Orange You Glad It's Election Time Again?

Don't you miss those Orange Alerts?  They only happen just before elections. You know it's election season when the Republicans start hauling out their proposal for an Anti-Gay Marriage constitutional amendment, or when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (whose name rhymes with "loyal uber alles") starts arresting Islamic terrorists who are plotting a jihad to "kill all the devils," including blowing up Chicago's Sears Tower. There's nothing quite like conspirators pledging an oath to Al Qaeda to get the fear juices flowing.

The leaders in the Bush Administration are masters of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). That's how they got America into an unjust, unwinnable, and hugely costly war in Iraq -- high in human costs; high in political costs; high in diplomatic costs; and high in financial costs.

After watching the FRONTLINE program entitled "The Dark Side," is it any wonder that the Republicans want to cut PBS's budget?  Once upon a time the major broadcasting networks (i.e., NBC, CBS, ABC) would do investigative reporting. Unfortunately, that's no longer true. Perhaps it's because nowadays they are all no longer independently owned.

The PBS FRONTLINE program portrays a vivid exposé explaining how all roads on the War on Terror ran straight through the Office of the Vice President. It had a political arm and a policy side. But, most frighteningly, it had a powerful legal team too.

Cheney believed in expanding the President's executive power. He was convinced that presidential power had been whittled away by Congress and the courts ever since Watergate. Richard Cheney viewed the searing moments of the Nixon Administration, in which he had a front row seat, as a dimunition of what the President ought to be. Within days of 9/11, Cheney's legal insiders saw a chance to rebuild the President's power, almost as if 9/11 was a moment of preparation meeting opportunity.

Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, headed a group of lawyers who said the President could authorize whatever means were necessary to fight the War on Terror. They said that, as Commander-in-Chief, George Bush could disregard any other law during time of war. When 9/11 came, it was a state of emergency that gave the people at the top of the Administration a chance to try some things they'd been thinking about for a long time.

Within six months of 9/11, it was clear that the Vice President was going to get the U.S. to go to war against Iraq -- even though CIA Director George Tenet believed he had proved that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not connected. Cheney's strategy was to raise fears about the imminent danger of weapons of mass destruction, saying on NBC's Meet the Press, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." His partisan chum Condoleezza Rice chimed in, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The intelligence community was merely used as a public relations operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.

How much longer will the war in Iraq continue?  That depends on what happens in the next couple of elections. Considering, though, that the incumbency rate in Congress is 98%, members pretty much have to be indicted before they lose their seat. I guess in the end America always gets the government it deserves and the government it elects because: a) the masses are asses; b) the partisanship is poisonous; and c) the country is run by extremists because the moderates have turned their back on our political systems.