Dante Atkins:
Ten years ago today, in a baffling and overtly political 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court decided that the only way to protect the equal voting rights of the people of Florida was to stop counting their votes--but only in this particular instance and no other, because they only wanted the votes to stop being counted when George W Bush was ahead.
The Bush legacy is one written in the red ink of debt, greed and death. An occupation of the nation hosting that did attack us, botched from an overweening desire to wage a preemptive war against a country that did not. Thousands of American lives and potentially hundreds of thousands of native lives lost in the process. Torture prisons in the name of national security. Warrantless wiretapping and other forms of surveillance and entrapment against United States citizens and nonviolent peace groups.
Not that the nation was just morally bankrupt: George W Bush did a number on our nation's fiscal health as well, with massive transfers of its wealth into the hands of those who needed the least help, and permission for private entities to loot the land and natural resources of this nation with no return to its taxpayers. And ten years later, virtually nobody has paid the price.
Many progressives--myself included-- felt that the Bush years should have been a national nightmare that we would just wake up from. That the immoral, absurd and illegal practices of those times were just a mere interregnum permitted by the ascension of a Manichean president operating during a time of national crisis, and that once he was out of office, we would instinctively revert to the comparative sanity we had under Bill Clinton. But we haven't yet, and it's likely that without systemic structural change, we never will.
The executive power grab is not restored, nor does it seem that the irresponsible, nearly trillion dollar tax cut for the superwealthy will be rescinded either. Let's bankrupt our nation further by adding $700 billion to our debt so Paris Hilton can get another $100,000 gift from the taxpayers. Nicely done, teabaggers and complicit Dems. Happy Anniversary all!
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