Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Amazing news! Inspections find culture of corruption within the Bush government!

From the NYT, the Interior Department's Inspector General seems to have found a lot of unusually blatant corruption:

"In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government's largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

"A culture of ethical failure" besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration's watch."

Why am I not surprised?

That might be because the corruption this regime has inspired is so extensive and so much of it has so far been revealed that it's more of a shock when a portion of it isn't corrupt. Bush is all about "cultures of ethical failure."

And who's going to fix it? McCain/Palin? Puh-leeze. McCain's become a dishonerable serial smearer who votes in lockstep with Bush, and Palin - well, she might as well be Bush:

The Washington Post reports that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) is “being asked by a local Republican activist to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request, including 40 that were copied to her husband, Todd.” Invoking a favored practice of the Bush administration, Palin has claimed executive privilege to keep the e-mails secret
— despite the fact many of them were sent to Todd, who is not an elected official.

What’s more, Palin and her staff intentionally use her personal Yahoo e-mail account, perhaps to avoid document release requests:

Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than from her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public.

“Whoops!” Palin aide Frank Bailey wrote, after addressing an e-mail to the governor’s official state address.

“Frank, This is not the Governor’s personal account,” a secretary reminded him.

The lawyer filing the request pointed out that the point of government e-mail is to ensure “security and encryption.” “She’s running state business out of Yahoo?” he asked. Mother Jones reports that Palin’s refusal to hand over e-mails stands in violation of the Alaska Public Records Act.

Serial liar. Outrageous politicization of every position she holds. Firing people not slavishly loyal to her. Claiming executive priveledge at the drop of a hat and working hard to get around the system - yup. That's Bush. Palin's exactly like him, aside from the lipstick.

We don't need another four years of this shit.

And we sure as fuck don't need another few months of this:

Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In a press conference today, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the administration’s ongoing efforts to find Osama bin Laden, calling him the “mastermind” of 9/11. Perino interrupted the reporter, claiming bin Laden was not the true “mastermind” of the attacks:

Q But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 –

PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

[snip]

Perino seems to be attempting to justify the White House’s failure to catch bin Laden by suggesting he was not the “mastermind.” But in September 2006, former press secretary Tony Snow stated:

Osama bin Laden, mastermind of September 11th, the person that many people talk about and still have concerns about, calls this fight, the fight in Iraq, “the third world war.”

Up is down, white is black, and what the Bush regime told you for seven years no longer applies. Reality is what they make it.

Is it any wonder America's falling in shards at our feet?