Brace yourselves - it's a politics post.

Bush has a huge problem - it is that he his physically unable to do anything right. No matter how hard he tries, everything is his fault - from natural disasters to flawed intelligence on Iraq, to a terrorist attack on America. The rest of the government doesn't actually exist - nobody else is screwing things up - there's no congress, no house, only "The Bush Administration."

Okay, so Bush has actually done a lot of good things, the real problem is that he could never dream of getting credit for any of it. I won't list all those things, I'll just get straight to what this post is about.

There is an article here talking about a new law Bush has signed allowing him to declare marshall law. Let's not even mention the fact that presidents have had this power since JFK (and maybe even earlier?). Let's just talk about this article for a moment. Here's the opening line:

"In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1)."

A stealth maneuver, was it? A stealth maneuver that was first passed by the house and the senate. It's not like Bush just made this stuff up and declared it law. The article misses the fact that we live in a democracy and that passing a law is a very un-stealhlike process.

Let's move on.

The article goes on to mention that this new law changes the Insurrection Act, which says what a president can and can't do in regard to military presence in a state. In the past, a president could only send in the military at request of the state itself. This law changes that so the president can act by himself.

Despite all the screaming about how this is Bush setting himself up for another term, how he's going to suppress the voice of America with armed force, and all the other hoopla going around about this, this is about something entirely different.

Katrina.

People screamed and yelled at Bush for not responding to Katrina when, in fact, he had no right to do so because the state government refused to ask for help. That's a power of the state, not the federal government. So here, Bush fixed it so that next time the slow response actually WILL be the federal government's fault.

But Bush can't win. Either he sucks for now going around federal law and flying troops down to New Orleans, or he sucks for changing the law so it won't happen again.

Someday I hope we live in a country where people aren't retarded. If a president really sucked, it wouldn't take lies to convince everybody. Let's live in a country where people look at everything the government does, and their motives, and makes informed decisions. I wish reporting like this was punished, not by the government, but by smart, informed readers who stopped reading (supporting) their garbage.