While You Were Out
Published September 10, 2007
By Max Bookman & Nate Bradbury
Summer is beaches, parties, road trips, and late mornings. It’s a hotter version of the school year, minus the classes and snowboarding. With the end of summer comes the return to Burlington, and all that it entails – coordinating with the roommates, worrying about finances, and maybe hitting up Facebook to poke that girl from Philosophy whom you hooked up with back in May. As we pack our bags, we get the sense that summer is more than just a hiatus from school, it’s a vacation from life.
Now that the summer’s over, we begin to restart our hibernating brains, and life itself gets back in session.
Even though we were secluded from the world in our summer bubble, the rest of the world kept moving, and believe it or not, the news kept coming. From Lindsay Lohan’s insane traffic fiasco to Congress’ defamation of the 4th amendment, this summer has had no short supply of moments when people in the public eye took a break from real life to do some unfortunate things.
The reporting on Senator Larry Craig’s incident at a Minneapolis airport bathroom several weeks ago tells it all. The republican senator was arrested for allegedly soliciting gay sex from a man in the stall next to him.
Too bad for Senator Craig, the man he solicited was an undercover police officer, investigating complaints of numerous man-on-man encounters at that location. The officer, Sargent Dave Karsnia, claimed that the Senator peered into his stall through the crack in the door, slid his hands under the divider between the stalls, and tapped his foot in the officer’s stall, which are – apparently – signals to ask to get it on.
Craig, of course, wanted us to know that it is a big misunderstanding. In a public statement he stridently asserted to reporters,“ I am not gay. I never have been gay.” He then cited his conservative Senate record and support for anti-gay legislation. But he did plead guilty and has since resigned from the Senate.
Okay, whatever, Senator Craig.
While you were partying it up in Florida, and the senior Senator from Idaho was getting quickies in airport bathrooms, Congress and President Bush were busy shredding up our 4th amendment rights, commonly known as our rights to privacy.
Thanks to the blind support of the new Democratic Congress, Bush signed into law a bill that modified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) and will significantly increase the government’s legal power to eavesdrop on international calls and e-mails without warrants.
So now, without a warrant of any sort, the National Security Agency can tap into your phone conversation with computer tech support in India and hear your desperate cries that your computer is crashing because you’ve been downloading too much porn. It was all done in a clandestine manner, by simply altering the definition of “electronic surveillance,” and was quietly passed by Congress without much fanfare or news coverage. Even if your computer isn’t inundated with Internet porn, you should care because this type of shady lawmaking seems to be happening more frequently. At this point, there is what amounts to a legal precedent for direct violations of the Constitution in the name of national security. That’s really bad.
President Bush, of course, has not been spared from his own summer misfortunes. Gallup polls indicate that his approval rating is at a simmering 32%, our position in Iraq growing lamer by the day, and it seems that the commander’s officers are finally jumping ship.
Over the summer months, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Press Secretary Tony Snow, and deputy chief of staff (better known as “Senior Advisor”) Karl Rove all realized that chilling by the beach might be a better idea than sticking it out with dear old Dubya.
While it is not that uncommon for White House staffers to resign before the end of a president’s second term, the bailing out of these three is especially detrimental for the President.
Rove, commonly referred to as “Bush’s brain,” is the slimy bastard who masterminded W’s journey into the White House through his hallmark style of misinformation, spin, and deception. It is difficult to admit that the man was good at what he did, but anyone who could trick America into thinking that Bush was qualified for a second term deserves props. Is it too much to hope that his exit marks a move away from the current deceits of our political climate? Probably.
Mr. Snow has been the theoretically well informed, but shockingly uninformative face of our White House press conferences. Since he took up the post in 2006, Snow has continued the Bush Press Secretary tradition of providing slippery answers to pertinent questions, maintaining the administration’s sentiment that relaying important information to the press is a privilege, not a right.
Effective September 14th, Mr. Snow will leave office to focus on his battle with colon cancer and leave the role of obfuscating the administration’s tracks to his far more obnoxious deputy, Dana Perino.
As Attorney General, Mr. Gonzalez has been a key player in the Bush administration’s blitzkrieg on America. In 2005, Vermont’s own Senator Pat Leahy said of Gonzalez, “My concern is that during several high-profile matters in your professional career, you’ve appeared to serve as a facilitator rather than as an independent force in the policy-making process.”
For instance, he allowed the rights of resident aliens to be undermined during the immigration battles, staunchly supported the move towards warrant-less domestic surveillance, and scandalously dismissed “un-cooperative” federal prosecutors in what pundits are calling “ Attorneygate.”
It is shocking that despite widespread misgivings about Gonzalez before his confirmation there was little oversight of his general law enforcement malpractices. Shouldn’t we have seen this coming?
While we have barely scratched the surface of summer’s news media “blockbusters” (think bridges in Minnesota, lead in toys, and Youtube’s democratic debates), we don’t think our post-hibernation brains’ can knife through haziness to grasp any more harsh realities.
So, unpack your duffel bags, boxes, and books. Get into the rhythm of class, parties, and not-so-late mornings. Let your brain re-engage with regular spurts of activity and come to terms with the pleasant and unpleasant realities… Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated as life kicks into full gear.
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