IT'S ONLY WEDNESDAY!!! I mean really. The year has barely gotten the new baby cry begun in the delivery room and all the participants are tired of carrying the scandal sheets. The lists of NoGoodDoers looks about as thick as the Manhattan phone directory. News organizations and assorted hangers on are...zzz...T..I...R..E...D. Not just ready for a nap tired. This is bone numbing, give me drugs any drugs, where is my favorite pillow, don't wake me 'til 2007 tired. The cause is....
The cause is simply too painfully obvious and freakishly simple to understand. What began as "possibly gonna be a rough four years" type of inside baseball, who's on first, and what did they pay to get there sort of scandal morphed into a scandal a month. Then, the Towers fell, and scandals sort of fell off the radar screen.
Soon there was full speed ahead war mongering. With war on the horizon, war profiteers weren't far behind. After all, when the government is handing out those spiffy contracts, no bid no less, there is high likelihood that someone, somewhere will figure out a way to skim a bit of profit off the top.
The war on gin, genteelly known as Prohibition, brought us rum runners. Well, the rum runners got a good start in the Civil War, and never really stopped.
Scandals started creating a gravity of their own. That would be the gravity that attracts things to itself. Sort of the way printing presses that are really good at cranking out those wonderfully artistic renditions of dead presidents and Ben Franklin, seem to have a bit of the green ink finding its way to the not quite US Mint versions of bills. In fact, dear Ben Franklin's portrait has been printed so well by defense contractors, they don't even need electronic banking. They don't need counterfeiting. Just grab the odd package off the odd delivery plane in Baghdad, and poof, money is rolling in. Literally.
The parade of horribles could now afford to pay the bands and lovely floats. Washington started doing periodic parades to bolster morale and prepare us for the new Imperialism. We would, for the first time in history, invade a sovereign nation. We hadn't been attacked and we were going to occupy another nation. We needed to do this for someones misbegotten idea of world safety. More accurately, we sought tighter control of oil dollars. And we had parades. With decorations. In green.
Think Rose Parade with a simple color scheme and no flower petals. The missing money? They used it for the All Green Ben Franklin Float in the new Middle East Procession of the Contractors. Cecil B. DeMille would have been so proud.
Extras were crowding the streets, curb to curb. They tossed necklaces made of twenties and fifties. They tossed contracts without any bidding process at these contractors. We tossed our best and brightest at this procession of obscenity. Bands played, wires were tapped, bullets flew, soldiers died, and the memories of the pre-Iraq war, scandal free month, faded.
That scandal free month would be the simple idea that Washington could operate without a scandal regarding safety, banking, money, pollution, defense, money, influence, money, lobbying, money, or power for an entire month. Those days were over. Happier days were ahead, but not for us, the mere citizens that make this nation great.
We went to War. After test driving the bombing plans, starting in Autumn 2002, we geared up for a full invasion with a full speed ahead beginning March 2003. And we prevailed. Mission Accomplished.
That's right. War job was job well done. The signs said so. The Texas dude who never could fly again after missing that pesky physical in the '70s, crawled out of a fighter plane and TOLD US. Just like the sign. Mission Accomplished.
Various money grubbers initially had a little hitch in their giddy-up. Game, set, match, Mission Accomplished. And if that won't frighten you, or possibly make those 20-somethings happy they won't see battle, the rest of the year made many, many cash collectors jubilant. Gleeful.
Soldiers and families wept with pain. Extra-legal and downright criminal acts went without investigation or punishment. The economy suffered. Wages slumpped. But, Billionaires, the real constituency did well. Even got fatter as more of the poor suffered.
You see, the Mission wasn't accomplished. Except for that hiccup called victory, the War was restructured. The War on Terror hadn't really been ended with the end of the Mission. The War on Terror is now the War On Terrorists Who Are Waging a War Agains Humanity.
And the scandals cropped up again and again. Why, it was like mushrooms after a rain. Month by month. Then week by week.
Scandals were everywhere. By the time the elections rolled around in 2004, the scope of scandal had widened from war contracts to, well, everything else.
In Congress, votes were held open for 2 hours 55 minutes longer than the rules allowed to make sure the drug guys got more of their drug of choice. Not at all legal, but productive in making the food of corporatists. Money.
Security businesses cropped up and got their fix of Money, Money, Money. Then the guys running these obscenely mis-labeled Public Interest Companies got richer on tax cuts. Why the money bloat made obese burger-stuffing citizens too large for those fuel conserving vehicles and the SUV glut was on. Then gas prices went up, more scandal, and the rest is history.
The Oil and Gas mavens were getting richer by the minute from fuel consumption by these super-trucks and failed conservation programs. Pipelines were expanded to increase the flow of cash to Enron. And ExxonMobil, Chevron and the rest of the profiteers.
Scandal scores were increasing at an alarming rate. The public just shrugged it off. This is war after all, and we all know that the Nobel Prize was not founded on the peaceful uses of explosives. Old Al Nobel got his money from wars, and established the Peace Prize.
By the end of 2004, the money pipes were opened full bore so the election counters could make even more money and, AND promise to deliver certain states in response to more money flowing their way for election machines that couldn't and wouldn't be verified.
Then 2005 happened. The Bush Doctrine of bring democracy to the world, expanded to "cross me on any issue, interfere with my buddies in the money business, try to stop payola, and we will bury you". Literally or metaphorically, starting with revealing information obtained from those phone calls to your 13 year old cousin in the Middle East.
This time, no short leader of a totalitarian/communist government was banging his shoe on a table. No, this time it was "we know everything, and we will use what we know to make sure you do nothing to displease us". Then they claimed violating the Constitution was their duty as a way to protect us. Oh, and they collected money for that too.
There it was. No Rosemary Woods, Tricky Dicky, or wonky dictation machines. They bragged about the tapes. And tapes. And tapes. Plus dismissing an entire area of criminal procedure as no longer necessary for good government.
Free speech? Nothing is free. Pay what we demand or else. Thus, protesters were relegated to fields about 50 miles away from events, and the taping went on.
And the money flowed.
And they bragged some more.
New Orleans had a water problem. And an engineering problem. And a money problem. New Orleans just didn't have enough money to keep the leadership away from vacations and air guitar performances. Suddenly, the crooks have gotten frightened and made big promises with nothing to benefit the people that were so harmed by the storms. The War on Iraq began to be seen in the harsh light of day and it wasn't illuminating much to do with the terrorism of 2001.
The Constitution was ignored almost as much as they tried to ignore Cindy Sheehan. Searches were and are ongoing. New Orleans is still neck deep in muck.
The money continues to flow. Oil fat-cats get fatter. Children die without health care. Money is flowing, but only to the upper income parts. The legs of this country are being systematically starved of the very element that makes this nation stand tall.
Ben Franklin invented a lot of things. He also was very influential in establishing the Republic. His influence will continue, if we can keep the Republic.
The fatigue is nearly overwhelming. We get more news every hour than ever before in history. Yet we are so tired. We need to quit starving the foundation of the Republic. We need an end to scandals, now arriving at your computer at a staggering rate of two per day. That is two new scandals per day.
And we are tired. Deservedly so.
This is the precise time that we need to take a deep breath, digest more of the Constitution and get rid of the money pipeline that is giving us the best government money can buy. We need to put a full stop to scandal.
It is time to feed the nation a strict diet of lawfulness, Constitutionality, Checks and Balances. We need to revive the government For the People. If we fail, we will not even have a chance of government of or by the people.