Dirty Politics

Here's a couple of important issues that are deserving of more debate...

Look at this Los Angeles Times report on Bush's string of embarrrassing political failures lately:

In the Senate's three major votes this week, Republicans won support from just four Democrats on Arctic drilling, two on the Patriot Act and none on the budget that ultimately required a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Dick Cheney to pass.

Many GOP strategists say they expect the party to use these votes against Democratic candidates next fall, particularly the filibuster against the Patriot Act.

Despite public warnings to that effect from key GOP figures, the Democrats maintained their filibuster.

Now, the proposal to drill for oil in Alaska was actually buried (why???) in a massive Defence Dept spending bill. So come the 2006 elections, GOP candidates will be saying crap like "My opponent voted against supporting our troops in Iraq".

Isn't that ridiculous? But most voters are simply not paying attention to what is going on at this level of politics today, and they probably won't bother to dig out the truth from the lies when they vote in 2006.

Like I always say, we get the governments we deserve. But surely there should be some drive to stop this dirty trick of burying important issues in totally unrelated bills? Unless Bush & Co want to admit that oil and the military are inextricably linked in their own crazed logic...?

And that's another thing: the convoluted logic about what is in "the national interest". It's a well-known dirty secret that successive US governments have identified the USA's growing reliance on dwindling supplies of international oil as a major economic dilemma, and many seemingly non-related issues (the Iraq War is only the most obvious) have actually been driven by the need to secure oil supplies.

Even foreign aid is conditional on whatever is deemed to be "in the national interest", so citizens of one impoverished country starve while their oil-strategic neighbours get aid drops (and most likely military deals as well). Remember, training Bin Laden and selling chemical weapons to Saddam were once considered "in the national interest".

A more enlightened, less hypocritical outlook on matters of principle like these would serve everyone far better in the long run.