There is method to the White House madness of treating every legitimate function of government like abandonware. Theyâ€™re trying to drown the economy in the bathtub. The goal is simple: to aggrandize the overprivileged few, and multinational corporations, against the mass of the population. This has been the Bush-Cheney goal from the start, and every splashy â€˜valuesâ€™ struggle over abortion or stem cell research or religious language in public buildings, etc., has been largely smokescreen. Regardless of the efforts of a few headline-grabbing and well-funded televangelists, the real darkling plain here is the one on which administration policy makers, their allies in the media, and lobbyists collide at some point with anyone working in any way for the public interest.

One irony in the GOPâ€™s targeting â€˜trial lawyersâ€™ is, as Iâ€™ve said before, that the relationship between this administration and the public resembles that of a bad lawyer to his client.

Attorneys are not all alike, and the worst lawyer is one who cheats his own clients. The game plan is simple: if the goal is cheating, then every mistake, every accident, becomes a tactic. Not that all of a bad lawyerâ€™s acts and omissions rise to the level of â€˜conspiracyâ€™ in the sense of a well-oiled machine. Not every mistake is deliberate; not every lie was carefully plotted out months in advance; not every misfeasance was malfeasance.

But both mistakes and tricks become tactics in the over-all strategy of the lawyerâ€™s working for his own advantage rather than the clientâ€™s. Why? -- Because a losing client is in poor position to file a complaint. A complaint by a losing client will be dismissed as dissatisfaction with the outcome.

Logically, in other words, the bad lawyer who does poor work also has an incentive to lose his clientâ€™s case.

Same with the Bush administration. The unqualified Bush team with its reverse-Robin-Hood economics and its top-dollar militarism has no vested interest in strengthening the polity. Quite the contrary.

Take the â€œwar on terror.â€ People unqualified for their jobs will not necessarily be conscious of their inadequacies. Nobody conspires to be mediocre. But Bushâ€™s downgrading the position of National Security Advisor, when he came into office, and upgrading the Deputiesâ€™ committees was no accident, nor was appointing several Deputies who were known â€˜Second Pearl Harborâ€™ types. The consequence of these structural and personnel changes was an administration focused on conquest and dominion, in Samuel Johnsonâ€™s words, and not focused on taking care of the most ordinary security needs.

Strengthening the cockpit doors of jumbo jets, pulling in visa holders who displayed the characteristics of â€œintending immigrants,â€ and stopping a cohesive group of young Middle Eastern men who bought one-way tickets are only a few in the long list of ways that 9-11 could have been prevented.

Failing that, the tragedy could have been treated afterward as the mass murder it was, and investigated. Instead, we have governments of nations that produced and supported the suspects acting in secret league with the White House. The Bush administration misused the metaphor â€œharboringâ€ to go after Afghanistan and then used the catch-22 â€œdisarmâ€ to go after Iraq, both Muslim nations it had already targeted. Instead of an investigation, we got a war â€“ one that Bush already wanted. â€œWeâ€™re at war,â€ Bob Woodward quoted Bush as saying on 9/11.

There has been blatantly inadequate follow-up of the â€œmoney trail.â€ Ways to streamline and facilitate the financial investigation, which would also clarify and simplify our tax code, lie ready to hand. We could eliminate legal gimcracks such as â€œLimited Liability Companies,â€ against which even investors who use them warn the public.

Genuine environmental clean-up would diminish potential security breaches in the nuclear energy, petroleum, and chemical sectors. But genuine remedies have been little applied. Neither â€œpreventionâ€ nor â€œinvestigationâ€ has been made even fractionally the watchword that â€œterrorâ€ has been.

This is the very opposite of working for the common weal.

Following is a condensed version of a blog I posted more than a year ago. Regrettably, it is as current now as it was then:

To sum up the past four years, we have an administration aggressively covering up 9-11 and preventing genuinely expert research into it, even when such research would rebut some nonsensical conspiracy theories. White House stonewalling on 9-11 investigation continues even while the White House milks those dreadful events for political benefit, simultaneously advancing an agenda of US colonialism in the Middle East, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts for friendly companies and their management, and even making money off the twin industries of â€˜defenseâ€™ and â€˜securityâ€™ for relatives and cronies of George W. Bush.

Move over, 98% of the U.S. population, those of youâ€”those of usâ€”who grew up aiming for good health, an education, a house, the freedom and ability to bring up children according to the lights of the parents, and relatively secure elder years. You are being brought ever closer to that half of the global population with little expectation or hope of such blessings.

Had the acts and omissions of the years since 9/11 been even slightly different, the above statement would sound like exaggeration. But given the events, theyâ€™re not.

Nineteen scantily armed hijackers have been treated as though they were the late Soviet Union. The administration has invaded the Middle East wholesale, something it wanted to do not only before 9/11 but also before the 2000 election. Genuine security experts in aviation security and elsewhere have been replaced by PR appointees with backgrounds in communications or in politics. Genuine diplomats and other personnel with experience abroad have been replaced by appointees who are an insult to world opinion. The invasion of Iraq has turned into a bloody pork barrel. U.S. military and security spending have turned into a giant slush fund, almost unhindered by Congress.

All of this has one central effect: the destruction is by no means complete, but the U.S. â€˜peace dividendâ€™ is being swept off the table, and democracy is being turned into a harpiesâ€™ banquet. A group of the greediest, most self-satisfied, least competent, and least inspiring gobblers at the public trough the world has ever seen in the United States has achieved their central aim. They have found something to replace their dream days of fantasy bloodshed and genuine avarice, bogus anti-Communism and actual self-aggrandizement in the Cold War with something equally good â€“ the â€˜war on terror.â€™

Actually, for their purposes, itâ€™s better than the Cold War. The Soviet Union was an actual power, with a findable, limited location. Guerrilla tactics by young males around the world are an imprecise, diffuse Enemy that you can project anywhere. And just in case the present supply runs short, the administration is moving aggressively to make as many new enemies as possible. Look at the destruction of educated, sane people in Iraq, including the assassination of Iraqi college professors under the CPA; look at the continuing deaths of Afghan elders â€“ the very individuals with the capacity for local self-governance whose resistance to their Soviet invaders made them targets for the new Western invaders as well. Their deaths began immediately after Massoud was assassinated and continue to this day.

But the destruction is wrought here at home as well as halfway around the world. The trillion or so spent on the â€˜war on terrorâ€™ is subtracted from U.S. domestic stability. Pensions in business are becoming a thing of the past, while the government fund protecting what pensions are left is in perilous condition. Health insurance is no longer an expectation even with a â€˜goodâ€™ job, and the insurance companies are often not held to any standard of coming through with actual coverage anyway. Our hospitals are merging and consolidating like our airlines and our mass media, and health care providers are forced to fork over ever higher premiums for malpractice â€˜insurance,â€™ even while the carriers use taxpayer-funded federal courts to try to deny claims and coverage. Move over, middle class. Your confident hope of health, education, housing and individual prosperity is â€“ not to put too fine a point upon itâ€”a threat to a small, grasping, ignorant caste of well-placed louts.

A trend away from genuine productivity and economic self-determination for the overwhelming majority, and toward watering the dollar, allowing layoffs of thousands of workers while failed CEOs walk away with millions, and weakening contractual good faith, is not happenstance.

They call it â€˜conservatism,â€™ but its real name is dispossession.

Here is the Nation article with Grover Norquistâ€™s famous phrase:

â€œMy goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,â€ he says, â€œto get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.â€

Norquist misstated, of course. â€˜Governmentâ€™ doesnâ€™t get more powerful than by invading other countries and breaking into peopleâ€™s homes, the aspects of government most buttressed by the current administration. Itâ€™s not the â€˜governmentâ€™ theyâ€™re drowning in the bathtub. Itâ€™s the economy, stupid.

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Reprinted with permission of MargieBurns.com

Margie Burns is a freelance journalist in the D.C. area with a blog at MargieBurns.com.

About author Margie Burns is a freelance journalist in the D.C. area with a blog at Margie Burns is a freelance journalist in the D.C. area with a blog at MargieBurns.com . She can be reached at margie.burns@verizon.net. Reprinted with permission of MargieBurns.com