"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." - - - William Blum

August 12, 2006

This analysis by Hunter is an example of what Democratic candidates must tell indecisive voters in order to attain their support:

Inexplicably, the Bush administration has been continues to actively fight against some of the most effective measures around for preempting potential terrorism -- more effective security, explosives detection R&D and deployment. As the report said, nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of funding went unused, and even then the administration was still making cuts.

One of the most dangerous qualities of this administration is incompetence in the fight against terrorism. They have been so focused on expanding presidential powers, selling Iraq, re-selling Iraq, demonizing opponents of Iraq, and trying to use other regional chaos as excuses for broadening the failures of Iraq that they seemingly have no actual time in their day to fight the real battle -- real, bona fide terrorism of the sort that the world can expect to face.

But just think about this for a minute, if your head can stand it. The Bush administration and Republican congress has been dishing out homeland security funds as basically a pork racket, with little actual relationship to real-world targets or needs. At the same time, a mere six million dollar program to detect the kinds of explosives planned for use in the alleged U.K. terrorism plot, as well as past known terrorist plots, was cut by the Bush administration.

The cost of the Iraq War is currently over three hundred billion dollars. The cost of ongoing Bush administration and Republican tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans is in the hundreds of billions. The cost of researching tools to better detect explosives known to be used by terrorists in the cut program was six million dollars.

Six million dollars for explosives detection is roughly two thousandths of one percent of the current cost of the Iraq War. The Bush administration wanted to cut it.

And then they have the audacity to paint their political opponents as "weak on terror".

I've got an idea: maybe President Bush can hold a $750,000 Crawford dinner and fundraiser to help finance homeland security efforts that the administration wants to otherwise cut. Six million dollars is a drop in the bucket for a typical Republican campaign season: maybe some of the wealthy donors that have profited so handsomely from the GOP obsession with tax cuts could kick a little of that newfound money back our way to help fund proper security at our airports.

It's surely not like there's a lack of other examples of incompetence that the Bush-war Administration serves to us on a daily basis. SusanG rounds out the analysis:

"The oh-so-mysterious message to elected officials is: People are sick unto death of war, of unresponsive representation, of incompetence, of corruption, of ever-more-intrusive government, of a spiraling deficit, of lobbyist-owned and corporation-sponsored politicians, of a power-hungry president, of six years of attempts to pass stick-up-the-ass moralizing legislation telling us when and how we can die and when and how we can reproduce. Get out of our personal lives, get the hell out of Iraq and do your freaking job - run the government competently, economically and fairly. Period."

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