2centsworth.info

The above is a headline in today’s New York Times (14 May 2006)… I think you could also call it the last nail in John McCain’s political coffin.

I voted for McCain in the first primary because I thought he was a man of integrity. I was astonished and disgusted at the tactics used by the Bush campaign to defeat him for the Republican nomination.

But I have been revising my opinion of McCain downwards ever since. Given his intelligence and background he must have had serious reservations about Bush’s justification for the war in Iraq and he certainly was aware of how incompetently the war was being prosecuted. And one suspects he despises Bush personally but he still cozied-up to the Bush campaign in the second election.

Here is a guy who paid a terrible personal price during our nation’s last unnecessary, incompetently led war… Who knows that there are young soldiers and marines now paying a similarly terrible price for the self-serving, bordering on traitorous, incompetence of the current administration.

And yet here McCain is once again acting as stooge for Bush and his cronies. Kissing Falwell’s ring isn’t quite as bad… People won’t die as a result but it is similarly stomach-turning.

Feet of Clay doesn’t do it justice.

Another interesting New York Times article (Senate Approves 2-Year Extension of Bush’s Tax Cuts – May 11, 2006)

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 54 to 44 to approve $70 billion in tax cuts benefiting, no surprise here, the country’s wealthiest taxpayers.

To put it in perspective, here is an excerpt from the NY Times article:

The overwhelming share of the tax cuts the Senate voted to extend will flow to the wealthiest taxpayers. People earning $1 million a year would save about $42,700, and reap about 22 percent of the total tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group in Washington. People earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year would save about $47 and receive less than 1 percent of the benefits.

I think, just maybe, that the folks that voted for GW and the Republicans in Congress may finally be realizing that they’ve been taken to the cleaners. Unless you are among the tiny percentage of Americans who’s income is more than $1 million per year, you are getting royally screwed.

GW came into office with a budget surplus and we have had nothing but disasters of every kind ever since. We now have the largest budget deficits in history, GW’s self-inflicted war in Iraq is costing us $100’s of billions per year, more than 2,000 US soldiers and marines have died, Home Land Security is a laughing stock, Osama is still out there, and oh, by the way, GW and his Republican buddies in the House and Senate are going to leave office having made sure that they and their wealthy cronies won’t have to pay for it… The average US taxpayer will.

I read an interesting article in today’s New York Times (January 10, 2006 page A19). Entitled “I.R.S. Is Sued on Failure to Release Tax Data.”

It turns out that back in 1976, Professor Susan B. Long won a Federal court case against the IRS. The Federal court ordered the IRS to provide her with data which show how thoroughly the IRS audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts taxes assessed these corporations and individuals following an audit.

For decades the IRS has provided this data at no charge to Professor Long, who posts her analyses on a website Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse along with tools which allow people to conduct their own analyses.

Among Prof. Long’s findings from earlier IRS data was that in 1999, poor people were much more likely to be audited by the agency than rich people.

But in May 2004, the IRS informed Prof. Long that it would no longer provide this information and ordered its statisticians to stop answering her questions. It also advised her that if it were ever to make the data public again that it would cost $12,000/month to receive the data in electronic form.

The senior national spokesman for the IRS, Frank Keith, has apparently claimed that no court order exists. Details on the orginal court order and the suits being brought to enforce it can be found at trac.syr.edu/foia.

Mr. Keith (the IRS Senior National Spokesman) went out of his way to state that no Bush political appointees had been involved in the decision to stop supplying Prof. Long with the data.

In January 2005, a Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine hit an undersea mountain south of Guam. One sailor was killed; others were injured; and it is expected that repairing the submarine will cost around $100 million.

The submarine commander’s career for all intents and purposes ended at the same instant as the collision. It did not matter that he wasn’t on watch at the time of the collision. It did not matter that the course which led to the collision was plotted by his subordinates. It did not matter that the undersea mountain was not shown on the official Navy charts his officers used to plot the course. And it did not matter that he had dedicated his life to defending his country and had provided decades of courageous and blameless service.

In the US Navy, the commander of a ship is responsible for its safe navigation. If the vessel under your command is involved in a collision you can kiss your career goodbye. No excuses are accepted and all naval officers understand this.

Now contrast this with the culture among our political leadership. The terrorist attacks that occured on September 11th 2001 are the worst intelligence failure the US has suffered in 50 years. Thousands of people were killed and the economic costs mounted into the billions of dollars. Yet the officials who you would think were responsible for preventing this… The head of the CIA, the head of the FBI, and the National Security Advisor… Did not lose their jobs. We got to hear them provide hours worth of excuses during their Congressional testimony and then they either continued in their jobs (FBI)… Got promoted (National Security Advisor to Secretary of State)… Or received the nation’s highest civilian medal (CIA). Talk about double standards.

And now we have hurricane Katrina and its tragic and humiliating aftermath. We find that the head of the FEMA is a lawyer with no experience at disaster management (his previous gig was managing the judging committee for the Arabian Horse Association). Both he and Chertoff (head of homeland security) seem to have spent more time on talkshows than they did doing anything to help the folks in New Orleans and Mississippi. Given the response of this administration to the 9/11 debacle, one wonders what lofty posts these two will get promoted to.

When will the voters recognize that regardless of your political persuasion, the competence, integrity, and experience of our leadership matters. We elected a president that even his supporters admitted was not the sharpest tool in the drawer. We were assured that he was being provided with experienced minders… men with gravitas… Like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

But what did Dick and Don ever actually do? They joined the Reagan Whitehouse as well-connected (went to the right schools, joined the right clubs) young men. Then they bounced from Republican adminstration to well-compensated positions in the military industrial complex and then back to Republican administration jobs. They both made their fortunes at taxpayer expense. The only problems they ever solved were ones that could be solved using their connections or by the lavish expenditure of taxpayer dollars. These guys would have fit right in in the old Soviet Union. Stalwart party members working their way up the ranks using their connections and personal loyalties.

I don’t care whether you like or dislike their politics… When is the US public going to recognize that these guys GW, Dick, Don, Condoleeza, and all the rest are incompetent?

• A small bunch of religious nuts totally blindsided us in 9/11 and Condoleeza and Tenet give us a bunch of whining excuses as to why they couldn’t have been expected to prevent it.
• The administration decides to invade Iraq before 9/11 and gives us one “the dog ate my homework” excuse after another why this was necessary… First it was WMD’s… After 9/11 it was that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots… Heck Donald Rumsfeld has stronger connections to Saddam than Osama does! And now, of course, it turns out we invaded Iraq to turn the Middle East into a garden of democracy.
• OK, so we had to invade Iraq… General Shinseki tells Congress that we will need nearly 300,000 troops to properly secure Iraq… So Donald (military genius that he is!) fires Shinseki and allocates half the number of troops needed and two years later we have Dick (another military genius) telling us the insurgency is in its last throws. I haven’t heard anybody actually serving in Iraq say that the insurgency is breathing its last. I imagine sitting on this side of the Atlantic surrounded by body guards gives you a different perspective.

The only thing that went according to plan is that Dick Cheney and Halliburton have made a lot of money war profiteering.

And, by the way, Bin Laden is still out there laughing at us.

To return to my original thesis… If these politicians and appointees were held to the same standards as our Naval officers, they’d all be disgraced and out of work. The consequences to the US public of their manifest failures is immense both in dollars and human lives and yet the consequences to them are insignificant. In fact, they are (or are likely to) profit from the whole sad mess.

News Flash: The president has sent Dick Cheney to the Gulf in a desperate attempt to see if he and Halliburton can extract additional profit from another administration disaster.

{Update: The previous “news flash” was just a sarcastic comment on my part. To my astonishment yesterday’s Wall Street Journal said that Halliburton is in line to get piece of the Gulf reconstruction action.}