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They Don't Call It the White House for Nothing

They Don't Call It the White House for Nothing

By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com.
Posted July 22, 2006.

God lost this time. I counted: Bush mentioned God only six times in his speech to the NAACP yesterday. The winner was "faith" -- which got seven mentions, though if you count "The Creator" as God, well, then the Lord tied it.
Coming in right behind God and Faith, other big mentions in the First Home Boy's rap included: The Voting Rights Act, his family's "commitment to civil rights," the "death tax," rebuilding New Orleans, "public school choice" and "soft bigotry."
As the philosopher Aretha Franklin once said, "Who's zoomin' who?"
Let's take it one point at a time.
Voting Rights Act -- This was a big applause line. Bush gloated about his convincing the White Sheets Caucus of the Republican Party to go along with the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. But he forgot to mention the fine print. The Southern GOP only went along with renewing the law on the understanding that the law would never be enforced.
Think I'm kidding? Check this: in July 2004, the US Civil Rights Commission voted to open a civil and criminal investigation of his brother's Administration in Florida for knowingly conducting a racially-biased scrub of voter rolls. In April 2004, Governor Jeb Bush, of the "family committed to civil rights," personally ordered this new purge of "felons" from voter rolls, despite promising never to repeat the infamous scrub of 2000. The new purge violated a settlement he signed with the, uh, the NAACP.
It also violated the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Commission turned the case over to the US Justice Department which, two years on, has yet to begin the investigation. That's not to say President Bush did nothing. He swiftly removed every member of the Commission who voted to investigate his brother.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:51 AM