Bush Trumpets Iraq Verdict to Rally Support

As I predicted yesterday, George Bush has wasted no time in using the death sentence passed on Saddam Hussein as a tool in his quest to stave off devastation at Tuesday's polls. The Republican Party still claim that the timing of the verdict was made on an Iraqi timetable and was not done to aid them in the mid-terms.

“Today we witnessed a landmark event in the history of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal,” Mr. Bush said to roars of approval in a hockey auditorium packed with supporters in Grand Island, Neb. “Saddam Hussein’s trial is a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.”

Leaving aside the highly dubious timing of the sentencing, it is still unlikely to be enough to save the Republicans come Tuesday morning.

The New York Times, for the first time in it's history, is backing not a single Republican candidate. The reason they have done so is why Bush should lose on Tuesday:

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.

This administration have gathered power to the executive in a way that is unprecedented in American history, with a President who now claims that he, himself, is above the law.

He has dispensed with Habeas Corpus and has granted himself the power to pronounce any citizen an "enemy combatant". Once he has declared that citizen an "enemy combatant", that person loses all right to an independent trial and no court in the US has any power to oversee the decision the President has made.

It is the kind of absolute power that dictators like Idi Amin have claimed is theirs. The idea that this kind of power is being claimed by an American President is highly alarming.

Normally, one would have hoped that in a system built on checks and balances, that the Republican party itself would have acted as some form of legislative brakes on a runaway President hell-bent on claiming the power of a king. However, this Republican Party have bent over backwards to give Bush whatever power he claimed, even granting him the disgraceful right to torture.

They have forgone any right to be deemed sensible enough to continue to hold such legislative power and every opinion poll suggests that they are, on Wednesday morning, going to wake up to a new political reality in which this power has been prised from their grasp.

This is certainly the hope of the rest of the planet.

Ronald Reagan once famously described America as "the shining city on the hill". And whilst there are many of us who feel the US never quite lived up to that level of hyperbole, we nevertheless never expected her to fall so far from her ideals as she has been allowed to fall under this disgraceful administration.

It is time for Americans to take America back. And whilst this will not be fully possible for another two years, tomorrow they have the opportunity to put the brakes on a runaway administration.

As the Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan said recently, "This is not an election anymore, this is an intervention. Someone has to be held accountable."

I couldn't agree more. It is time to rein in Bush's power and hold these extremists to account.

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tag: United, States, Bush, mid-term, elections, November, Saddam, Hussein, sentence, Iraq, Military Commissions Act, 2006, enemy combatant, interrogation techniques, Geneva Conventions, "Stay the course", trial verdict, Habeas Corpus, Republicans