Wednesday, October 29, 2008

What Goes Around Comes Around

Several weeks ago I asked whether it would be 40 years in the wilderness for the Republi-cons. Read this interesting article, Washington Post, Return to Grant Park, which speculates that after 40 years in the wilderness Democrats will have come home, ironically enough to Chicago's Grant Park, the scene of clashes between police and demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The article says:

"In part, the GOP's decline is due to the Bush administration's penchant for headlong, unilateral military adventures. But fundamentally, the coming Republican calamity is a consequence of public anger at the economy that predominantly Republican perspectives and policies have shaped over the past four decades, in which the vast majority of Americans no longer share in the prosperity of good times and get clobbered when the economy turns bad.

Absent a governing New Deal coalition, the mixed economy the New Deal made, where unions balanced corporations and the government provided a safety net, has substantially eroded. Now, reenter, stage center-left, the Democrats."


It is almost karma for the Republi-cons, don't you think?

Bush's Twilight Zone

In the last post I asked what will we do without Bush. But more seriously, what will Bush do without accountability? From The Guardian:, Brace yourselves - George Bush will soon be free to do just what he wants:

"We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won't even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer."

One thing Bush will do is exercise his power of pardon. An article in Roll Call found that Bush has issued only 157 pardons and six commutations of sentences during nearly eight years in office. The possibilities for the final round of pardons include: Scooter Libby, Senator Ted Stevens, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers who are still being investigated, two border control agents who were sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison for shooting an unarmed smuggler in the buttocks, Abu Ghraib soldiers, CIA agents who possibly engaged in torture while interrogating terrorism suspects, General Services Administration Chief of Staff David Safavian, and lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Bush might even pardon himself.