Centerfield

Corruption I: The Man In Office

This is the first of what I hope is a short series of posts about one of my more important issues, corruption. OK, I'm starting too easy. Too true.

Most Presidents seem to need awhile to become corrupt. IMHO, it took Bush one year; yeah, it was a bad crisis, but we try and choose our leaders to see the nation through these kinds of things calmy, and to only take needed powers. That's so fast, I've been wondering if Bush' earlier White House experience and having a presidential Daddy started the corruption clock on him early; now I'm worried about Hillary, too, on the same account.

Bush' thing is a little unusual - not sex or money, nor even quite the usual kind of need for power. No, I conclude Bush has an unaccountability fetish. Yep! Yeah. I'll give some evidence below, so just be patient.

Before 9/11, interestingly, Bush' behavior on civil rights was pretty good; better than Clinton on privacy, for example. Yes, it's true. I was paying attention to a couple of early nasty Administration proposals that were straightened out with respect to freedoms when they hit the White House. It's hard to believe in light of the rest of his time in office.

Since 9/11, Bush' pattern has been to claim that we NEED thing after thing for America to be secure, with no immediate justification of WHY beyond that. This went from claims of needing citizens to keep watch on each other (shades of KGB!), to claims he NEEDED the NSA to collect all kinds of info, to warrantless financial data access, to claims judges would be too slow (in a system with retroactive warrant grants????). Now we have him claiming we NEED Colombia FTA for security (oooh, way to convince Pelosi and other Dems).

This is hardly the Civil War or one of the World Wars, where we faced existential threats, and really had good reasons for most of the restrictions.

In fact, exactly ONE domestic measure has performed well - the bank transaction checkpoint - al'Qaeda has clearly become deglobalized, with its global reach down to small, weak cells that have done little. There's no reason that judicial permission couldn't've been made a requirement for such usage early and quickly.

Yeah, I know some people LIKE this game. I wouldn't dream of making it illegal for people to voluntarily engage in bondage/dominance. But it's evil to FORCE it on a free people. Especially where there's no reason. We HAVE lost freedoms of privacy, habeas corpus, and travel (been on the terror watchlist recently?). I miss them.

During earlier Administrations, we've seen more scandals come to light by Federal mechanisms. Only Congress seems to be investigating wrongdoing in Iraq. And Bush feels only he can be unaccountable for running deficits and paying for what he wants.

The most black-and-white evidence for his unaccountability fetish is the unccountable Blackwater contract terms. No matter what bad stuff a Blackwater guard does, he gets a get-out-of-jail-free card. If Bush wanted to maximize his power (or our security), he would've made them accountable.

Accountability is a basic ethical requirement of all democratic officials.