Cindy & Katrina: Two women who have exposed the Bush Republican corruption

Last month, Cindy Sheehan shown a brilliant spotlight on the Bush Republicans, illuminating the calculated, cynical and deliberate way that they had deceitfully, corruptly and deliberately led America into an unjust and unnecessary war. "Exactly what noble cause did my son die for?" Cindy asked.

Did the "noble cause" that Casey Sheehan died for somehow invovle lining the Bush Republicans' pockets with America's hard-earned money? As billions and billions of our tax dollars mysteriously disappeared down the rabbit hole of waste and mismanagement in Iraq, we began to suspect that it did.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit with all the lurid force of nothing America had ever seen before, destroying and obliterating a entire section of this country. And suddenly Cindy Sheehan was forgotten, stale. She was yesterday's news.

Or was she?

As the stories filtered back to us about how the Bush Republicans had systematically drained major chunks of financing away from paying for the levee maintenance projects necessary to keep the Big Easy safe, we realized that New Orleans, like Iraq, was all about money.

As the stories filtered in about how millions of dollars had been spent by Bush Republicans on ad campaigns to make pariahs out of the scientists who had tried to warn us that Bush Republican pro-pollution policies were exacerbating the global warming process that allowed Katrina to grow from some obscure tropical storm into the Gulf Coast's worst nightmare, we began to realize that here too governance -- to the Bush Republicans -- was all about money.

What Cindy and Katrina have both pointed out to us -- too late to save America's long list of corpses -- is that, like termites burrowing from within the structure of a home that seems from the outside to be solid -- Bush Republicans have burrowed into our economy, eating a bit here (Enron), a bit there (Halliburton's obscene profits from Iraq), a bite at a time (the staggering national debt, the tax breaks for the rich, the union-busting, the looting of our National Guard, the welfare-for-corporations legislature passed by Congress, the de-funding of schools and hospitals, the pollution of our air and rivers...) until the largest, strongest economy in the world became just an empty shell.

Two women have shown us -- on national television -- pictures of what can happen if we allow corruption from within. It's time to clear our foundations of these termites. Their greedy crimes have cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. It's time to call in the exterminators and get rid of these pests -- starting witn impeachment, asset impoundment and jail. To quote Bush himself on TV last night, "Looters should be treated with zero tolerance."

I offer heart-felt thanks to Cindy Sheehan for being brave enough to point this deceit and corruption out to us. However, I never will find it in my heart to thank Hurricane Katrina.