Bush the Saboteur
Posted on Sep 27, 2007
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—If a candidate for any office ran on a promise to render government dysfunctional—to destroy its capacity to work on behalf of something roughly considered to be the common good, to assure that bitter division and not even a grudging tilt toward compromise would prevail—it is reasonable to assume that voters would recoil. This would surely be true if the office-seeker aspired to a seat on the local sewer commission.
President Bush did not run for the White House on such a platform. But it is how he has governed, and how he seems to see his role—now more than ever. The predisposition has grown since the Democrats won control of Congress, an event that might have punctured the bubble of disinformation around Bush, but which seems only to have reinforced it.
The crisis now at hand, besides Iraq, is how to finance the most basic operations of the federal government. It is a manufactured impasse, since Congress has actually made quicker progress in approving routine spending bills this year than in most. The House already has passed its dozen appropriations bills. This compares with none—zero—passed when Republicans led the chamber last year. When the Democrats began running the House in January, their first cleanup chore was completing that leftover task.
The more deliberate Senate has passed four spending measures. This incomplete record is one reason Congress must pass one of those “continuing resolutions” that always seem to the public to symbolize political indolence. But this bit of housekeeping to keep the government operating after Oct. 1 shouldn’t be confused with the more significant reason a budget crisis is brewing—the reason there is the potential to repeat the infamous government shutdown of 1995.
Bush, having declined to veto a single spending measure when Republicans controlled Congress, says he wants to veto just about all of them now. It is perhaps too near the twilight of his presidency to call Bush on this latest hypocrisy—and anyway, the repetition is tiresome. Better to illuminate the picayune nature of the fight Bush picks.
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070927_bush_the_saboteur/
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