WAS THERE A BUSH/CHENEY LOVE AFFAIR WITH BIG BROTHER?

Gone, but not forgotten. This much-used cliché represents, perhaps, the most bizarre team of individuals to ever share control over the White House. Doubtless the Obama administration will spend much of its tenure attempting to uncover the horrendous mistakes, and outright attacks on the constitution, as well as to try and understand the incompetence level of George W. Bush. It was like a modern-day burlesque act with Bush and Cheney performing as headliners under the stage name of Big Brother in their attempts to develop complete control over the people of the U.S.

I did a post back in June of 2007, “The Cloning of George W. Bush,” which revealed the extent to which he had gone in his quest for imperial authority. There was talk at the time of Dubya plagiarizing George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in an attempt to turn the United States into another Oceana, the novelist’s fictional country. Along with his conniving VP, he was able to confuse, confound, befuddle, astonish, mystify, unhinge…there aren’t enough words in the dictionary to describe their manipulating of the American public while deluding conservative constituents.

In another 2007 post—I was on a roll that year—Dick Cheney was featured in a piece depicting his participation in hijacking our privacy. It centered on the FISA court case about two plaintiffs who sued over being monitored in the NSA spying incident. They lost. Bruce Fein on Slate wrote an “Impeach Cheney” article with the sub-headline, “The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.” It seemed clear then to everyone that cheney was the designer of the NSA’s warrantless spying.

It is amazing how the Bushies were able to level threats against and intimidate those who disagreed with their philosophy, while managing to curtail any investigation of what has turned out to be a corrupt administration. But they couldn’t have done it without the “architect,” Karl Rove. Other lackies included Defense Don, John Yoo, and Paul Wolfowitz. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was, of course, the leader in W’s rubber-stamp brigade.

We were habitually told that Big Brother was doing what it did in the best interest of American citizens. That was BushSpeak for, “shut up and let me do it my way.” You might remember another demagogue that used scare tactics to lure the public into believing his rantings over how Communists were taking over the country. Joseph McCarthy entered the spotlight in 1950, one year after George Orwell published 1984, and went on to hold Senate hearings on suspected subversives which ruined the lives of folks from Washington, DC to Hollywood. Sound familiar?

I’ll close this post with one of the most egregious maneuvers of the Bush administration; that of by-passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for warrants in the act of spying on innocent Americans. FISA had a record of approving these warrants swiftly, and without the normal process that slowed down the court system. Many wonder if Dubya just knew it was all wrong and that his underhanded surveillance tactics would be exposed for what they really were. Illegal.

For what it’s worth, we are rid of this stigma now, but the question arises of just how long it will take to forget the Bush/Cheney era. I’m betting never. And if I didn't answer the question of this post's headline, maybe that means we need to take the subject up again later.