They are thieves and traitors all 

I'm ex-intel and still belong to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, where there is more than a little consternation and fear over the way our intelligence agencies are again being employed in the personal political service of the temporary occupant of the White House, including domestic surveillance such as President Ford banned by executive order after Nixon's excesses, even assassinations. I also spent 12 years in law enforcement, mostly as a police chief (as my father before me) at two universities. I'm certainly not a liberal as it was measured before the Republican Party was hijacked by the religious right and energy industry conspirators. I was a Republican until Bush was elected and once gave thousands a year to the party. But since the days of the Christian Coalition, the GOP has increasingly looked more like the party of Bob Jones than the party of Everett Dirksen, and Bush was the last straw for me. Now I've lived to see the kind of government thuggery my mother experienced during the Red Scare era.

Dumbya used the word "jobs" 16 times in one of his rare press conferences, as though repetition would hypnotize the citizenry into not noticing 44,000 more layoffs in one recent month (2 million jobs lost in North Carolina alone since Bush). He seems to believe that if he can just pack the stage with enough American flags, we won't notice he's given us the worst economy in years, while paying off his wealthy supporters with billions, leaving our children, grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to foot the bill.

Bush seems to think if he just smirks and lies enough, we won't notice there are no weapons of mass destruction, or that the CIA said there was no Iraq-Al Qaeda connection long before the war, or that he had no peace plan whatever for Iraq, but had in fact planned months ahead for Iraqi oil contracts for his close allies in the business. Bush seems to think no one will realize he is the end product of four generations of servants to the oil industry and that nearly anyone of any significance in his administration comes from the same background.

Despite the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that 95 percent of the 9/11 report material outlining and damning the Saudi involvement in terrorism and the deaths of more than 3,000 men, women and children in the 9/11 massacre could be released without impact to our investigations and intelligence efforts, Mr. Bush stands before us and lies yet again to protect the Saudis and divert our attention from a real threat to our national security, i.e., the degree to which our government officials are bought and paid for by the House of Saud.

And finally, seeing his poll numbers weaken, President Bush stirs up support among the bigots of the Christian right by piling on homosexuals and gay marriage, thus gaining praise from Pat Robertson, whose Liberian gold mining operations our troops are now being sent to protect. At no time in our history has our government been so corrupted, our military might so perverted to private gain, our leadership so willing to see the people of this country fall into privation and want, in order that men of boundless greed and ambition can treble fortunes already so huge that the greatest wastrel alive could not possibly spend it all. But every day the president's money men build a bigger campaign war chest to ensure Bush gets four more years to aid and abet the pillage and plunder. They are thieves and traitors all, and we deserve the Third World servitude they believe is our destiny and fate if we sit home and let these robber barons buy another election. But the signs remain less than encouraging to me.