Monday, January 28, 2008

The Chimperator's Legacy

I have yet to decide if I am going to watch the Chimperator's last State of the Union speech tonight. Between making me want to retch over his disingenuous lies and finding it difficult to listen to his inability to speak normal English, it is all in all a painful experience. Of course the joke - on the Chimperator - is that he wants this speech to help his "legacy." It is way past time to worry about that!!! Six or more years ago would have been a better time to have such worries. In this regard, Daily Kos has a brief run down of some of the Bush 43 legacy that shows what a failure his presidency has been (http://www.dailykos.com/):



When it comes to evaluating the legacy of the George W. Bush "administration," for instance, we're all too well aware of the dark record, even if the traditional media have been less than dogged in its daily pursuit of the accumulated weight of Bush's departures from our traditional understandings of the constitutional order and that nebulous metric, "The American Way." Consider what we've witnessed over the years:

**the emergence of the use of torture
**secret prisons
**indefinite detention
**the denial of habeas corpus
**warrantless eavesdropping
**illegal domestic spying
**the politicization of the administration of criminal justice and of civil rights
**the claimed unilateral nullification of enacted legislation
**the claim that the failure by the president to comply with Executive Orders amounts to a **secret and unwritten revocation or revision of such orders
**dictation of the terms of legislation by the president to Congress
**dictation of the terms of appropriations bills (heretofore known as the "power of the purse" by the president to Congress
**the declaration that federal judges are incompetent to rule on questions touching on "national security"
**the refusal of the "unitary executive" to permit the other branches to test its claims of "executive privilege"
**the refusal of the Justice Department to prosecute contempt of Congress charges against executive branch officials
**the staggering increase in the frequency of use of the "state secrets" privilege to block access to the courts
**the systematic suppression of scientific evidence regarding "administration" policies through the manipulation of administrative procedure

And of course, much more.

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