Housecleaning

From The Carpetbagger Report’s Monday Mini-Report:

* Bush’s approval rating is down to just 31% in the new Newsweek poll, and down to 33% in the new Gallup poll. I’m not sure what the president did of late to warrant the drop in the polls, but I suppose the electorate just wants to kick him when he’s down.

I think it’s far more than just a little righteous revenge. Since September, when Congress recessed so senators and representatives could hit the mid-term campaign trail running, America has seen six years of the Republican Party, led by President Bush, as if in microcosm.

It was sort of like opening a forgotten container from the refrigerator. When the lid is peeled back, you’re hit with the dizzying stink of death and decay and discover that whatever it was inside has turned greenish black and fuzzy. You can’t wait to dump it down the garbage disposal, holding the container with the tips of your fingers and gagging as the slimy contents slough out and fall with a nasty, wet plop into the sink. Gahhhh!

You knew that container had been there awhile, but you’d forgotten for how long, or even exactly what was in it. And there it sat, lit up once in a while but mostly in the dark, slowly growing more and more toxic, malevolent and unrecognizable.

Yep, that’s our government under the Republicans.

You scrub the container with lots of soap and hot water, but it still carries a faint whiff of poison, and there are black bits that just won’t wash away – they’ve sent their roots deep into the plastic. They’ve become the plastic. And so, ruefully, you throw the container away.

Consider: Since September, we’ve seen the innocuously titled Military Commissions Act passed in a big hurry by Congress, doing away with habeas corpus and giving the president the power to have people detained on flimsy or even hearsay evidence, torture them and then keep them imprisoned indefinitely, as he pleases. This act basically flushes our democracy and the American right to a fair trail down the toilet, once and for all. Yes, there was some theatrical posturing by the notoriously two-faced John McCain, claiming to soften the act, but it was just that – theater. In the end, Bush got the power he craves, just as he did with the Patriot Act, another incredibly stupid law that stripped away the rights of all Americans to privacy.

The MCA blatantly cut the legs out from under our democracy, setting our country up for a fascist tyranny. Yes, the act has been challenged, and yes, now that the Democrats have won the majority in Congress, it may well be reversed. But don’t hold your breath.

Since September, we’ve watched with a sort of awe as Foley’s nasty, years-long extracurricular activities with young, male White House pages came to light – and his colleagues and superiors in Congress ran like rats for their holes, claiming not to have known about it or, if they did, well, they tried ... uh-huh.

Then there was Ted Haggard, a powerful evangelical who had the ear of the president and his men, who bought methamphetamine and sex from a male prostitute while exhorting his wide-eyed flocks to hate homosexuals with all their might.

We saw Senator Bob Ney tossed into the slammer for his involvement with the Jack Abramoff influence peddling scandal.

We had Bush himself stumping for Congressional candidates whose seats were looking a little shaky, calling anyone who opposed the war in Iraq traitors and terrorist sympathizers, and while he was at it, he did his best to terrorize all Americans, telling us that if we voted for Democrats, we might as well vote for bin Ladin.

And he and other Republicans made it clear that nothing would be done about Iraq before the election, in spite of the fact that more and more American soldiers were dying there. Their lives were coldly sacrificed on the rack of Republican politics.

After the election, Bush dumped Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary and admitted with a shrug that he’d lied about keeping him on until the end of his presidency so as not to mess up the chances for Republican candidates to win the election.

“Kick him when he’s down”?

I dunno. I think it’s simply that Americans finally decided to clean out the national refrigerator. Now that the job has started, we’re finding more and more containers full of awful, dead things and we’ve discovered, to our dismay, that the toxic crud has invaded the refrigerator itself. The walls are moldy, the shelves slick with slime. The stench is making us sick to our stomachs.