The United States of Three New Scandals a Day UPDATED WITH MORE SCANDALS

Words are starting to fail me.  We are literally living in a THREE NEW SCANDAL A DAY AMERICA.

And I fear that it won't even help Democrats at the ballot box at this point.  The wave of scandals is so fast, so furious, so mindblowing, that I fear the effect on the average voter after reading the news will be like the effect of a Hollywood blockbuster on them as they stumble out of the theater: dazed, confused, overwhelmed, tired and apathetic.

And why shouldn't they? At some point, the scandals have to stop coming long enough for a thinking person to catch their breath and take it all in.

I had thought of starting to write a book detailing all of the scandals to beset the GOP during Bush's time in office, but the project at this point is unthinkable: the tome would be longer than the Oxford English Dictionary, and you would need the full efforts of Wikipedia's entire crew to keep updating the book as each new scandal filed in hour by hour.

After all, just look at a partial list:

Cocaine Use

Drunk Driving

Texas Air National Guard

Don't Take This as a Precedent: Bush v. Gore

Laura's Past (drug dealing?  Manslaughter/murder?)

Arbusto stock sale, Saudi bailout, lack of SEC followup

"Please don't kill me!  Heh heh heh!"  Bush and the Texas Death Row

Kenny-Boy Lay of Enron

Cheney's a resident of Wyoming???  He is?  Our impeachable Vice-President

Cheney Shoots a Man in the Face

Refusal of Recusal: Cheney, Scalia, Duck Hunting

Smear on John McCain

Florida vote scandal, voter suppression

Cheney/GAO.  Are those meetings STILL secret??

Bush Chokes on a pretzel

Happy-Fingers Claude Allen

Longest vacation time of any president

Ashcroft the Boob: Eagles Soaring over Prayer Circles, and Venus de Milo porn

No Vetoes--ever.  For the first time in history.

Missile Defense Shield: The Indispensable Program (you don't hear about anymore)

Enormous Deficits

Out of Print: Stopping the publication of basic economic data

"Is This a Bad Time?" Manipulation of Economic Data

Left Behind: The failure to fund your signature education act

Zarqawi the Boogeyman: Pentagon Psy-Ops on the American Public

Abstinence Education: Promoting Morality in the Name of Ignorance--er...vice versa...

Stem Cells: The Compromise that Wasn't

The "Plan A" for Plan B? Theocracy.

"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."  Now what could that possibly mean...

My Pet Goat

Extrication of the Saudis after 9/11

"Find Out What Saddam Had to Do with This"

9/11 Commission??  No way!  Or, I dunno...why not?   Sure.  My idea all along!

You want to see my...library records???  Excesses of the Patriot Act

Failure to Catch Bin Laden (or Omar) in Afghanistan--Wanted Dead or Alive

Yellowcake from Niger

Curveball

Ahmad Chalabi

Downing Street Memo

You Go to War with Body Armor & Sandbags you Have...

PLAMEGATE: Intrigue followed by intrigue

"God Told Me to Invade Iraq"

Humor Dinner "Are the WMDs under my Desk?"

No-Bid Halliburton Contracts

Vast Monies unaccounted for in Iraq

700 TONS of the explosives Unguarded?  Are you freaking kidding me?

ABU GHRAIB (and where are the rest of the photos, Mr. President?)

Gonzales and the Torture Memo, or "What could possibly hurt worse than organ failure?"

"But they said they wouldn't!": extraordinary rendition, and boiling people in our name.

Bunnatine Greenhouse

Giulia Sgrena: or, What the Hell is Negroponte doing in Iraq, anyway?

Judith Miller, Embedded Reporting

Targeting Al-Jazeera (and other reporters)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Sacked By His Own Team: The Tragedy of Pat Tillman

Missing White Girl, Embedded Edition: Jessica Lynch

Flying UN colors to goad Saddam into war

Paying of Journalists and Planting of Stories in the U.S.

Paying of Jouranlists and Planting of Stories in Iraq

JeffJim Gannon/Guckert

Stunning Incompetence: De-Baathification and the Breakup of the Iraqi Army

Swift Boat Vets

You Have a Call on lines #1 through #3,258: The NH GOTV scandal

The Wrath of Khan: Gushing National Security Secrets for Electoral Politics, & the London Tube.

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Sibel Edmonds Coverup

Terror Alerts: What happened to them all, and Olberman's 19 "total coincidences"

The Bush Debates: Is that a Hump on your Back or are you just happy to see me?

Diebold--hackable voting systems and their corrupt CEO

Ohio Voter Suppression, Ken Blackwell

Terri Schiavo

The Medicare Bill: what's a couple hundred billion dollars, between friends?

On Bribing Senators for Medicare

Cloture?  What Cloture?  Creativity in Parliamentary rule-bending.   Or breaking.

HURRICANE KATRINA RESPONSE: Sloth

Hurricane Katrina response: Indifference.  

Nero Strummed while Rome Flooded, and his (Wife) bought shoes

Barbara Bush at the Superdome

The Brownie scapegoating

The whitewashed reconstruction of New Orleans and wage freezing

"No One Could have Predicted the Levees Would Fail"

CRONY-GATE: Doin' a Heckuva Job, Brownie

(More CronyGate)

Bill Frist & and the FEC

Bob Ney of Ohio

Duke Cunningham of San Diego--now with Watergate prostitutes!

2005: A Faith-Based Odyssey, or what in outer space is an undergrad doing telling NASA scientists what to think?

SOTU: Why we're going to Mars to win the war on humanimals

Tom Delay Redistricting

Tom Delay Ethics Violations

JACK ABRAMOFF--Saipan to Indian Tribues

Ports, Inc: Bye-Bye, Dubai!

The Loofah Factor in the No-Falafel Zone

"It Depends on Why the President Would Need to Do That," or What does John Yoo have against little boys' testicles?

The Executive Writes the Laws, Enforces the Laws, and Interprets the Laws: The dictatorial beauty of the Signing Statement

Forget Your Civics Class: When the Senate and the House don't agree, who cares? Sign it anyway--with a statement...

Able Danger

Zoned Out: Town Halls and the Curtailment of Free Speech

Record Prices, Record Profits: Government of the Oil, By the Oil, For the Oil

NSA Wiretaps without Warrants--Domestic-International division

NSA Wiretaps without Warrants--Domestic-Domestic Division

"How Quaint Thou Art": Gonzales and the Geneva Conventions

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And this doesn't even BEGIN to cover it.  It goes on.  And on.  And on.  And on.

And now THREE MORE TODAY.  Add Principi, Crawford and Parsons to the list.

And STILL the wingnuts apologize for this--the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  Still they support the most vile stain on this nation's character since its inception.  They still attack us as UnAmerican, unpatriotic mouthbreathers unfit to live in their America.

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How history will judge this period is certain.  The truth is already coming out.  And my suspicion is that we are only seeing the first tip of the iceberg, and that 95% of the sordid shenanigans taking place still have not been uncovered.

What I am less certain about is what we will tell our children--and our grandchildren.  How will we explain to them that these things happened on our watch?  How will we explain to them the actions of the government elected by their parents and grandparents?  How will we explain the utter depravity that has been allowed to take place?

Ultimately, this is the greatest price that this Administration's current apologists will have to bear: the scorn of generations to come.

While those of us who post here will still have to answer for the crimes that occurred on our watch--while we will still have to pay down the debt these criminals have racked up, and attempt to undo the damage to our national character and prestige that these criminals have wrought--we have an alibi.  Not as strong an alibi as we might like (few of us have been arrested, or taken truly dramatic action as of yet), but an alibi nonetheless.  We have been screaming into the wind--and the wind is starting to change, whip at our backs, and hurl our righteous anger across this land.

But these assholes have NO alibi.  They will have to answer--to their children, to their grandchildren, and to the pages of history--for their misdeeds and willful complacency.

Because this dark period in American history, once brought into the light of history, will be remembered by those who stumble forth from it as the period of the THREE SCANDAL A DAY AMERICA.

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WE MUST KEEP FIGHTING.  Because those who fought hardest--those who fought strongest--will not only have done right by their country and by their children--they will be glorified in the annals of history, just as those who fought Joseph McCarthy are today.

And there will be hell to pay for those who imposed this nightmare upon us, and for all of their followers.