The stink just gets ranker and ranker...

Many pundits, conservative and liberal alike, use the term "cesspool" when referring to federal government corruption here in Washington, D.C., and the Bush administration is doing everything it can to vie with Nixon for most corrupt administration in living memory.

You'd have to say BushCo got off on the wrong foot, what with having to steal the election in 2000 and all (perhaps the most jobbed election since Tilden-Hayes), but once in power they made haste to f*ck everything up as much as possible, with plans to dismantle public education, public healthcare, and assistance to anyone in need. Even September 11, 2001, was seen as an opportunity: rather than concentrate on Osama bin Laden, the self-professed perpetrator of the attacks, BushCo seized the chance to go after Saddam Hussein, a hamstrung dictator who'd been on the outs since 1990 with the US government who'd been willing to see his regime through chemical weapons use and other bloody reprisals all through Reagan's 1980's. Pretty much everyone except the most die-hard idiot wing of the Republican Party understands that BushCo engineered the evidence for that "preemptive war" and Scooter Libby's conviction confirms that they then went about on a campaign of intimidation and character assassination to silence dissent about their fabricated evidence.

Even being embroiled in two foreign wars hasn't kept BushCo from their neoconservative agenda of hate at home, though. While talking a good game about supporting the troops, BushCo has been embarrassed by the shoddy conditions of the services -- medical or otherwise -- afforded the returning troops. The Walter Reed Hospital scandal highlights the administration's shortcomings when it comes to "supporting the troops," a jingoistic catchword that the right wing has long deployed syllogistically to imply that opposing the war means supporting the enemy or opposing US military personnel.

But the scandals keep coming. Attorney General Alberto "I Support Torture" Gonzales decided it was time for a few US attorneys who didn't toe the BushCo line well enough to go. In his eight politically motivated firings, Gonzales might have thought he could slip under the radar, but nothing could be further from the truth. Last week we learned that Republican legislators had called at least one of the now-fired attorneys to try to fast track investigations into Democrats. Now it appears that the seeds for the plan originated in the White House. Harriet Miers, she of the failed nomination to the Supreme Court, had wanted a wholesale purge of US attorneys as Bush's second term began. History, apparently, teaches these fools nothing.

Unfortunately, history rarely teaches most of the electorate anything, as we continue to vote fools into power. Democracy only works with an informed, educated, and active electorate.

It is a sad time for the Republic.