The first thing to understand about of scandals besetting the Bush administration is the sheer power of the U.S. Presidential system.
Here is a government not only at warand losing against the Iraqi resistance. It is at war within itself, as the State Department, Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency crucify each other over who lost the victory in Iraq. The director of the CIA has been peremptorily purged; the fiction that Gorge Tenet chose this moment to send more time with his family cannot possibly be believed by anyone.
This administration is now known to have created an entire secret archipelago of torture, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and hidden facilities around the world, in collaboration with god knows how many foreign intelligence services and freelance "interrogators" recruited from the old South African, Chilean and Argentinean dirty wars.
Distinguished retired foreign service officers, military men and recent administration officials are filling bookstores and newspaper columns with their accusations and first-hand accounts of the Bush administration's lies, ideologically driven recklessness, fiscal maladministration and general incompetence. Less than three years after 9/11, BushCheney-Rumsfeld have become the most internationally loathed and despised American government in history.
In a parliamentary system, a third of these .... revelations are generally instant political death to the Prime Minister if not his party. A Canadian Liberal government with an overwhelming majority is about to be voted out over a clientelist scandal amounting to roughly $100 million, statistically insignificant in Enron or Halliburton terms.
In the USA, on the contrary, these crimes may not even cost Bush the November election, which remains at this writing much too close to call. This is not due to any unique chauvinism, blindness or stupidity on the part of the American people, who as may be remembered did not elect George W. Bush in the first place
To understand what's going on here, it's CORPORATE POLLUTERS ATE MY
necessary to briefly explain BRAIN
the structural and iconic role of The Presidency in the U.S. political system. It is an institution that has served the U.S. ruling class superbly, from the founding of the Republic through an exceptionally violent second revolution called the Civil War, and the twentieth centutransformation from STOP GEORGE W. BUSH'S republic to world imperial
overlord. Particularly in the process ON THE ENVIRONMENT of the rise of U.S. imperialism,
the Presidency took on a degree of power and pomp that exceeds ••• that of any European royal house, the British monarchy included
The Presidency combines the functions of the "government of the day" with that of head of state; its dignity and standing therefore must be preserved at all costs, even from the irresponsibility and buffoonery of the incumbent.
In recent history, then, when the IranContra criminal conspiracy and economic uncertainties and possibly, in retrospect, the first symptoms of dementia) made it necessary to end Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1986, he was not formally removed from office but kept there ceremonially while a new White House Chief of Staff, Howard has entirely disappeared from history. came in from the North. The Contra forces from his resignation and replacement by A Gore, who would then have run and won as an incumbent.
Today, The Presidency is shielded by the fact that neither the corporate press nor the opposition party will simply state what is obviously true: that of course George W. Bush ordered the torture centres, that of course he personally ordered that the Geneva Conventions be treated as toilet paper, and that if any of this happened without his full knowledge he would be so indolent as to be a danger to the safety of the world if that weren't already clear enough.
The power of The Presidency and the importance of its image were graphically illustrated in the endless week of the Reagan funeral, when the celebrations of The Great Communicator's optimism and the libera tion of Eastern Europe were undisturbed by any mention of Guatemala, where the bodies of the disappeared are still being dug up.
Only rarely was there a recall of the vast largesse that the Reagan administration bestowed on Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
Reagan himself, ravaged by Alzheimers disease, remembered none of this in his final decade. The media do not have that excuse. Rather, their role in the complex process of Manufacturing Consent determines their complicity as perpetrators of the ongoing mythology of The Presidency.
George W. Bush is the incumbent beneficiary of this institutional amnesia; the people of Baker, effectively finished the term. This facto: the USA, Iraq and the world are the losers "freedom fighters" and "the equivalent of our