Tish

Tish
Originally uploaded by Mom Smackley

Dear Carolyn Jones:

Your Morticia took our world and turned it upside down...and we loved it! When you cut the roses off of their stems and said: "What lovely thorns this year - too bad they have such ugly blooms," we fell in love with a goddess of the dark. You were beautiful, seductive, wild, and - not funny - satirical. You put June Cleaver in her place. Thank you!

Bush's Partners in Crime: Political Schemers and Scandals We've Known and Loved

And George Bush Thinks That People BELIEVE Him?

"I was feeling sorry for you and thinking I was doing my Christian duty by making love to you."

That quote comes from the diary of Senator Bob Packwood. He supposedly said it to one of the 27 women who filed sexual harassment suits against him in 1995. Just before he resigned under threat of expulsion from the Senate.

Government. Crime. Scandal. The subjects seem to live together like one big, dysfunctional family. Here's a small list of the crimes of Members of Congress (since 2000 - we couldn't devote the webspace to all of them!). Some of these guys got off lightly, some (justifiably) didn't, but they all believed in one thing: the ignorance of the American public.

Members of Congress who have been charged with crimes since 2000:

Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio): tax evasion, bribery, racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice (5/4/01)

Rep. William Janklow (R-South Dakota): second-degree manslaughter after his car struck and killed a motorcyclist. (8/29/03)

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas): felony money laundering, conspiracy in fundraising efforts. (10/3/05)

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, (R-California): a total of $2.4 million in bribes associated with a corruption scheme (3/03/06)

Rep. Bob Ney (R – Ohio): trading political favors for gifts and campaign donations from lobbyist Jack Abramoff (1/19/07)

Rep. William Jefferson (D-Louisiana): racketeering, soliciting bribes, money laundering (6/04/07)

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho): arrested in bathroom sex sting at the Minneapolis airport (6/11/07)

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Arizona): extortion, wire fraud, money laundering attributed to Arizona land swap (2/22/08)

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska): false reporting of services received personally from oil services company (7/29/08)

And let's take a look at some of the political scandals:

Mayor (Detroit) Kwame Kilpatrick: perjury concerning an extra-marital affair

Governor (New York) Eliot Spitzer: accused of involvement in a prostitution ring

Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana): active involvement in the business of Deborah Jeane Palfry, aka the D.C. Madam

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: the political firing of eight competent U.S. Attorneys

Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida): reports of “sexually charged” emails to boys working as congressional pages.

Pres. Richard Nixon: (R): involvement with a cover-up concerning a break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate office complex

Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew (R): bribery and corruption investigation

Additional political/career scandals: Chappaquidick, Iran Contra, Robert Taft, Gary Hart, Marion Barry, Whitewater, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, Gov. Robert Taft, Clinton-Lewinski.

I ran across this in my research and just couldn't pass up the chance to relay it to readers:

Sen. Bob Packwood: 29 women accused Senator Packwood of sexual harassment.

In his diary, Robert Packwood wrote: “But I said wait a minute. You and I have made love maybe six or seven times. She says, “At the most.” I said, “Well, six or seven times, and you were telling me then that you maybe made love once a year. I was feeling sorry for you and thinking I was doing my Christian duty by making love to you.”

Ouch!
So very many politicians and plain government hacks were involved in headline-grabbing politics, it's a wonder that they were able to escape public scrutiny, but one man laughed at the public and its questions of ethics. Amongst the most scheming, conniving political ne'er-do-wells of his or any other time was non other than Roy Cohn. He was more than a legal henchman for Joe McCarthy, he was, before that, the man who coaxed a death sentence testimony from Ethel Rosenberg's brother David Greenglass. From Alger Hiss to John Gotti, from the Copacabana to Studio 54, Cohn knew everyone and partied everywhere. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred Cohn in August of 1986 - the same month he died of AIDS. Tony Kushner's play, Angels In America focused on Cohn and his double life as a closeted homosexual. It pulled out all the stops and portrayed him as a duplicitous man dying of a disease he said that he did not have. He said he had "liver cancer". At the time of his disbarment, National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart referred to him as "an ice-cold sleaze".

Now I'm going to throw this out to readers simply because the above characters beg the question: is the Bush Administration worse than these people?

• Refusal to testify to a Congressional Committee
• Undocumented meetings with energy corporations
• Deliberate revelation of the identity of a covert CIA operative
• Approval of methods of torture against the Geneva Conventions
• False allegations concerning the link of Iraq to the events of 9/11
• Commutation of the criminal sentencing of an administrative aide
• False allegations concerning WMDs causing the country to go to war
• Refusal to submit documents requested by Congressional investigations

Just a thought.

Torturing Us With Torture: Is the Administration Trying to Kill Us?

CIA "Rendition Map" Sorry it didn't come in a larger resolution.

Fri Aug 1, 1:38 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorism suspects at the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia in 2002 and possibly 2003, a former senior U.S. official has told Time magazine.

"The official, a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings after September 11 who has since left government, says a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island," the magazine reported.

The Pentagon repeated earlier denials of U.S. military interrogations at the island. "There were no DOD detainees or interrogations there," Jeffrey Gordon, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense, said on Friday.

Washington has admitted to staging "renditions," in which suspects in President George W. Bush's war against terrorism have been captured in one country and flown to another for interrogation.

Time said the identity of the prisoners was not made clear.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, editing by Vicki Allen)

Wikipedia:

Extraordinary rendition and irregular rendition are terms used to describe the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another, and the term "torture by proxy" is used by some critics to describe situations in which the U.S. has purportedly transferred suspected terrorists to countries known to employ harsh interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture. It has been alleged that torture has been employed with the knowledge or acquiescence of the United States, although United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated in an April 2006 radio interview that the United States does not transfer people to places where it is known they will be tortured.

The above map:

Blue: Detainees have allegedly been transported from these countries.

Red: Detainees have allegedly been transported to these countries.

Black: The United States and so-called "black sites" which are suspected of holding, imprisoning and torturing detainees.

Bush won't stop this insane party he calls the War on Terror. Will anyone? Meanwhile, articles like the above keep going out to foreign press. We're feared because of them and because Condaleeza Rice is too incompetent to allay other countries' fears.

And I ask: after January 20th, 2009, will anyone be held accountable?

Just a thought.