Russ for US

I originally posted this as a comment to a recent post by Don Surber, an ultra conservative Bush apologist columnist for the Charleston Daily Mail and thought I would share it here in the event you haven't stumbled over to the dark side Don's blog.

The comments were the usual bull shit er... rhetoric about how Feingold was essentially being an unpatriotic traitor for offering his resolution to censure the President for illegally wiretapping American citizens' phone calls without a warrant.

I haven't weighed in about my pick for President in 2008 lately (a choice I like even more now than when I made it on November 7, 2004), so I thought I would share it here...

For those that claim Feingold is just being an opportunist, let me remind you that he was the lone Democratic Senator to vote in favor of bringing impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Contrary to the Republicans, he is being consistent - when the President does something wrong, it's up to Congress to call him on it.

Republicans who claimed to support the rule of law and the need to impeach Clinton, now are willing to ignore the rule of law when the President is Republican.

They aren't even willing to convene a hearing to check into it, but during the Clinton presidency they had special prosecutors with unlimited budgets looking into 20 year old stock deals, blow jobs, file-gate, travel-gate, and any other "gate" they could think of. But now there is absolutely NO oversight for outing CIA agents, faulty intelligence for WMDs, prisoner abuse, domestic spying, lobbyists corruption, etc.

Russ Feingold was reelected overwhelmingly by his voters last year. He is recognized as one of the 2 biggest hawks against the deficit in the US Senate. (You realize it's almost $8 trillion right?) He proposed and passed legislation to limit the influence of corrupt lobbyists such as Jack Abramoff years ago, before it was the popular thing to do. He voted against violating personal rights through the Patriot Act in 2001 and again this year. And he recognized the idiocy of the Iraq war and voted against it. He voted in favor of military action to find and kill Osama bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

He was correct on each one of these issues from the beginning. The President was wrong on each one.

Finally, if the President followed the law and didn't break it, as you all are now claiming, then why do Republicans now feel compelled to make changes to accomodate what the President did?

It amuses me that you can be so convinced of the inerrancy of President Bush, despite the reality of skyrocketing deficits, thousands of dead servicemen, lost civil liberties, shrinking middle class and economic opportunities, a broken health care system, homeland security ineptitude, and widespread corruption throughout Washington and beyond. All of these have happened as the result of the failed leadership of President Bush during the past 50 months. It's a shame that you haven't noticed.