IT IS STRANGE HOW OUTRAGE DEVELOPS.� IT DOES NOT COME TO SOME BECAUSE THEY SEE THE DISSERVICE DONE TO OTHERS.� INSTEAD, IT COMES ONLY WHEN THE FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON APPROACHES THEIR FRONT DOOR.

In light of the multiple scandals that enmesh the Bush Administration, I suppose that little should be left to surprise me.� Having lived through 9/11, Iraq, Plamegate, Libbygate and Katrina, DeLay, Frist, Rove, Rumsfeld and Cheney and the NSA domestic spying scandals, I should be jaded by now.� What else could these scuzballs possibly do to surprise me?� Little, I would have thought.� I would have been wrong.

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Business Week magazine, as far from being a bastion of liberal thinking as could be imagined, has just spilled the beans on yet another abuse of our constitution perpetrated by the Administration, and all of the media are carrying articles about the FBI’s controversial raid on Congress, something our founders made abundantly clear was not to be tolerated in our society.� It is almost as if they were taking the United States Constitution, the document on which our entire society is based, folding it up and running it through a cross cut shredder.

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The Business Week story is most intriguing because of the overall scope of the issue involved.� Presidents since Jimmy Carter, according to the article, have had the right to exempt certain corporations from the reporting requirements of the Securities Act of 1934, when the transactions being exempted deal directly with matters of national security.� In the past, when these exemptions were issued, they were on the direct order of the President, usually to protect companies involved in the manufacture of secret weaponry or intelligence equipment.�

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President Bush seems to have come up with a new twist on this, however.� The King of Evil, intelligence czar, John Negroponte, has been given the power, by an executive order of the President, to issue corporate reporting exemptions without presidential participation.� Negroponte, a man who is known to be of less than sterling character, and a convicted felon for his participation in the Iran Contra scandals during the only term of Bush 41, is now in a position to give a blank check to publicly traded companies who are participating in the nefarious activities of the current administration.� Those companies, of course, would include the likes of A.T & T., Verizon, and Bell South, the companies that have been turning over your personal telephone information to surrogate organizations that then sell that information to the government.
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Let’s get this straight.� These guys have literally eviscerated the Fourth Amendment by spying on us without warrants through third party recipients of data who then sell that data back to the government.� Then, they have further dismembered our securities laws by allowing the participating public companies to avoid reporting on this Unconstitutional activity.
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The problem is that this is not the only story to come out today that details the death of the rule of law in our country.
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Although he is not a man of great character, Congressman William Jefferson of Louisiana is a Democrat.� When the entire congressional corruption scandals have finally shaken out, Congressman Jefferson will be one of the few members on the left to have been convicted of corruption.� A few days ago, Congressman Jefferson also received another singular dishonor when he became the first and only member of Congress to have his office raided by the FBI.� The reason this never happened before has to do with the Constitution that specifically forbids the arrest of a member of Congress or the search of that member’s office within the confines of the Congressional buildings.
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There is no doubt in my mind that Congressman Jefferson is not a good guy and probably deserves to be arrested, but rules are rules.� It seems really odd to me that similar charges have been brought against others in the House of Representatives, all of them against Republicans, and, yet, the only member whose office was raided was the sole Democrat suspected of taking and soliciting bribes.� Certainly, a grand jury found sufficient evidence to indict Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) without having had the FBI raid his office.�
Similarly, there were no raids at the office of convicted former Congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) or at the office of about to be indicted Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH).

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What is most interesting is that the one’s screaming the loudest, sort of like stuck pigs, are the Republicans who are dreading the potential of FBI raids at their offices.� These jerks have sat by idly as President Bush and the group of criminals that surround him have castrated them by systematically taking away all of the checks and balances that the founders of our country built into the Constitution.� Only now, when the ham handed tactics of the FBI are coming dangerously close to their doors are they starting to squeal.

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It is strange how outrage develops.� It does not come to some because they see the disservice done to others.� Instead, it comes only when the fire-breathing dragon approaches their front door.

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The other day, I was talking politics with a friend on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan when a stranger approached and suggested that if I didn’t like America, I should leave.� He sounded like the “America Love It or Leave It” crowd from the ‘60s and 70s who spent their time defending their wonderful leader, Richard Nixon.� I chose not to engage him in a protracted conversation, but was reminded of the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller in referring to the Nazi’s in Germany.�

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“They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a communist; They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a union leader; They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”

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They came for the whistleblowers, and no Republicans spoke up, because they weren’t whistleblowers.� They came for the liberals and seized their phone records without warrants, and no Republicans spoke up, because they weren’t liberals.� Now they have come to raid their Congressional offices, and they are speaking up.�

Fortunately for them, the rest of us, those who have been speaking up against the evil perpetrated by La Cosa Nostra Bush all along, are speaking up with them, just as we have always done.

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HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT