this and it is only part of the reason this whole scenario is so disgusting. Everybody who has paid any attention to politics over the past 40+ years, the length of time of my interest in the subject, knows that the republicans are unapologetic racists (of course publically, they try to say the “right” thing once in a while, but their actions are conclusive) – so it has been no surprise to me that they could leave the Black neighborhoods of New Orleans in ruins until the time they are being finally thrown out of office. It’s the flagrant thumbing their collective noses at legality, morality, and civility – without consequence number one – that bothers me the most.

This gets me back to the point that I’ve been writing about since shorty after Barrack Obama’s election. The damage these guys have caused is HUGE! They can’t be allowed to just walk away and not have to pay for what they’ve done to our government and the people it serves. The big obvious issues are the warrantless wiretapping, the torture, and the financial fraud on Wall Street – but make no mistake – all of this is part of a bigger fraud that has been imposed on the American people with more and more brazenous as the years have progressed since Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981. They have been purposely and with premeditation destroying the very government they have pledged to defend. Their handiwork has led to an assault on workers from every corner of the economic spectrum, and it has funnelled the money that is represented in our 11 or 12 trillion dollar deficit into the hands of their cronies. This has been the greatest fleece job, by far, in the history of the world. And there’s a bunch of them that should be walking around thinking of their need to possibly require legal counsel.

The only way this will happen, however, is if Obama and the Democratically controlled congress finally develop a spine and start “fighting back.” This has been a war waged by a bunch of selfish, greedy, people who figured out how to take the entity that they despised the most, the US Government, and turn it into an incredible “Cash cow.” And the sad thing is that they’ve figured out how to get the very people they are fleecing to vote for them and keep them in power (if anyone thinks this war is over just because Obama won this past election, you’re kidding yourself). It is time for all of the corrupt activities to be investigated and for the criminals who have used our system of government to enrich themselves and their buddies to be prosecuted. And whether Obama wants a “unified” nation (I’m longing for the same thing) or not, we’re not going anywhere until this stuff is dealt with. And the window of opportunity is not large. They have to begin the process immediately upon assuming office. They can implement the programs that will get the economy going and do this at the same time. There are plenty of good Americans who will answer the call once it is clear what we need to do to save this nation – but we need to scour these arrogant criminals from our government and prosecute those who have stepped over the line of what is legal and what is not. We can’t have a nation of laws when the people at the top are flipping our legal system “the bird!”