A president's shameful legacy

[tpsbmam]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-a-presidents-shameful-legacy-793662.html

Independent, UK

<snips>

Anyone who imagined that, with the clock running down on his tenure in the White House and America's attention concentrated on the election of his successor, George Bush could do no more serious damage to America's reputation in the world must now surely be rueing their complacency.

At the weekend, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have specified what CIA interrogation techniques can legitimately be used against suspected terrorists. The intelligence bill, passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress, would have limited CIA interrogators to the 19 techniques allowed in the 2006 Army Field Manual. This would have ruled out methods such as simulated drowning ("waterboarding"), sensory deprivation, mock executions, hypothermia, beating, burning, electric shocks and sexual abuse.

The President shows no signs of understanding the damage done by giving free rein to interrogators. It is a sure-fire way to produce gross prisoner abuses of the sort we saw at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mr Bush may claim until he is blue in the face that "we do not torture", but torture is exactly what his administration has facilitated with its disgracefully relaxed attitude to constraining interrogators.

This latest veto by Mr Bush is another example of a recurrent theme in his Presidency: a disregard for the international rule of law and a fatal indifference to how America is viewed by the rest of the world. This self-declared patriot who wraps himself in the Stars and Stripes at every opportunity has actually done as much as any American in recent years to undermine the values his country claims to stand for.

[mac2]

1. What Constitution and laws?

Not to mention international treaty violations which he does not adhere to (not his duty to change). He has given the world's dictators and despots reason to do what ever they want. Yet they won't impeach?

The message...you'd better do what I want or I will find a way to abuse you or find a member of your family. What else are those leaders in DC but a Mafia? They have abused their power to become thugs.

Not even the President himself, VP, or Congress have respect for the office of President (represents the people of his country).

One box store after another closes in our town. Yet we are only in a "recession"? There has never been such incompetent leaders in "swamp land" by the Potomac. Shame on you all.

Cruel and unusual punishment...bring it on says Georgie. What comes around goes around DC.

[greyghost]

3. One of may favorite sayings. I sincerely hope it rings true in this

case. What goes around comes around.

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. Texacutioner was a title well deserved, now he's King of the Castle, "WorldExecutioner" now . .

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.
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Not much wonder the world is a mess -

Those trillion$ on genocide could have solved a lot of grief and suffering,

Instead, USAmerican's taxes are being used to make things worse.

For Everybody.

[DeSwiss]

4. A very good article.

As a Baby-Boomer who cast his first vote against Richard Milhouse Nixon, and who later watched him escape justice, I remember him as being the one who brought us the idea of the Infallible Imperial Presidency. Or at least attempted to. And we Boomers, ourselves being a rather spoiled and selfish lot (the offspring of Great Depression survivors who vowed that their children would never be deprived), chose not to continue with the ugliness of "doing the right thing" -- the dealing with all the rancor and discord in the country then. We didn't have the time, nor the patience. We wanted it OVER. And so we paved over the ugly hard parts and we smoothed the way only to arrive at the place where we now are.

So I would have to say that at least for me, the late 20th century is where our decline began. Or maybe it just became apparent. And rather than "healing the nation" as so many political experts, historians and pundits of the time put it, the blanket pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford only planted the seeds whose fruit today lives on in the form of George W. Bush.

How many instances can anyone recall, in family or in friendships where the continued glossing over and the exercise of blatant disregard for the rights and consideration of others -- did not eventually lead to disharmony, breakup and despair? The betrayal of a loved one or a friend can send everyone connected to it into a tailspin. So why should the breaking of laws and the betrayal of a President be any different? The answers is: it's not. The wound must be lanced and open to the light of day, if healing is to ever take place. As in nature, we too are no different -- being that we are a part of it and it a part of us.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43 -- all of them represent the worst in us. Not "Law and Order" as Nixon espoused, but an almost total departure from it.

Not "Morning in America" as Reagan intoned, but "Mourning for America."

Not George H. W. Bush's "Read My Lips" but don't watch my hands while I steal the country blind, making deals with our enemies, just like dear 'ol dad.

And not George W. Bush's bald-faced lie of a "compassionate conservatism" but rather a cold, uncaring, and ignorant spendthriftism, which is burdening generation after generation with our short-sightedness.

This kind of open hostility for the rule of law, the selfishness, the arrogance, and the sense of entitlement, were the reasons for the coining of the phrase, "The Ugly American." And George W. Bush wears this label proudly....

- K&R