It’s accountability, stupid!

With the comment, “We were stonewalled by the CIA”, the co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission once again highlight what is a major problem for the people of this country. We have allowed the current caretakers of our government to do as they wish, say what they want and to do so with no accountability repercussions. They are, literally, getting away with crime. Today, The Huffington Post reports and Glen Greenwald blogizes on the CIA matter.

The subterfuge, the misdirection, the lying by this administration has no end save twelve o’clock, Noon, January 20, 2009. I don’t wish to give up a year of my life here on earth, however, I think it would make all our lives much better if we could just fast-forward to that date and time.

On accountability:

The Bush Administration has perfected the lie with [it seems] no fear of ever being called to the Bar to be reckoned for knowingly lying to the American people and to the world. They lie with impunity.

They subvert the law …by lying, of course, but Bush does it more insidiously, he devises ‘signing orders’ that exempt him from following the very laws that Congress passes and that he signs into law.

But, in my view, the most subversive of all is the Bush Administration’s penchant for destroying the English language. Some may think of it as spin, but, factually, the Bushits’ use words that have long-standing meanings that anyone can easily discern the accepted definitions from a quick review of any number of dictionaries. The problem is that the dictionary definitions are not the meaning that the Bush bunco artists have in mind. War means peace. Surge means escalation. Wrong-doing by a member of the Administration means commuted sentence, an eventual pardon and quite probably, a Medal of Freedom. Reducing the deficit means shifting expenditures off-budget. Saving the Social Security program means killing it. Tax-cut means redistribution of monies from the bottom 95% to the coffers of the wealthiest 5%. In Bushland, black is white, up is down and quite obviously, yes is no.

And then there is the the oversight body, the US Congress, the Keystone Cops of government accountability.

So now we have it, an Administration that is willing to do whatever they wish to accomplish whatever is their end destination; a Congress that is [at best] inept or at worst complicit. All of this is over-arched by a Media that is too fat, too dumb and/or too lazy to serve the interests of Americans.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the dozen or so candidates plying Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and points south and west with their recipes for the future will be much better. I think that I will start encouraging the kid down the street on his tricycle to prepare himself for a run at the White House. I fear that it will be his generation or later when America is put back together again.

God help us all to survive for the next two or three decades until, hopefully, help arrives.