There's Something I Just Don't Understand

Someone’s got to explain Dick Cheney to me.

And Karl Rove.

Well, this whole administration, I guess.

I mean, President Clinton got a blowjob and I had to sit through six months of impeachment hearings.

President Bush sends at least 4,000 American boys and girls to die in the desert based on a lie, and not peep one about impeachment (well, at least not until the advent of www.wexlerwantshearings.com , but that only popped up in the last few months.)

On top of that, the economy has been destroyed; veterans hospitals aren’t taking care of the sick; homes are being foreclosed all over this great nation; and our national debt – if coined and printed, bundled up, and launched in to space – would be the 4^th largest planet in our solar system.

I guess I have to admit the possibility that I’m just young and naïve and every generation has a president who they find to be utterly incompetent. But this smells of a different flower, methinks.

Am I wrong? Is this the kind of utter disregard for the will of the nation that we are to expect from an administration? Or is the level of destruction wrought by Bush and his cronies something extraordinary?

So, assuming that this administration does, in fact, represent something beyond the norm, I have to wonder: how have they gotten away with this?

How have they convinced the nation to sit idly by as they condemned our children to irrevocable debt and a world that hates them? How have our country’s parents allowed themselves to stand stoically as our soldiers were sent to die in a war that has no justification? How have they convinced the voices of good reason to stay silent as our homes were taken, our jobs were lost, and our economy spiraled down to a point where realistic people don’t foresee us ever rebounding?

Does Dick Cheney have some sort of power that we are unaware of?

Does he have naked pictures of every congressperson with 8 year old Filipino boys?

I mean, that’s about the only scenario that makes sense to me: that somehow Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration has such powerful, career crushing evidence against every possible voice of dissention that to speak out against them would be tantamount to suicide.

So what is it going to take? Do we just need (gasp) 60 senators who put the good of the nation above their own careers?

Or is it worse than I imagine? Are the interests that dictate the actions of the office of the president (oil, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, Satan himself I think) the same as the interests that dictate the actions of the House and the Senate? Are the families who run the most powerful lobbies in Washington SO powerful that no one is immune to them?

In an episode of The Unit last year, a line of dialogue indicated that there were “about 14 families that run this country”. At the time of viewing it, of course, I dismissed it as a silly bit in a TV show. But I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t some truth to that. I mean, somebody’s interests have to be being served by the idiocy that we have endured these past eight years. The CEO of Halliburton certainly hasn’t been missing his mortgage payments, for instance.

So is that what we’re seeing? Have the interests of these “14 families” finally become so disparate from the interests of the nation that they cannot be hidden any more? During the cold war I could imagine the people not noticing (or caring) that the false war against the Soviets actually existed to feed the pockets and power base of the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us so strongly against in his farewell speech in 1961.

But this new war is a different kind of war. Planes and Tanks and Submarines aren’t as necessary any more. So that money still needs to be spent, but it needs to be spent in different areas. I don’t doubt for a minute that it isn’t ending up in the same pockets – it’s just that it gets filtered through different companies on its way there than it used to.

So Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld foresee these developments in the late 80s when they first tried to get the US in to war with Iraq. And when Bush the Second becomes president he hires on Rumsfeld under the oh-so-laudable goal of privatizing the military (yikes). The point, Rumsfeld argues to Congress, is that privatizing the military leads to competition which will drive down prices, and save the country money during war time. Then war starts (odd) and Halliburton, Blackwater, and a number of other companies are awarded multi-billion dollar contracts on a NO BID BASIS. How, Mr. Rumsfeld, is competition supposed to drive prices down when you DON’T ALLOW ANYONE TO COMPETE FOR THE FUCKING CONTRACTS? Instead, we have a war that will end up costing this country upwards of 4 Trillion Dollars. To compare, the whole Vietnam War cost the US just over $133 billion dollars. This war is costing us TWICE that, PER MONTH.

So someone explain this to me.

Explain where this money is going. Explain how there are no checks anymore on the power of the President. Explain how our constitution is being spit upon and no one is saying boo. Explain how our liberties are being one by one dismantled by a single man, and we are allowing it to happen.

Explain it, because it just doesn’t make sense.