Milkhouse Mouse

With the fifth anniversary of the September 11^th terrorist attacks looming on the calendar, all is not well south of the Canadian border. An apt metaphor for us Yanks’ dire state of public affairs comes from Greg Palast, America’s premiere muckraker tracking White House criminality, in his latest bestseller “Armed Madhouse.”

To paraphrase a friend from Toronto, America has nosedived over the precipice of sanity. But it was a coerced leap, occasioned by the convenient confluence of 9/11 and senior White House officials too well-versed in Niccolo Machiavelli’s views on exploiting opponents’ errors for political gain. While an estimated 700,000 Americans die annually from medical error, Bush administration officials envisioned more self-serving payoffs by enacting a Keystone Cop-esque pursuit of a terrorist group—created in the 1970s by some of those same officials—allegedly responsible for some riveting TV coverage of substantially fever deaths on 11 September 2001.

In exploiting 9/11's fear-wracked aftermath, the Bush administration launched its dubious “war on terrorism,” which White House attorneys then secretly used to justify expropriating unprecedented wartime powers to the executive branch. Abetted by a increasingly conservative federal judiciary, the newly empowered presidency cajoled Republican congressional leadership into virtually rubber-stamping a proto-corporate police state agenda. That American police state now diverts more than half of every federal tax dollar from public service coffers into no-bid contracts for political allies who gleefully profiteering from a preemptive war and dizzying litany of classified national security programs and projects.

The 9/11 agenda also ensures George Bush operates above the law, since constitutional checks and balances now are relegated to the political status of historical footnotes. Pertinent examples abound. Among the most egregious is the National Security Agency wiretapping* of Americans’ electronic communications reported by the New York Times in December 2005. Not only has the congress ignored its constitutional mandate to investigate even the appearance of executive wrongdoing, but that august body is looking past George Bush’s confirmed obstruction of a Justice Department inquiry into the legality of the NSA program—a subterfuge the Washington Post compared to Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox just as he stumbled on evidence linking the White House to the breakin of Democratic headquaters at the Watergate Hotel.

That Bush’s longtime legal whore Attorney General Alberto Gonzales outed his boss’s felonious obstruction of justice in testimony before a congressional committee further confirms just how far above the law the White House perceives itself to be. Gonzales' revelation also is tantamount to rubbing the cumulataive faces of congressional Democrats and the American public in the White House's post-9/11 proverbial bullshit.

Niccolo Machiavelli could only be proud of his 21st-century students.

[More forthcoming to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11]

*German Anony-mouse: To make the government scrutiny's of your web-surfing more challenging, check out http://anonymouse.org/. There you find a free online proto-proxy server for anonymous emailing, broswing and posting to newsgroups. If the little German ads that pops up on websites you access prove too much a distraction, $38 for a year gets you ad-free websurfing.

# posted by Moose Kateer : 5:31 AM