Saturday Night Special

"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law." -- Justice John Paul Stevens

EXTRA Election 2000 final: Bush wins Presidency by five votes; each personally delivered by William H. Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia.

10JAN2001 Jason Robards, Jr., portraying Ben Bradley in All the Presidents Men asked about someone going on-record with the Watergate story. Yesterday the President went on-record, finally; at least acknowledging that something went seriously wrong in Florida. Bill Clinton said our candidate won the popular vote, and the only way they could win the election was to stop the voting in Florida...

Vice President Al Gore called for a count of thousands of disputed Florida ballots. Bush opposed that effort, and Gore conceded only after the U.S. Supreme Court closed the door to the counting.

Watergate was an attmpted coup. The "selection" of a President rather than the "election" of a President at the hands of George W, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris was an accomplished who sleeps with whom or politics makes strange bedfellows coup.

The Age of Embarrassment or The "Cringe" Factor of Bush selected President of the United States could be the top news story over the next four years. The writer (Jill Nelson) says, "Bush's cabinet choices are an assortment of right-wing ideologues, fat cats, has-beens, wannabees, and plain ol' opportunists..." Jill is a journalist, author and edited the "Police Brutality Anthology." She is a regular contributor to MSNBC.

The price America pays for putting an underachiever in the White House

Forget all the rhetoric during the campaign from George W. Bush about morals, virtue, honor and restoring America to her former glory. The Age of Embarrassment is upon us, and if you think you were humiliated by Bill Clinton's shenanigans in the Oval Office, baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

THIS IS the era to cringe as you see the latest Republican retread nominated for a cabinet post. You can't help but blush when a right-wing, racist, Republican senatorial candidate from Missouri loses the election to a dead Democratic opponent and then is rewarded by the president-elect by being nominated U.S. Attorney General. Not to mention the deja vu all over again that struck when Donald Rumsfeld was nominated for Secretary of Defense, one mo' time. If you can remember back that far, this is the man who began his political career with Richard Nixon and graduated to being Secretary of Defense in the Gerald Ford Administration, is a supporter of space-based defense systems - remember the joke that was Star Wars?

Watching Bush announce his cabinet choices over the last few weeks, I suppose it's possible for those who did not vote for him to avoid feeling sick, disgusted, or outraged. But it's been totally impossible to avoid being embarrassed.

It's as if we're watching some bad national sitcom, very loosely based on Oedipus, in which the First Son tries to prove himself to his ex-commander-in-chief father. And how does he go about doing this? By surrounding himself with aging father surrogates - first and foremost Daddy's main man, Dick Cheney, who, heading the vice-presidential search committee, ended up having himself chosen for the job.

In "taking charge" on January 3rd, President-elect Bush commented on the Fed's decision to cut interest rates, by saying 'bold action' is needed to make sure the economy remains vibrant.

Junior Bush's cabinet choices are composed of an assortment of right-wing ideologues, fat cats, has-beens, wannabes, and plain ol' opportunists. Not a visionary in the bunch, and no one in sight who seems capable of imagining this nation or the world absent the status quo of corporate capitalism. From soon-to-be Secretary of State Colin Powell to Gale Norton, nominated to head the Department of the Interior, to New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, whose state is a hotbed of racial profiling and who herself once smiled for the cameras as she participated in a ceremonial stop-and-frisk operation, there's not an original, innovative thinker in the bunch. Sure, there's superficial diversity in the Bush cabinet, which includes two African Americans, two Latinos, two women, and a lone Democrat of Asian descent, but the cabinet still remains overwhelmingly conservative politically.

THE POWELL FACTOR Colin Powell is Bush's pick for Secretary of State.

I'm not comforted by the selection of Colin Powell, white America's favorite Negro, as Secretary of State. In an America where major changes have been made through citizens saying "no" to authority, particularly African Americans, Powell is an obedient military man who was involved in the major military debacles of the last half of the 20th century, including Vietnam, Grenada and the Gulf War.

As for women, Gale Norton, who worked under former Secretary of the Interior and environmental assassin James Watt, isn't likely to stray from the conservative mindset that concerns about protecting the environment must always give way to corporate profits. Gender won't help us here; this is a woman who believes corporate self-policing - rather than federal laws and regulations - is the way to protect the environment.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that after bushwhacking the U.S. Supreme Court, W decided to select Missouri Sen. John D. Ashcroft for Attorney General, an anti-abortion ideologue who accepted an honorary degree from the notoriously racist Bob Jones University in 1999. Ashcroft's biggest challenge in his upcoming confirmation hearing will be explaining exactly why he led the dishonest assault that destroyed African American Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White's nomination to a federal judgeship.

Looking at Bush's cabinet picks is like waking up to a recurring nightmare that gets worse by the moment, without any relief in sight. Perhaps the scariest aspect is that while Bush consistently chooses committed conservative ideologues, he appears to have little commitment or clear ideology himself. He's still Daddy's wayward prankster son, only this time with a big job and the power to hire his father's cronies to do it for him.

In 1996, at the height of a controversy on racial profiling in the New Jersey State Police, Gov. Christie Todd Whitman was photographed participating in a search. The photo will haunt her confirmation hearings for the post of EPA chief.

Watching Bush announce his cabinet is like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz," in which the Wizard is revealed as a short, impotent charlatan. The difference is that at least the Wizard was pulling the strings; it's still not clear exactly who's calling the shots for Bush2, although the specters of Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, Jerry Falwell and the gang are never far away. The one thing that is clear is that Bush and his handlers have demonstrated little respect for civil rights, women's rights, human rights, the environment, the law, or the courts.

SKEPTICAL AND RESTIVE Perhaps what's both most daunting and most hopeful in this Age of Embarrassment is that it dawns in a nation split after an election that at best can be described as deeply flawed - and at worst, outright stolen - by Republican partisans led by the president-elect's brother, Jeb Bush, and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Reports have already surfaced in The Washington Post that Harris will be rewarded for her efforts by being named Special Envoy to the Americas.

Yet as Bush prepares for his inauguration and seems bent on ruling as if he has a mandate, many Americans watch with skepticism, eyebrows raised. Yes, the Age of Embarrassment is upon us.

Given the election debacle and the backward bent of the Bush cabinet, I'd like to think that the Age of Citizen Activism is not far behind.





Police Brutality: An Anthology by Jill Nelson, Editor
Hardcover - 320 pages (May 2000) ISBN: 0393048837
Paperback - 320 pages (May 2001) ISBN: 0393321630
W.W. Norton & Company







Straight, No Chaser : How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman
Hardcover - 224 pages (August 1997) ISBN: 0399142622
Putnam Publishing Group
Paperback - 240 pages (February 1999) ISBN: 0140277242
Penguin USA





Volunteer Slavery : My Authentic Negro Experience
by Jill Nelson
Paperback Reprint edition (July 1994) ISBN: 014023716X
Penguin USA