inkbluesky

There has been some commentary recently to the effect that Dubya’s political power has been diminished by various scandals. The administrations response to Katrina, that the administration exaggerated the probability that Saddam possessed WMD and the threat that Saddam posed in general, the administrations claim that it could ignore Congressional and Constitutional restrictions in spying on Americans, and the administration’s attempt to distance itself from long time supporters like Jack Abramoff and Ken Lay among many other suspect actions and policies.Perhaps there has been some damage, Bush is afterall a lame duck president. Still its important to remember how successful the Bush-Conservative political machine has been at enforcing party discipline. To date, with the exception of Scooter Libby’s indictment, no one in the administration has really been called to account in any concrete way.As liberals and progressive have been want to do, they have often times been been very critical of Democrats for not being more vociferous. Well, when you’re the minority party, you don’t control the agenda, you don’t determine the course which any committee takes. As we all saw in the initial hearings on the NSA controversy even a moderate Republican like Spector tends to bend his judgement toward that of the Whitehouse - when there is any doubt, the Whitehouse is to get the benefit of that doubt. The only immediate hope of getting the Bushies to start acting like responsible leaders instead of zealots drunk on power is to get a majority in the House or Senate ( or at minimum an even split in the Senate).
The acts that are being committed in our name, our country will haunt us for years. There is no reason for this or any administration to be running “black sites”. The CIA’s ‘Black Sites’

This February, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International urged the House International Relations Committee to support three new resolutions of inquiry into American use of torture, citing the fact that “there is still a strong perception in many parts of the world that the United States continues to facilitate or willfully ignore torture by rendering individuals to countries where they are likely to be tortured, and by holding detainees in secret locations closed to the International Committee of the Red Cross.” (Emphasis added.)

But on February 10, in a party line vote, the House International Relations Committee defeated all three resolutions.

There has been hardly any notice in the press or anywhere else about these congressional setbacks as part of the Bush administration’s continued success in suppressing news of what actually goes on in those “black sites” in the name of the United States and its citizens.

Poll: Bush Ratings At All-Time Low 

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they’re opposed to the agreement.

CBS News senior White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that now it turns out the Coast Guard had concerns about the ports deal, a disclosure that is no doubt troubling to a president who assured Americans there was no security risk from the deal.

What would be a big mistake here is for Democrats to try to ride this poll. They should not be thinking, we’ll just play it safe and ride into office on Bush’s negatives or Republican corruption. They should be acting like Bush’s numbers are in the seventies and take every opportunity to sell the American people what they’re already willing to buy, that we can do better.