George W. Bush is no lame duck. That's right, I said it. The words that every democrat fears of hearing from their fellow man as of right now. No, Bush isn't one. He's more dangerous than that.
Right now the Democrats are trying to pin President Bush in any corner that they possibly can. Admittedly they haven't done the best job; all they can seem to do is issue what I call "half-votes"; they'll vote for a troop pullout or something of that sort and get a "yea" vote on it only because they have the simple majority in Congress. Then the President (inevitably) vetoes any bill with language calling for troop pullout and the Democrats have no choice but to revise the bill because they obviously don't want to be seen as "troop haters" and withhold funding for them.
But even when the darn Democrats manage to corner the President, he utters two words to the Press and basically the world that sends shivers through any true advocate of democracy: "executive privilege".
Do those two words mean the implication of dictatorship? Hardly. But does it cover up wrongdoing and corruption? Most definitely. Pres. Bush most recently used it in an attempt to restrain his legal counsel Harriet Myers from attending a Senate committee hearing about possible wrong-doings with the start of the war in Iraq. He's also always stood by his embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez saying that he did nothing wrong. The pinnacle of his cover-ups has been the reduction of Scooter Libby's sentence from prison time to just paying a simple fine. All coincidences? I think not. What Bush has done now is shattered his "grand masterpiece", whatever it may be, whether trying to get cheaper oil or whatever. He knows it too: his approval ratings are at an all time low and military enlistments are pretty darn low as well. All he's trying to do now is super-glue the pieces to his supposed art. Unfortunately there's not much the Democrats can really do about it; after 9/11 we are still in a fearful state, and as long as the President cites "executive privilege" for the sake of saving America, there will still be people to believe him.
But something will inevitably happen soon. Whether it is a terrorist attack, a mass mutiny, an assassination attempt, a call for impeachment, or just civil disobedience, who knows. But surely checks and balances has become a myth in today's world...and whether it can be put into line before it is too late, we may never know.
bush as a lame duck? I would've preferred that.
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