A War Without End or Oversight
President Bush places himself above the law — even ones he signed.
An honorable president would have the gumption to veto bills he found objectionable. But as Americans have learned by now, there is no room for honor in President Bush’s Oval Office.
He prefers chicanery in the form of “signing statements.”
Prior to delivering the State of the Union Address on Monday, Bush eviscerated four key provisions of the new defense bill by saying he will ignore parts of the law he doesn’t like.
Bush finds objectionable provisions that:
- Forbid the United States from building a permanent military base in Iraq and controlling Iraq’s oil reserves.
- Create a wartime commission to investigate waste, fraud and abuse by military contractors and finally hold them accountable.
- Offer protection for employees of government contractors who expose wrongdoing.
- Require intelligence officers within 45 days to either respond or state why they will not produce documents requested by the Armed Services committees of Congress.
The Bush administration repeatedly has denied concerns that it seeks to create a permanent base in Iraq. But this signing statement and the president’s reluctance to bring before Congress a pact it is negotiating with Iraq regarding the presence of U.S. troops beyond 2008 indicate otherwise.
Bush must be stopped before he commits this country to obligations that endure long after he vacates Washington.
Congress must do what it can to hold Bush accountable. Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said he intends to move forward with the wartime commission that he sponsored. It is akin to one created by President Truman during World War II to bring oversight and accountability to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
“We don’t quite know what the administration intends with this sort of language,” Webb said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “But I want all my colleagues to be aware of it and to be aware that it potentially is an impingement on the rights of this legislative body — in effect saying the president has the authority to ignore a law that is now passed, a law that he has now signed.”
No American should be able to ignore the law without consequence. Not even a president.
Copyright © 2008 The Roanoke Times
The cycle of death and rebirth seems to apply even to countries. Question is, has the US “died” yet or or we still at the beginning of a prolonged and horrible illness? Is rebirth coming next January or next century?
Sadly, rebirth probably won´t come until next century.
“Congress must do what it can to hold Bush accountable”
After 157 signing statements this statement is a joke (on us).
“Bush must be stopped before he commits this country to obligations that endure long after he vacates Washington.”
Pardon me, but Hahahahahahaha
This is truly pathetic. America has a real problem; and George Bush is the problem. Iraq is being literally torn apart by madmen, and America sits there frozen in place because of the word “republican.” I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s to fear-impeach him and get it over with.
A true conservative would want to investigate and reduce if not eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in the military contract industry.
Don’t worry, Bush will appoint an “independent” committee to investigate.
Did you see the commission report in Israel about their failed war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon? No mention about the illegal act of war and the lies being told. Just a long list of how they could do better next time they decide to start a war.
If we go to Iran, Israel will probably start the war and the U.S. will be “forced” to support their ally.
We have the ability to live in peace. The military is not the only, or best, or most efficient strategy for achieving this goal.
We need to do the oversight that the White House seeks to avoid. We need to keep talking about these issues. We need to do our own research and publicize our findings as much as possible. Who knows which one of us will make history at some point in the future for being the blogger, whistleblower, congressperson, judge, etc… who discovers something that will absolutley change the course of this nation?
This bullshit could stop any time the Democrats decide to develop a spine and put up any kind of opposition to it. Unfortunately, they too, are so sold out that they have done and will continue to do nothing. None of these con-artists deserve to go back for another term.
so if the asshole has violated the law(s), who’s willing to hold him accountable? and what, before his kingdom ends, will be the consequence(s)?
If The Bush decides to make some kind of agreement with the government of Iraq concerning future military support, but doesn’t submit it to congress as a treaty to be ratified, isn’t it then just a personal agreement between The Bush and a foreign government, with no legal status? Why would the United States as a nation be bound to honor such a personal agreement?
Arguably, the worst President in American history has been highly successful by the standards of his economic class. And I would expect family investments, including the Carlyle Group, are doing very well through “defense” and oil.
Despite international war crimes, the trashed dollar, a bankrupt economy and government, and a loss of American legitimacy worldwide, Bush has engineered a huge transfer of wealth from the many to the few. Government and war are the primacy vehicles.
The endless expansion of elite wealth is what his class lives for, including wealthy democrats. How many rich “liberal” democrats returned their Bush tax breaks while giving lip service to economic justice ?
Perhaps that is why Congress kept giving him standing ovations during his recent and pathetic State Of The Union address ?
I told an old journalist friend after Bush first invaded the Whitehouse, “The plan is simple, Bush and his crowd will steal as much as possible while in office.”
They have succeeded.
In fact, so much wealth is now concentrated in so few unproductive and immoral hands that the overall economy is virtually dead. The peasants can no longer participate in the consumer dream culture which unfortunately is the largest sector of the economy.
And printing up 150 $Billion inflationary dollars to spend at Wal Mart will not solve the problem.
The “war” in Iraq is simply an extension of the war of the haves vs. the have-nots !
Time to redistribute the wealth.
Arise workers of the world!!! You have nothing to lose but your shackles.
The war stratagem has not succeeded yet. Most US of I citizens can still afford electricity. When they can not to use electricity for more than an hour a day, as is the situation in Iraq, and be unable to buy petrol, then the war will have succeeded and the GW Bush Crony Corporation will have managed to bring down the green house gas emissions of the US of I sooner rather than later. When every rich person in the US, including congress people and senators, affords their own private security guards to shoot at will at the starving riff raff and protesters who get in their way, then GW will have brought his understanding of proper human relationships to the US of I.
Write your Congressional Representatives. Tell them to IMPEACH both BUSH and CHENEY …. NOW!!!
If the House won’t do its duty to Impeach…then vote every one of our current congressmen and congress women out of office in 2008 and in 2010. Reward the brave and honorable congressional representatives who vote to IMPEACH. Punish all of Bush’s enablers…………
IMPEACH THESE CRIMINALS!
Bush believes, as does the public, that the country needs a strong President with the necessary power to act decisively. Like Bush said, “Dictatorship is a good system as long as I’m the dictator”. Americans feel the same way, they just have trouble making sure the dictator is a good one. The US population follows Hamilton, not Jefferson.
It’s the quarterback,the receiver, the ace starter, the power hitter, and the stopper, not the team, that dominate the American psyche. That is why we will choose McCain.
Yes, Lizard. Fear McCain.
Bush is a real winner. No stopping the permanent bases? Then no stopping the war. And they laugh at Ron Paul.
The media endorses these wrong people for president and we have to live (or die) with it.
Why is it that in a democracy we can’t vote out a miscreant such as Bush? We aren’t truly free, that’s why.
Bush is just making it clear that we no longer live in a Republic. Congress agrees. The people agree and are largely content. The military agrees. The churches agree. Corporations agree. What is it about Fascism that “you” don’t understand?
A question: Has Bush ever acted on any of his signing statements or has he just written them? Since they have no force of law, I don’t see how he can enforce them, and I wonder if his handlers don’t realize that. If he ever tried to actually enforce one of them, it would be a criminal act which could have repercussions if the jellyfish we elected to Congress ever evolved an internal skeleton.
From Godfrey Reggio:
Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy’ kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. 1. A life of killing each other 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.
This war wasn’t meant to have an end, it was meant from the get-go to be perpetual, a godsend to the MIC and wartime economy worried about its purpose in a post-Cold War period. What’s astounding is that a small handful of terrorists have (ostensibly) proven so difficult, time-consuming and expensive to beat. If such a rag-tag group of terra-ists takes longer than the Nazis to defeat, the Soviets would have driven our country into the ground within months.
ddell413: Why? Not because we aren’t free, though that is very close to the truth. It’s because this is not a democracy; it’s representative government.
Why should bush not ignore laws? He has been doing so since he first cheated and connived his slimy ass into office in 2000. What have the Bend-over-crats ever done to stop him? They keep happily rolling over. If I were bush I would go for broke.
bush has the Dims bent over a table. What are they going to do? Impeach? Pelosi says “impeachment is off the table” but apparently their asses aren’t.
Say what you want about Nader. He was right that we have become a two-faced (and only two-faced) corporate war-state, Judeo-America. Devoted to principles that have nothing whatsoever to do with “reality” by which I mean the vast majority of planet Earth. Now for 11 months we can listen either to the senile McCain who wants us all to conquer the lost Vietnam in his mind, and/or pretend-along that Shillary/Obama mean some kind of “choice” to make. Listen to Shillary: “I will keep your job safe.” How, exactly? What fucking job? “I will bring health insurance to all” by forcing them to buy it—what Romney did to the poor of Massachusetts (and of course it makes no difference or improvement at all except for insurance companies). Obama? He wants to “bring me together” with state of the art Repuglicans? I tried that with Slimey Bill Clinton and went bankrupt….It’s one choice we have now: a genuine third party or a catastrophe. Any bets?
The United States has never withdrawn its forces of occupation from Europe since World War 2. The reason for this is simple. European countries are nothing more than client states of the USA. They are allowed some independence in domestic policy, so long as it is not too left wing, they are not allowed any freedom with regard to foreign policy, this is strictly dictated by the USA. Hence the Europeans do not utter any concrete opposition to the USA when it flagrantly undermines multilateral solutions to global issues from the war in Iraq through to global warming, the death penalty, War Crimes etc.
So long as there is no Collective will to stand up to the USA, the world will experience war without end, as the US economy is as dependent on war as a junkie is on heroin. The only way that the USA will go cold turkey will be if the Europeans and other surrogates of the USA in Asia and elsewhere decided to close the military bases of the occupier, and if their is a global insistence that the defense of the USA should be limited to the actual geographical borders of the USA.