Everyone Who Opposes Bush Is A Terrorist?

by Glynn Wilson

While the revelation that former FBI agent Mark Felts was Deep Throat dominated the attention of reporters on the national level this week, and the hung jury in the trial of deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy dominated the attention of the local press corps., there are other important stories developing almost off the press and public radar screens.

As I predicted in the last presidential election cycle, the Bush administration is moving to turn activists on the left in this country into terrorists. Under the so-called Animal Enterprise Protection Act, amended in 2002 to include "animal enterprise terrorism," prosecutors in New Jersey plan to try six animal rights activists as terrorists from a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

"This is a frightening step in the Bush administration's path to war on domestic dissidence,'' the group said on its Web site, according to Reuters.

I know it won't happen, so saying it will most likely do no good. But what the fuck. This is my recommendation.

Every environmental organization in the country with goals under attack by this administration should find an umbrella group to support and file friend of the court briefs on the side of the animal rights activists in this case. If individual activists can be jailed for opposing research using animals, the next step is to jail members of any group which opposes corporate destruction of endangered species. And that's a real issue, since we now know that one-fifth of Earth's bird species are in danger.

While we are on the subject of the Bush administration, the newspaper that now seems emboldened by the Deep Throat story, the Washington Post, has a story today under the headline: Bush's optimism on Iraq raises questions. No shit.

While over at the New York Times, which is still struggling to find greater transparency in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, there is some good work taking place on the issue of class in America. Today's installment flies under this headline: The Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far, Far Behind. No kidding.

Which brings us back to the subject of the deadlock in the fraud trial of Richard Scrushy. Talk about the super rich.

Could it be that the U.S. attorneys office and the federal judge handling the case are just eating the wrong kind of cookies? This case has been billed as the first test of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which was written in the wake of the collapse of Enron to hold corporate executives criminally responsible for fraud.

So an interesting question becomes: What happens to the law if this case fails? That is a question that escaped analysis by the press covering this trial.

But then, again according to the New York Times, the news media is still recovering from watergate, so perhaps that's a good enough excuse.

Or perhaps Ted Turner got it right when he said this week that CNN focuses too much on perverts.

And speaking of perverts, here's a little noticed story this week. The Kentucky Diocese of the Catholic church has agreed to set aside $120 million to pay victims of sex abuse by gay, pedophile priests.

If you can't trust a priest, who can you trust? Certainly not the government or the press these days.

As indicated in this space last week, we are living in traumatic times. What's a Southern Man with a brain to do? The only I know to do is to put more honey in the coffee and on the biscuits and, of course, blog on . . .

Or maybe read a little satire and laugh at the bastards. According to Tom Burka's blog, Republicans criticized Paul Revere for his famous ride last week, saying that he had violated professional colonial ethics by divulging military secrets in violation of his duty to his lord, the King of England.

Comments for King George anyone?

Or, if you are not in the mood to laugh, how about this essay on the 14 basic characteristics of fascist regimes?