Doing it on purpose

by Rich Miles

Today is Feb. 1, 2007.

Within the last week, we've discovered that:

- The US may have botched the training of Iraqi police recruits by outsourcing the job to unqualified private contractors - and then failing to follow up to see if the contractors were even TRYING to do the job.

- Our troops, who are fighting Bush's War, many of whom don't even know why, are underequipped even to the point of not having enough ammunition.

- Our government sold spare parts for fighter aircraft to people who then resold them to Iran, the country that Bush is now fully erect to attack.

and

- The nominee for the Director of National Intelligence has a $2 Million a Year Conflict of Interest

And that's just within the last WEEK.

So a question, actually two questions, that I've asked over and over for the past 4 years or more comes up once again: Are these people screwing up on purpose? And if so, WHY?

I mean, what other explanation can there be? The law of averages would seem to dictate that they'd get SOMETHING right occasionally.

But no - I cannot think of one single thing - not ONE, not even a hospital being built or a schoolhouse being painted - that this administration and this Defense Dept . and this State Dept. and this Justice Dept.(oh, don't get me started on the Justice Dept.!) has not utterly and totally
screwed up.

The above examples in the links are pretty much prima facie - not open to much interpretation. But one has to admit it's true that "screwing up" is a moving target - or "in the eye of the beholder" as my dear ol' grandpa used to say. (It's true - he really did, he said "screwing up is in the eye of the beholder")

So let us, in the interest of fairness, allow that some will not think presidential signing statements are "screwing up", despite their apparent extraconstitutionality and their clear intent to place the president above the law; or that the Justice Dept. removing career federal prosecutors, many of them right in the middle of major cases against drug smugglers, terror suspects, and corrupt politicians, and replacing them with political appointees of questionable competence but unquestioned, unquestioning Republican loyalty is not, on any sort of objective scale, "screwing up."

Perhaps some will say we're too harsh to call it "screwing up" when our country's chief law enforcement officer says that the Constitution does not guarantee the 800-year-old legal principle of habeas corpus, or when Bush signs an executive order 'that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.'

And perhaps there will even be some who think it's not screwing up for the government to interfere in the ability of scientists to tell the world about global warming and other scientific matters.

But as some folks are saying about Bush's War, if this isn't screwing up, what is? Can the world, quite literally, survive any worse screwing up than this entire administration and everything they do?

So - way down the page, back to the second of the two questions: since it seems unquestionable that they're doing it on purpose, why?

Sadly, frighteningly, there is an answer to that question: Christianists on the March

"...A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity."

In other words, they need chaos to thrive. Who better to give it to them than George W. Bush and his humanity-challenged thugs?