DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
By Ivan G. Goldman
If you wonder how our warrior Prince George can so callously throw more American youths into the Iraqi meatgrinder in a moronic effort to salvage his blighted legacy, just look at how casually he kills other Americans in order to fatten the wallets of his greedhead friends.
His demented, malevolence has been proved to us over and over during our six-year nightmare, but most recently in two blatant cases involving global warming and sociopathic Big Tobacco poisoning.
Only a week ago it was revealed that his administration put the fix in for death by tobacco in a blockbuster six-year mega-case. In a March 22 report by Carol Leonnig in the Washington Post, ex-Justice Department attorney Sharon Eubanks related the Bush officials’ interference. Tobacco pushers had been utterly trapped at last, with documentary evidence showing they’d lied about a product they knew was inflicting regular disease and death on Americans. The court was poised to exact a $130 billion levy, much of which would have gone toward educating young Americans against the dangers of cigarettes. Studies show these programs work. But Eubanks now tells us that on the eve of victory, the department ordered the requested levy be sliced to $10 billion. That consigned hosts of Americans to a life of disease and early death, but before they expire they'll shell out blood money to a vicious industry that must create new addicts to replace the ones it kills.
Presiding US District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote, “Over the course of more than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, they suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, they distorted the truth about low-tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting, and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal—to make money with little, if any, regard for individual suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system.” These were the twisted, hateful, greedy geeks the Bush Administration chose to align itself with.
Then we saw the Justice Department go all the way to the Supreme Court to push its screwy thesis that the EPA lacked the power to monitor polluting emissions that exacerbate global warming. Here we have a power-mad administration that claims the right to read our mail and listen to our phone calls without a warrant, to suspend habeas corpus, torture suspects in the bowels of a secretive international CIA gulag, and ignore law through the stepped-up use of "signings" to legislation. Yet rather than help citizens breathe and fight against the ravages of our poaching planet, suddenly it claims it’s just a little ole toothless government with no power to exact civilized policies from Big Oil and other serial polluters.
The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favor of citizens versus the lunatics was encouraging, but those four votes against us were yet another wake-up call. Justice John Paul Stevens, instrumental in this and other cases defending us against the pirates who run the administration, will be 87 this month. Should Bush appoint his successor, the harsh legacy of his fiendish stewardship will follow us with greater strength for decades.
Meanwhile, more troops head for Iraq to suffer death, disfigurement, and possible capture (our inept corporate news media never, ever mention the missing when they cite casualties), dispatched by such a deeply deranged fool he has yet to re-examine any of the deluded platitudes and slogans that in the dim-witted recess of his mind pass for moral policy.
