Bookraft

Richard Gwynn writing in the Toronto Star on Friday April 07, 2006 on the downfall of Tom Delay, former speaker of the House - raises a broader issue - the legitimacy of bringing Bush-style democray to the World. On the same day that headlines show New York Police Detectives convicted of carrying out 8 mob hits while both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are revealed to have given the go-ahead to leak secrets about the Iraq war for partisan purposes - Gwyn raises broader questions about the issue of Delay and his impact on the American democracy:

"Despite [Delay's] power(he so intimidated his own Republicans he was known as 'The Hammer')...Delay had no hold on the public's imagination. ... Yet Delay personifies and exemplifies one of the key problems of our time. This problem is whether the United States, at the same time as it is leading the global campaign for democracy, can be considered a democracy itself. If the United States is indeed no longer a democracy other than in external rituals like elections and TV debates between candidates, then the global campaign for democracy is bound, sooner or later, to collapse under the weight of its own illogic.

To understand Delay's contribution to this situation, it is necessary to keep in mind some numbers. First, there are now 36,000 registered lobbyists in and around the famous K Street in Washington. This is close to a fourfold increase since 1994 when Delay, then Majority Whip, launched what he called the "K Street Project", to increase the number of pro-Republican lobbyists. ...

What has happened is that [the US] democracy has been turned into a dollar-ocracy or into a lobby-ocracy[or a Bautocracy]. Without dollars, immense amounts of them, winning elections in the US is impossible. And winning elections is all that matters. ... There is in US politics these days and has been for some time, an insensate partisanship, a limitless polarization, a sheer unremitting hatred of Republicans for Democrats, and the reverse. Those attitudes justify just about anything for the sake of winning."

So when readers ask why should Canadians have concerns about the mission in Afghanistan - look at the failure of a US lead mission to act on dozens of known Afghan warlords' opium production plants, warehouses and prime poppy fields for the past 3 years allowing them to double and redouble into suppliers of 90% of Europe's heroin and opium. Then ask yourself - how do we want to work with this "political leadership team" in which military officers in the field are at the mercy of top level political handlers who avow "we let the the commanders in the field determine our troop strength and requirements for more resources " and then like the Great "I-am-a-Uniter-Not-Divider" - these Rumsfelds, Cheneys and their ilk not only impose their own troop and resource levels - but downgrade any officers who publicly dare to disagree. Is this a side Canadians want to work with ? Many military people are unambiguous . To paraphrase - we have no problems with the US men in the field, its the top command political leadership that is so dismayingly inept. Unfortunately Jon Stewart's the Daily Show appears too close to wickedly right on when they refer to Bush and his Bungle Boys. Just as a point of interest, all the Bush top command never served in Vietnam (Cheney a series of medical deferments, Wolfowitz also deferred, Rumsfeld like Bush kept on the "domestic front") .

(c)JBSurveyer 2006-2007