A few more turnings

What is that faint aroma in the wind? Ah yes, Karl Rove just passed by. Tom Delay, disgraced and out of office, tries to regain his reputation as the Exterminator again and suggests that the Democratic leadership is close to treasonous. Dick Cheney, Eminence grise of the administration, accuses Harry Reid of flip-flopping on the funding of Iraq. Candidate Giuliani is trying to scare the electorate into believing that a Democratic Presidency in 2008 will lead to another terrorist attack, as if the debacle and terrorist-encouraging actions and inactions of this current administration really kept terrorists from planning. That's right, it's the Democrats that are giving terrorists reasons to attack us. And George Bush, President of the United States, shows innocently and with no awareness of the irony on late night TV that he is acting as the puppet master to the Prime Minister of Iraq, giving al-Maliki what? a B minus? He also thinks that Alberto Gonzales is doing . . .. well, a heckuva job. (http://www.charlierose.com/home).

The historian Robert Dallek just published a book on Nixon and Kissinger, and he recalls similar talk from those two about impending victory and South Vietnam needing to provide security for its people, all the while knowing that the war was lost. Yet they slogged on , much to the pain of thousands of American and Vietnamese families. The president should be talking about how we will pay reparations to the Iraqis, or perhaps how we should be taking care of the largest number of refugees in the Middle East since the nakbar, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). Or perhaps he should be asking Nouri al-Maliki in his daily tlephone conversations why the Iraqi government is failing to give the UN accurate figures on the number of deaths in the country. That government is slowly dissolving, by some accounts; wait until they start debating or start trying to jam through the Parliament the privatization bill for oil.)

So for a remedy, read Senator George McGovern's op-ed riposte, in the Los Angeles Times, to Richard Cheney's ignorant statements about McGovern's platform during the 1972 political campaign. Print it out, keep it in your purse or wallet and read it every once in a while. And don't forget that April 28 is Impeachment Day. (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mcgovern24apr24,0,4084076.story.)

Word is that Monica Goodling, White House liaison to the Justice Department, who intends to take advantage of the Fifth Amendment, is now going to be subpoenaed to testify under oath, but with immunity. Apparently only the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against extending immunity. Keep this one in your daily radar.

Perhaps the ship of state is slowing down. Now to turn it around.