America's Hour of the Wolf

Are Ya'll ready out there? It's gonna be a long, hot summer.

America's Hour of the Wolf:

"Since at least the Schiavo fiasco, even sympathetic observers of the Bush Administration have begun to agree with what progressives have long said: the Bush junta does not know how to govern. This has nothing to do with incompetence.

Well before successfully gaming the system to put and keep themselves in power, they were signally incapable of and entirely unconcerned about distinguishing policy from politics. Their policy is all politics, all the time. Nothing they have done since September 11, 2001, has been untainted by the stink of the crassest political opportunism.

With this as their guiding principle, they have put their eager torch to the dry tinder of many branches of the American Tree of Life.

The air is dirtier, the water less safe, land in the public trust more vulnerable to despoiling. Crime is up, poverty is way up, the number of Americans with health coverage is way down. Seniors are often paying more for prescription drugs after the enactment of a Byzantine program nominally designed to lower costs. Thousands of Gulf Coast residents only know about what's happening back home - and there isn't much happening - when they see it on TV. A sunny patch of budget surpluses has been drenched in the cold rain of record deficits.

Strategists speak of a 'long war' where once an uneasy but stable peace was maintained. Any possibility of a genuine response to terrorism was lost the day 'War On Terror' became the covering cry for what has really become a War on Civil Rights, and thus a War on Americans."