Situations to ponder in the Bushy night

If things get dull in your neck of the woods, and the best conversation the people around you can come up with revolves – still – around the Academy Awards, here a couple of suggestions for stimulating livelier discussion:

* Why is Dick Cheney still hiding out, moving around secretly and sleeping in undisclosed places? (Just like Saddam Hussein used to do, incidentally – or not incidentally.) And why have the news outlets made so little of that very, very peculiar behavior? And what would they make of it if the creepy official were a Democrat? And why has nobody raised the obvious question of serious paranoia? The man is, unfortunately, the vice president of the United States. If anybody you knew behaved that way, you’d probably try to gather friends and relatives for an intervention; there would be talk about the immediate need of psychiatric care. Right? I simply cannot understand why the news media are letting this slide – or perhaps I can but really hate to face the truth.

* On the peace and justice front: The Bushies are very largely responsible for the horrendous mess in Haiti. Apparently because they didn’t like Jean-Bertrand Aristide – who is, indeed, a disgusting failure, but was the least disgusting alternative, it appears -- they prevented the payment of about $500 million in humanitarian aid (total due from several sources), which precipitated the present crisis. The way they handled the obvious build-up to explosion was to ignore it. Is racism a factor in their nonfeasance? Is lack of oil on the island, or the lack of any resources that would make it worthwhile for Halliburton and the other Bush & Co. parent corporations to enter that arena?

Now those saviors of Iraq from the evil torturer Saddam Hussein appear ready to accept the leaders of the anti-Aristide crowd, virtually all of whom have histories that make Saddam look like an apprentice torturer, a mere intern to their expert professionalism. And what should this country do now that the situation exists? One hopes we do more than station Coast Guard ships off the Haitian coast to prevent the terrified and abused from sullying our pristine shores, right? So far, those ships appear to be the entire Bushy plan.

And, just for fun, what’s the betting on whether U.S. troops did, at least for all practical purposes, kidnap and forcibly remove Aristide from the island? I know a couple of conservatives who can’t believe anyone would question the administration’s version of the story. Most of my friends can’t believe anyone would accept anything that came out of the Bush crowd’s mouths at face value. Throughout most of the rest of the world, apparently, just about everyone assumes the Bushies are lying. Such is the reputation they’ve built.