• Is Obama Right To Ignore Bush Transgressions?

President Bush has cloaked his term in the White House with a singular distinction of secrecy that would give Richard Nixon a case of acute envy. President Elect Obama has just indicated that he does not want to be, “looking backwards.” Is this an appropriate deflection for an incoming administration?

The eight-year imperial Presidency that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have enjoyed, has been one long sequence of questionable and unexplained, but massively expensive events. Taxpayers have been patient as they watched an administration mislead them into a war whose astronomical costs may never be audited, and through which much questionable siphoning of cash has been deftly executed. Bush and Cheney friends, along with their companies including Halliburton Co. were seen to be taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of contracts. Taxpayers were not surprised when Halliburton’s Chairman announced he was moving headquarters offshore to Dubai. The endless fomenting suspicions were not appeased, they were irritated. Repeatedly, questionable corporate ethics were given a pass.

Obscene pictures taken in a prison they had never heard of also confused Americans. They were further conflicted in how they should feel with the detention of prisoners in Guantanamo, held indefinitely without due process. The discomfort was not really for the prisoners, but was due to a certain malaise stirring in the knowledge that while laws provide us protection against imprisonment without at least having had the benefit of due process, the Administration had managed to somehow circumvent the rules. Who might be next?

America was provided detailed explanations on the extraction of information from extrajudicial prisoners, through a particularly aggressive method, and “waterboarding” joined the English language. We have more recently wondered about the extent to which spying on our lives has actually occurred. Although we have moved through anxiety regarding terrorism, and then passed into annoyance on the invasion of our privacy, we are now slipping into a tunnel of suspicion that government attitude has shifted to an assumption that everyone is suspect until proven otherwise.

The Iraq war, the Iraqi reconstruction, and the countless available accesses to financial abuse and corruption, continue to make headlines. These reports do not exhaust our patience as much as they might have done prior to the current financial crisis overtaking our lives. The bombardment of bad news has to be prioritized. A $15 trillion debt trench has been dug by corporate and political mismanagement, with enabling help from very suspicious Congressional oversight.

Whatever Obama’s motives for not being emphatic or specific on digging out any wrong doing, the decision appears to be the right path for him to take, and his Presidency can be given a pass on this one. The problem is deep and wide, but it is not his. This conundrum is endemic across too many levels of the system from the White House to the Capitol, from the Pentagon to Wall Street, and from Iraq to Dubai. Taxpayers will have to pressure their elected Congress and the hired bureaucracy to deal vigorously with those who have trampled on laws, if accordant evidence of wrongdoing surfaces. The current administration and legislature cannot be given a pass. The country does not need a witch hunt, however, taxpayer outrage deserves a relief valve and the American Democracy can withstand the heat.

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• Obama - The Second Tell

As follow-up to a November 21, ’08 article on this post regarding signs that may reveal the direction that an Obama Presidency might take, the following presents another “tell.” This one is less innocuous, but may prove to be more expensive to America.

Perceptions inside the current White House, when Bush and Cheney took office, were that incurring debt was its right and was its political capital to spend with Cheney supposedly claiming “deficits don’t matter.” Hindsight was temporarily kind to them with support from William Niskanen, a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors also claiming, “The lesson we should have learned is that deficits have little or no short-term economic impacts.”

Through the early years of this decade, everyone accepted the premise that debt was a normal, perhaps integral conveyance of a modern society, possibly even an applauded one. From economists to taxpayers on assembly lines, everyone dwelled in the comfort that deficits and borrowing could bring unfathomable respect from acquisition of material possessions. Second mortgages were objects of desire and their procurements were cause for boasting. And didn’t second cars and gigantic cinema sized TV screens provide jobs for people in foreign lands anyway? Who could possibly argue with success?

Debt administered through spinal shunts delivered energy into the U.S. economy. The amphetamine rush sent economic experts into undiluted delusions of grandeur, and the exploiters into creative overdrive on derivative concoctions too complex for their corruption and decomposition to be diagnosed. Somewhere along the delivery track, the drug magically transformed into analgesic and the rest of society, including government, slid into either acceptance or compliance. Some sectors of government abdicated responsibility, when their persuasion to appear oblivious was finessed with financial seduction.

Debt is seductive. Its power is evidently overpowering. America is anxious to move on beyond the current administration and is anticipating a new President with promises of change. We listen for signs of that impending change, and so here is the Second Tell. During this past weekend President Elect Obama, while making promises of unprecedented public works projects, stated, “We've got to provide a blood infusion. And that means we can't worry short-term about the deficit." At least Obama’s delivery of attitude toward economic probity was less arrogant than Bush and Cheney’s, but identical in its bearing. He seems more genuine, even if misguided. The legal debt ceiling has already been increased to $11.3 trillion and more increases will be requested.

Evidently not so much has changed or will change, and deficits be damned, full steam ahead with borrowing and government intervention. An additionally disconcerting sense is felt when accepting the reality of the notion that even bigger government may not be just an enigmatic abstraction over the coming four years.

A preceding article on this post discussed the need of the 44th President to urgently obtain an intensive and thorough education on inflation. With the coming boom in currency creation, not doing so would be tantamount to an abdication of responsibility.

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• TRIGGER FOR A CHENEY PRESIDENTIAL PARDON?

We read the headline on a story buried deep on a back page related to Texas indictments on Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but we don’t bother reading further. What’s the point? Surely it’s related to Guantanamo Bay, or some other absurdity these guys were involved in. It did not make the front cover, so how momentous can it be? The story appears to be about prisons, or prisoners, or something else that won’t affect us much, so who cares? Things are rarely as they appear.

On closer analysis, we are offered a view of the bizarre circus that is often performed by the Texas judicial system. That is not bewildering, since the performance of many magisterial infrastructures on this continent are desperately wanting, and the Texas judiciary rarely provides a surprise. The indictment of a sitting Vice President of the United States, however, should be international front-page news, and deserves dissection with all the skepticism that CSI Miami’s labs might percolate into truth. Alas, no such disposition is demonstrated on this case, yet even for modest entertainment, the incident deserves attention.

It may be impossible to discern if this collision of hapless dominos being played in a judicial game of Texas law, is simply a Universal coincidence when all astrological forces have merged to favor the Bush Administration, or if it is an outcome of the current White House hard at work on its end game.

The endless rambling road of predictions and conjecture is littered with decimated egos, yet on this one, can we help ourselves? The opportunity is too appetizing to pass up. This spectacle in Texas, fields a cast of characters too reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, to be either funny, or an aberration. And no, this isn’t a conspiracy theory revelation, but how good can a story get?

Cheney is accused of conflict of interest because he owns substantial holdings in the Vanguard Group, which invests in private prisons, while he holds influence over the Willacy County’s federal immigrant detention center. He is also accused of misdemeanor assaults on detainees because of that ownership link. In the litany of errant decisions suspected of Cheney, nailing him with a misdemeanor does not ignite much interest, and would not even make any list of top ten transgressions. This misdemeanor would also not find much traction in most courts, yet there it stands.

Gonzales on the other hand is accused of terminating an investigation into abuses at a federal detention center in the county. Gonzales demonstrated little propensity for recollection of anything when Congress questioned him on events within his own office. How can anyone possibly believe that he might successfully be linked to events inside a Texas detention center, while he fumbled around Washington? Perhaps someone is finally crediting Gonzales of having talent.

We suspect that Cheney and Gonzales are not losing much sleep from anxiety over this affair. Neither the accused, nor the District Attorney showed up for arraignments. The D. A. was found camping outside the courthouse with a horse, 3 goats and a rooster, and clerks, judges and prosecutors related to the case are separately being indicted on charges of abuse. They are furthermore embroiled in other debilitating peculiarities, laying a cloak of dubious lineage on an already questionable judicial exercise.

So how bizarre is this game? Perhaps not bizarre at all. The timing is impeccable and the players appear perfectly suited for the performances of their lives. Burlesque or not, they may be celebrated for years to come at a now famous ranch in Crawford, Texas, and might be deserving of a badge of excellence.

For all those who have reported, with a certain glee, on the charges against the intensely disliked Vice President’s potential humiliation, don’t dive into your bath of triumph with too fervent exhilaration. You may be gawking at a perfect scenario for George W. Bush to erect a Chinese Wall around himself.

As Bush exits the most powerful office in the world, but before welcoming the 44th. President, he will dispense Presidential pardons with sanguine indifference to perceptions. He can do so even before any trial is concluded. What a perfect, non-descript, development, and excuse for a blanket absolution of his Vice President from exposure to flack flying from any and all activities, or decisions. Gonzales is just an additional moat of protection for fortress Bush. Rather than wait for events to unravel after he has left office, or for other charges to be leveled at Cheney, Bush is presented a perfectly rational circumstance for exercising the power to pardon, before it evaporates completely from his grasp on January 20, 2009.

Deployment of the protective mantle to shelter the first guard of this markedly reviled President may propel Congress to revisit the practice that has been an embarrassment to the electorate in almost every instance that a Commander in Chief has left office. Presidential pardons have no place in a Democracy that honors itself with Laws.

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