It's small wonder that Mr. Bush's approval ratings are the lowest ever. The Pew ratings show only 33% approve of Bush and a significant majority of 57% disapprove. Only a minority of 40% think Bush is trustworthy, which makes it difficult for him to use the presidential bully pulpit to pull himself up by the bootstraps. He is still trying, though: Bush has been on the stump giving speeches and holding press conferences to (re)sell the American people on his war of choice in Iraq. See this story. He now says openly that he does not expect to still be president when we finally pull our troops out--in other words, it will be a long, deadly time in Iraq, if we keep on the present course.
Meantime, the concerns about abuse of executive powers in the name of a "war" on terrorism continue. Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness project, which Congress shut down in 2003 by defunding because of strong concerns about privacy, has nevertheless continued apace in the Defense Department. It has just been funded by the secretive National Security Agency that seems, like the agencies modeled after it in fictional television programs like Alias, to have deep wells of funding, arrogance, and lack of concern for the law on torture, assassination or domestic spying. See this article about the data-mining project. The Pentagon transferred two TIA components--Information Awareness Prototype System and Genoa II--to the Advanced Research and Development Activity at NSA headquarters. Given the new names "Basketball" and "Topsail", all references to TIA have ceased. (Topsail's ARDA funding may now be in question, however.)
These programs, combined with NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance, are quite worrisome. They appear to permit the government to undertake massive data sweeps of emails, blogs, and phone calls with almost no oversight from any group external to the administration. Congress has lately come out of its complete turpor, with Heather Wilson's forceful statements about the need for oversight of domestic surveillance, but this is very little and very late. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote last March on Counterpunch in an article on the effects of Bush's hegemonic militarism:
"It is America that has undergone regime change. The Bush administration constitutes a Jacobin revolution. Its fanatics have declared world war on political diversity. The first victim of Bush's "war on terror" is the Bill of Rights. In its place we have an incipient police state."
And while I am not a fan of much of Roberts' economic philosophy, I think he hits the nail on the head in his February 6 "My Epiphany" where he writes the following:
The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. * * * * Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors. They undermine our protection by trashing the Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees. Those with a tyrannical turn of mind have always used fear and hysteria to overcome obstacles to their power and to gain new means of silencing opposition. * * * *If the Bush administration can continue its policy of picking up people anywhere in the world and detaining them indefinitely without having to show any evidence for their detention, it can do whatever it wishes.
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