Bush: The Lame Hawk President

Forget your lame duck President. Bush is our first lame hawk. He may have lost credibility and lost direction, as Congressman Murtha claims, but it would be foolish to see him as chastised and tamed by the judgment of the American people. He will remain George Bush, making a false show of bipartisanship, covering his greed for power with a genial grin, only to wait his moment to strike and make his kill.

A lame duck will hobble along for two years, quacking and quaking, but George Bush is an opportunistic predator, and like the American kestrel, our common hawk, he feeds on mice and insects, keeps his talons sharp, and an eye out for the weakness of his timid prey. So unless the newly elected Dems wish to become the meal of this predator, they cannot hide their views in the name of collegiality. They cannot scamper away from the big issues; removing our troops from the Iraq disaster, repairing the broken environment, or scutter away insect like from the outrageous disparities in American economic life. Like a hawk, George Bush is a social predator. He will cling to his right wing advisors while pretending to fly above the fray, and wait for an opening to swoop down and strike the timid in the Democratic party. Never has it been more important for Democrats to act in a fearless, forthright, united manner, or our lame hawk will swoop down and make a meal of them. He may have lost the public's confidence but he has not lost his talons. So this is no time to celebrate the defeat of the worst President in American history. As President he keeps the power of the executive, and that is an enormous power over foreign policy and Judicial appointments.

It's time for the Dems to go to work, and the work of this Congress is a clean up that is a greater challenge than that of the Katrina mess. The notion that the Dems should not investigate the criminal war profiteering and the corruption of the Republicans, or investigate the origins of this war because the American people want to move on is so much sliced baloney. You can't move on with your wheels stuck in the mud. Americans have asked for a change, and the Democrats had better find the courage to do it, without hoping that this President will make the task easier by seeing the error of his ways. This hawk of ours, George Bush, will not change, cannot change, his DNA stands for Deny, Negate, and Attack. This must always be kept in mind as the Democrats attempt to repair the great damage he has inflicted on this country and the world in the past six years.