Posted on 12/08/2002 1:35:47 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.
Then imagine that this country's king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.
This is the America we all live in. The Bush administration has quietly started awarding bonuses to political appointees, a practice abandoned during the Clinton administration -- back when the economy was booming, the budget had a surplus and terrorist attacks on American soil were unimaginable.
This is just the latest act of greed and insensitivity from an administration whose very legitimacy, lest we forget the 2000 election, is suspect. Add it to the growing list of outrages: undermined civil and constitutional rights, government surveillance, secret detentions without charges, fouling of the environment.
That doesn't even touch on a post-9/11 foreign policy that, according to a huge survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is rapidly making the United States one of the least favorite nations of much of the world.
Yet Americans, terrified of terrorists, seem unwilling to rein in a president who has little or no respect for the law of the land, the dream of democracy, or, as far as I can tell, the American people.
As so many of us struggle to make ends meet, afraid that it may be our job eliminated in the next round of layoffs, Bush is using our tax dollars to award his political appointees, many of whom already make more than $100,000 a year.
Exactly what have they done so well? Couldn't be the economy, justice system, environment, equal protection. The administration says many of those rewarded are involved in counter-terrorism activities. Funny; I haven't been able to find one person who feels safer now than he or she did a year ago.
Frightened as Americans are of what the future holds, it's time we recognized that not only does our emperor have no clothes -- he's steadily stealing ours.
Jill Nelson is a New York writer and editor.
She is clever enough to reach the media top to rake in the six-figures, clever enough to be heard to soothe and stroke her ego. Fool enough to believe in her twisted liberal views who favors the bad people and tightens the noose on the good people.
Gee, Jill, your imagination must be a lot more feeble than mine. In 1993 I imagined that Jihadists tried to detonate a bomb beneath the World Trade Center. Just two years later I imagined a truck bomb exploding in front of a government building in Oklahoma, this time with extensive damage and loss of life.
Other products of my busy imagination: tanks, flames, and bodies burned to a crisp at a Texas religious compound, and flak jacketed stormtroopers bursting into a Miami bedroom. I don't suppose those count, since they were carried out by the government and not terrorists.
And all in the administration of the Most Venerated St. William Jefferson of Clinton.
Imagine that.
I don't think so, Tim.
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