This is what we’re in for.
I know many of these idea have been touched upon often, but perhaps not quite like this: a look at the war that will be waged on Capitol Hill in the next two years.
You know that horrible feeling you had in your stomach everytime Bush violated the Constitution? Well friends, it’s a comin’ back.
Paul Begala shows us the bid domestic story, and five paragraphs of Frank Rich predict what will happen in Iraq.
We’re going to be mooned, flipped off, contemptuously mocked and disobeyed until the bitter end. So even though we have taken the ship, I predict we are going to be in for nothing less than a Coup D’Etat.
It will be called a Constitutional Crisis- there will be 24 hour coverage and I believe that something like Paul Begala predicted would actually happen. US Marshalls will be confronted by US Marines or by worse- contractors-Skeletor-like overpaid anti terrorists special weapons folks from CusterBattles will stand against Federal Marshalls.
Who will win...?
I wrote some time ago in a diary entitled Bush Has No Idea How Much Trouble He Is In , that the Iraq Study Group was nothing less than an intervention by a Bush 41 and the Pragmatistas ( Scowcroft, Baker, etcetera) to save the GOP’s hurting ass- or should I say pachyderm- from even more damage by the Cheney Bush team. Well if you think the hundreds of signing statements W has already used to disobey Federal Court Orders, you will W push the Executive Branch to the power of pure Tyrrant.
That is why he is switching Generals out like a croupier. He, or Rover, is establishing lines of egress. You bet. He and his family have even bought hectares of land in Paraguay and are building a compound where they retreat to after the next election. They are about to defend themselves with every penny and dirty trick they have. Bush and Cheney will simply say "No" and Tony Snow will lecture smarter people on the Constitution.
They may even win a Constitutional showdown. They may have the votes on the Supremes to win as they did in 2000.
We may end up with an ersatz full-blown dictatorship. The question is- is there enough willpower to say no to this?
The only reason George W. Bush would turn loose of White House Counsel Harriett Miers - who gazes upon our president with an adoration and veneration bordering on idolatry - is because he wants a war-time consigliere.
In a way that might make Harry F. Byrd proud, our president is about to embark on a policy of massive resistance. He will instruct his lawyers to delay, deny and refuse to comply with any effort by Congress to get to the bottom of official corruption - especially as the billions squandered or stolen in Mr. Bush's war. He'll try to run out the clock, then take his chances with his hand-picked right-wing judiciary. (Keep in mind the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, through which this dispute would flow, includes such Bush appointees as Brett Kavanaugh, a Ken Starr protégé whose work in the Bush White House was described by Henry Waxman as promoting "an imperial presidency." And the Supreme Court has such presidential suck-ups as John Roberts and Sam Alito.)
Thank God the American people - and Nancy Pelosi -- have given the responsibility of oversight we have constitutional heroes like Waxman and John Dingell. They are fair and tough. But even in their combined 83 years experience in Congress they have not seen a crowd that has more contempt for the Constitution than the Bush-Cheney team. I would not be surprised to learn that, in anticipation of receiving congressional subpoenas, the Bushies were having shredding parties that would make Ollie North and Fawn Hall blush.
Link Here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Remember that knot in your stomach you feel when you hear about caskets hidden from view, worse and worse problems in Iraq violence? Well folks, that’s gonna’ get worse too.
Here is the master surgeon, Frank Rich reading the tea leaves.
It’s against the backdrop of both the Hussein video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed "surge" in Iraq — a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation. As Mr. Ford had it, America cannot regain its pride by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned and, for that matter, as far as Iraq is concerned. By large margins, the citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start disengaging. So do America’s top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.
It would still take that many troops, not the 20,000 we might scrape together now. Last month the Army and Marines issued an updated field manual on counterinsurgency (PDF) supervised by none other than Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the next top American military commander in Iraq. It endorsed the formula that "20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents" is "the minimum troop density required." By that yardstick, it would take the addition of 100,000-plus troops to secure Baghdad alone.
The "surge," then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined "victory" Mr. Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the "we’re not winning, we’re not losing" status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last week, a new president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof." This is nothing but a replay of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger "decent interval" exit strategy concocted to pass the political buck (to Mr. Ford, as it happened) on Vietnam.
As the White House tries to sell this flimflam, picture fresh American troops being tossed into Baghdad’s caldron to work alongside the Maliki-Sadr Shiite lynch mob that presided over the Saddam hanging. Contemplate as well Gerald Ford’s most famous words, spoken as he assumed the presidency after the Nixon resignation: "Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."
This time the people do not rule. Two months after Americans spoke decisively on Election Day, the president is determined to overrule them. Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.
No link- tech problems
So you think we will have hope for stem cell research? Or stopping the torture? Or opening up the Cheney Energy Commission? Or raising wages without major tax breaks?
One might be a recycled version of the stem-cell funding bill that drew Bush's lone veto last July. Other possibilities include measures that would raise the minimum wage without offsetting tax breaks for businesses, fully put in place the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations and curb oil-industry subsidies.
The Democratic takeover of Congress and the planned 100-hour burst of legislation sent parliamentary experts in both the administration and Congress scurrying to dust off the manual on vetoes and to brace for a possible onslaught.
In the new Congress, just days old, promises of bipartisanship still fill the air. Such pledges, however, may be put to the test in no time.
Link here
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_s_vetoes
My prediction-There you have it, a fight to the finish. To the bitter bitter end.
2.35 dead day X 730 days to January 9th 2009 + 3006 already dead = 4721 American dead ( luckily well within the Fox News measure for acceptable slaughter ).
Add to this unfortunate statistic another 10,000 or so wounded that we can barely take care of as it is.
If you hate Bush now, just wait...
Ps- sorry to bum you out.