Let Freedom (Fries) Ring

Once Bob Ney was the Mayor of Capitol Hill, wielding his influence as chairman of the House Administration committee to assign parking spaces and order French fries to be renamed “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria. Now, he’ll be trading cigarettes for extra cans of Pringles in prison. It’s an American tragedy, don’t you think?

I don’t mean to be melodramatic, it’s just that I’m reeling from the stunning news of Ney’s guilty plea to fraud and conspiracy in the Abramoff scandal. Next thing you know, we’ll find out he wears a toupee. He’s admitting to taking about 170 thousand dollars worth of goodies from Abramoff and his associates. Who could have seen that coming? After all, for more than a year he denied any wrongdoing. “I was duped,” he said, and we believed him, didn’t we? Even when we read emails like this one:

“Just met with Ney! We’re f’ing gold! He’s going to do Tigua...”

---Jack Abramoff, March 2002

So another one bites the dust. I suppose I shouldn’t make light of Ney’s problems and issues. It’s just that I have a low tolerance for those who throw stones at glass houses (using election-year politics for the gain of their own party), when they too live in a glass house. The only way you can throw stones at others is to live in a house made of brick (no corruption). And from what I’ve seen in recent months, more and more in the Bush Administration just don’t meet that test.

It bothers me a lot when a politician is an advocate of a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay couples from marriage to “defend marriage”, when he/she are on their third marriage.

It bothers me when a politician is against abortion, except when they get caught with their pants down (no pun intended) and find out that, for political reasons, they seek out an abortion and try like hell to keep it a secret.

So it’s hard for me not to get that evil grin when I read that yet another corrupt politician gets zapped for getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

But I think things are changing. After all, it doesn’t look like Bush will be able to pull off creating an exception for the United States to the Geneva Convention.

“Time is running out,” Mr Bush told a news conference at the White House. “Congress needs to act wisely and promptly.” He went on to warn that their refusal to endorse White House proposals to redefine compliance with sections of the Geneva Convention prohibiting torture would weaken America in its “war on terror”.

“I believe that it is vital that our folks on the front line have the tools that are necessary to protect the American people,” Mr Bush said. “The reason they need those tools is because the enemy wants to attack us again.”

Senator John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner in the Vietnam War, and the other Republican rebels argue that loosening the standard on the Geneva Convention would put US soldiers at greater risk of mistreatment if captured.

Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, has added his prestige to their cause. In a letter to Mr McCain, Mr Powell said the White House proposals would create doubts about the “moral basis” of the war on terror.

But Mr Bush showed little patience for that argument.

“It is unacceptable to think that any kind of comparison (exists) between the behaviour of the United States of America and the Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve their objective,” he said. (source)

OH REALLY?

What about our treatment of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib? What about the people who were MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD by our own troops around Baghdad and Mahmudiyah?

BAGHDAD, June 30 -- The U.S. Army is investigating allegations that American soldiers raped and killed a woman and killed three of her family members in a town south of Baghdad, then reported the incident as an insurgent attack, a military official said Friday.

The alleged crimes occurred in March in the insurgent hotbed of Mahmudiyah. The four soldiers involved, from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, attempted to burn the family’s home to the ground and blamed insurgents for the carnage, according to a military official familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was providing details not released publicly. [...]

In June, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murder and other crimes related to the shooting death of a crippled man in Hamdaniya, west of Baghdad. Residents there said the soldiers planted a rifle and a shovel near the victim’s body to make it look as if he had been burying roadside bombs.

Later in June, three soldiers were charged with murdering three Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody and threatening to kill another soldier who saw the incident. And last week, two Pennsylvania National Guardsmen were charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed man in the western city of Ramadi and with trying to cover up the crime.

At least 14 U.S. service members have been convicted of crimes related to the deaths of Iraqi civilians or detainees, according to the Associated Press. (source)

The President may feel that it is “unacceptable to think that any kind of comparison (exists) between the behaviour of the United States of America and the Islamic extremists”, but I doubt the families of the innocent Iraqi’s killed at the hands of our troops will see the subtlety.

And just so I make myself clear on this before I get a lot of hate mail for dissing our troops, I should say that I support our troops, to the extent that they are trying to do an impossible job - restore and maintain order when they have been re-deployed time and time and time again to the point of exhaustion, without an adequate number of soldiers in Iraq to achieve that task, and for trying to follow orders when there is no plan in place to accomplish anything. And for that, the blame goes right back to the President of the United States and the Congress who nodded time and time again (until now when his poll numbers are pathetic) to endorse his failed policies.

The result is a failed effort in Iraq, along with an estimated 50,000 Iraqi civilians dead (yes we do body counts, despite what General Tommy Franks of US Central Command said: “We don’t do body counts”), and this grim reality....

As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States approaches, another somber benchmark has just been passed.

The announcement Sunday of four more U.S. military deaths in Iraq raises the death toll to 2,974 for U.S. military service members in Iraq and in what the Bush administration calls the war on terror. The 9/11 attack killed 2,973 people, including Americans and foreign nationals but excluding the terrorists. (source)

Past Presidents have been impeached for lesser crimes than the deeds of our current President.