Obama Government Rising From Her Bath

Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders Wednesday that took the first important steps toward making government more accountable and transparent. His plan to do so includes tightened ethics rules for the Executive Branch, especially regarding lobbyists, and a wide-open policy toward FOIA requests.

You could almost hear the agonized groan from Dick Cheney, last seen Tuesday impersonating Frankenstein's monster reanimated by a 9-volt battery.

But if Obama is to be successful at once again making government the solution to, rather than the exploiter of, America's ills, this is an important step in restoring its credibility.

Diminutive dimwit Grover Norquist, the Thomas Pain-in-the-Ass of Reaganomics and co-author of the Contract On - excuse me, "with" - America, is the source of the quote about wanting government to be so small he can "drown it in the bathtub." Under George W. Bush, government wasn't so much drowned as it was waterboarded in debt, with plenty of spending for excellent adventures in Eastern empire-building, but not so much for things like domestic infrastructure, healthcare or education.

Now, the economy looks like New Orleans 9th Ward after Katrina, with small taxpayers and Big Business alike looking to the Obama Administration to make like a helicopter and pluck them off their waterlogged, over-mortgaged roofs. To just about everyone these days, capital "G" Government is looking as beautiful as Botticelli's Venus rising from the bathwater.

But to do the job fully and effectively, we have to be able to trust government again. The neo-cons have convinced all their bundists that government is bad in and of itself. That ideology is a self-fulfilling prophecy because, under neo-con control, the government actually was bad. Very bad. It was so bad that we don't even know how bad it was, because from the day he entered office, Bush did everything he could to hide any and all information about government, including his father's government, from the prying eyes of those pesky historians and journalists.

Of course no one can trust government, they proved. If you could, would Katrina have been so bad? Would Iraq have happened? Would the economy have collapsed? Apparently, all government is good for is to rack up incredible debt and spy on its own citizens.

But it's not that we can't trust all government, just that last one. It's not the system that has failed, but the process.

Obama's influence-free election, together with the extraordinary steps he is taking to ensure that his administration is above-board, will help the US Government to regain its status at home and abroad as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. It's not that government needed to be drowned in the bathtub.

Merely bathed.