If you didn't foresee this prison "scandal" coming, you weren't paying attention.

It is part and parcel of the same ailment which began with the Gingrinch takeover of the Congress in 1994. The significant thing which we learned about the Republican Party and its leaders with the advent of the Gingrinch Congress was that they treat the law and the rules with utter contempt. We saw it in the vote fraud which gave them their majority in both houses of congress. We saw it in the Rules Committee of the House when the GOP would "stand the rules on their heads" to make them mean what they WANTED them to mean, rather than what they said themselves they meant only days or weeks before. The Speaker himself was fined vast sums over what one of his mouthpieces called a "parking ticket" offense. And the Supreme Court's first thoroughly corrupt and utterly illegal entry into the fray wasn't Bush v Gore, but came when the GOP bribees decided that the way to screw Bill Clinton was to force him into jeopardy by allowing a civil lawsuit to be brought against him by a fully bought-and-paid-for-by-the-GOP Paula Jones.

What the House Judiciary Committee did in bringing articles of impeachment was illegal and wrong. What the House did in impeaching Clinton was illegal and wrong. What the Republican Senators did in the "trial" was illegal and wrong. What the Republicans did by replacing the original IC with Starr was illegal and wrong. What Ken Starr did almost in complete totality was illegal and wrong.

Nearly every single thing done by the GOP in Florida in the 2000 election was illegal and wrong.

What the Supremely corrupt Court did in December of 2000 was illegal and wrong. (They might have "thrown out" the Florida vote, telling them to repeat the election if they could do so with legal ballots in time to make the vote of the Electoral College---and that could have been done on a "one time basis," but not what they did illegally and wrongfully.) But even if the Supremely corrupt Court hadn't given the election to Bush in Bush v Gore, the Florida Republican Legislature was poised to give the election to Bush anyway, since they had the final say and had the votes to do yet another illegal and wrong thing.

Then we have the Botch administration or better stated, the Botch regime. They aborted treaty after treaty via fiat with no consultation with a toothless Congress which was so cowed and scared that it allowed the Bush thugs to plunge the country, showing a surplus for the first time in many years, into the deepest debt ever in the history of America.

The same Congress shamefully abdicated its Constitutional responsibility for taking the country to war, and it allowed the Bush regime to take us illegally and wrongly to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, based on terrorist acts, which were abominable to be sure, but which were nothing more than law enforcement issues, the same as those involving Timothy McVeigh. The Congress allowed the puppet in the White House to dictate the action, and his bosses said to go to Afghanistan---funny thing but the war plan for that had been on his desk for approval long before nine-eleven ever happened. Then, the Congress again allowed the puppet the call and let him lead the country into a shameful war against Iraq (funny thing, but THIS war plan was all wrapped up and ready to go also long before the posturing and lying which was featured in the runup to war), killing tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands so we could steal Iraq's oil without Saddam there to protect it from our grasp.

The prisoners taken in Afghanistan were illegally and wrongfully taken to Guantanamo Bay supposedly to keep them from coming under Constitutional protections, but again, that is the way the Republicans have always done things . . . the Constitution of the United States applies to all of us all the time wherever we may be on the earth; only the GOP would try to evade it by using of all places another illegal and wrongful outpost in Cuba. The Constitution applies to ALL AMERICANS and that means those who are responsible for the prisoners, and it applies as well to the prisoners because they are under US control and supposedly protection. Wait and see . . . the Supremely corrupt Court will also do another illegal and wrongful thing and say the Constitution no longer applies when you leave the shores of America.

Are you beginning to see the pattern here? Can't you understand that the Republican thing is to SUBVERT or subtend the law, to evade responsibility and find ways to claim the intent of decent laws are the opposite of decent and just. Look at what they have done in Texas with their gerrymandering for a prime example. (Not that Democrats haven't gerrymandered, they have, but it was equally illegal and wrongful and distasteful then as well.)

When we went to war with Japan in December of 1941, we "interned" (means threw into jail) Japanese Americans illegally and wrongfully. In September of 2001 almost sixty years later, we hadn't learned a thing, because the Republicans started throwing arab Americans into jail for no cause, illegally and wrongly.

The Patriot Act . . . no one read it before voting for it like it was the answer to every prayer. What it does is illegal and wrong. It is the very antithesis of the Constitution of the United States.

Every day in the Republican regime you see government by fiat, not by law, not by the people, and certainly not FOR the people, because democracy got sick when Gingrinch found a way into power, and it died when the felonious five on the Supremely corrupt Court placed their own master's puppet into power.

Don't expect any help. Democracy died in December of 2000. We have no more control over our fate than did the Germans under Hitler in 1933. The dictators will run their course, and perhaps the Generals will do a coup, and perhaps the people will rebel . . . time alone will tell what comes of all of this, but as I said, you ought to have been paying attention back there in '94, because that's when the USA ceased to be a nation of laws and became an outlaw nation. Clinton held them at bay for six years, but now they have full control, and no one can save us.

No one.