whereiswaldo's Journal: Al Gore speaks about Bush's lawlessness

What is really going on in the United States with President Bush at the wheel? Definitely read this PDF on a speech given by Al Gore entitled "Institutionalized Dishonesty in the Bush Administration". It's really worth taking the time to read!

http://www.acslaw.org/pdf/gore6-24.pdf

Some hilights (typos are mine):

The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged in order to aggrandize power have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, the silencing of dissent, the ignoring of intelligence. And although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach upon the legitimate prerogatives of Congress and the courts, there has never been this kind of persistent, systematic abuse of the truth and the institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.

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Moreover, in contrast, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that helped to save our country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress, controlled by the president's party, has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government. Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the president on what to vote for and what to vote against. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form; and instead, they let the president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them.

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First of all, more than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush administrations from governmental websites...
To muddy the clear concensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report -- changes that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarassed to use the language insisted upon by the political employees at the White House.

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And another example. When mass layoffs became too embarassing, this administration simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades.

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He [President Bush] will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties, again on his personal discretion. He will continue to intimidate the press, and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for reelection.

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What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an administration for whom the best law is no law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And when the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.