“You’ve probably been at a mall or airport and seen children on tethers. They’re not being abused.” – Guy Womack, attorney for Abu Ghraib guard Charles Graner, defending the practice of putting Iraqi prisoners on tethers, 1.10.05

WASHINGTON, D.C.– A week before the $40 million inauguration, right-wingers are tearing themselves to pieces. A dispute simmering since last summer between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Arizona senator John McCain has turned into an open and bitter fight. Republican pols think it’s bad enough to hurt upcoming election chances. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, the prominent right-wing think tank, likened Bush to Clinton, suggesting that the current president was just another big-spending liberal.

McCain rankled the administration by stating he had “no confidence” in Rumsfeld, prompting right-wingers to start calling McCain an “anti-Republican Republican.”

Then Rumsfeld sent McCain over the wall when he told the Arizona senator he was hindering the war effort by using his rights as a senator to stall congressional approval of Rumsfeld nominees for top Defense posts. In addition, McCain has attacked Rumsfeld’s plans to give a non-competitive contract to Boeing for leasing air tankers at a cost that could reach $30 billion. When McCain sought to investigate the deal, the Pentagon and the White House balked, insulting him by restricting documents and insisting he could read some papers but not copy them. Eventually the Pentagon relented, and McCain went on the Senate floor to read e-mails from then air force secretary James Roche that browbeat members of Congress into supporting the tanker deal.
McCain said the proposed tanker leasing was “a case of either systemic failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness, or rank corruption.”

The Heritage Foundation in this year’s Mandate for Leadership, a well-accepted planning document for incoming Republican administrations since Reagan’s, rakes Bush over the coals. Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage president and heretofore regarded as a strong Bush man, chastised the president, noting, “Sadly, commitment to principle has been missing in Washington’s politics for quite some time.” The document paints Bush as a big spender, adding to entitlements with his Medicare drug plan and loading the economy with regulations. Echoing criticism of Reaganites, Stuart Butler and Larry Wortzel, Heritage veeps for domestic and international studies, respec- tively, write, “Public diplomacy has been weak, and sound foreign policy initiatives have failed to win support from our allies because they were not accompanied by well-planned public diplomacy efforts. Observers can therefore be forgiven for concluding that Bill Clinton’s declaration that ‘the era of big government is over’ now seems rather premature.”

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Prepping for Bush’s prom
Cops, dogs, choppers sniff for germs, bullets, weird signals

Next Thursday’s inauguration promises to be an extravaganza, with rich Bushies nibbling on rattlesnake nachos and slurping down Tito’s vodka. The government will put 4,600 officers along Pennsylvania Avenue to guard the parade. There will be the usual retinue of sharpshooters atop buildings lining the route, dozens of plainclothes cops in the crowds, and Secret Service agents in buildings along the avenue. Twenty bomb- sniffing dogs will be on hand. The feds will jam cell phones to render harmless any attempted signals aimed at setting off bombs. The military will deploy germ and biological warfare units around the city, along with units specializing in rescuing people from bomb-blasted buildings.

Sensors have been placed around the city. “If we had a release of sarin gas on the Mall, not only will the sensors on the Mall pick it up, we will know the height and density, its direction, and how far it has spread,”
one federal official told The Washington Post. “We did not have this in place before 9-11.”

Overhead, air combat patrols will race across the sky.
Planes that wander off course and into restricted airspace will be intercepted by fighter jets. Small aircraft are to be banned within 50 miles of the Washington Monument. There are surveillance cameras throughout the city, and choppers will be overhead all day, taking pictures and relaying images back to a headquarters in Virginia.

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