Gangsters
In the White House

Gangsters run the White House and Justice, although the Don appears to reside at One Observatory Circle. Can you believe these guys! To them it appears to be normal practice to threaten US District Attorneys who don't target Democrats. And deniability is a mantra.

"I don't remember." "I don't recall." Other mobsters were convicted on legal pretexts as tangential as Libby's perjury and obstruction of justice charges. The favorite for the Mafia was tax evasion. After all, if everyone is scared to death (or for their careers) of coming clean on their long list of crimes, you can still catch lies in their inconsistencies--or cash unaccounted for.

But the White House players are more slippery than the Mafia and they've got most of the courts, most of Congress, and almost all the media cowed (or collaborating). Perhaps, finally, enough members of the House, and almost enough members in the Senate are willing to brave the threats of "omerta" issued by their chief spokesman--George W. Bush--to begin to ask questions.

Have other nations been taken over by gangsters? It's probably more common than we realize: not just the small, stereotyped kleptocratic states in poor nations, but major powers, empires like Rome, and Spain. The Roman Empire presented in this website was a kleptocracy of long standing. What was it, after all, but an Empire of super-thieves who pillaged the whole Mediterranean, and then settled down to enjoy their ill-gotten gains--including the labor of slaves, a continuous supply of which was maintained by subordinate members of the gang--the slave-catchers--and prevented from escaping by the rest of their followers, the hired mercenary troops.

The gangsters in the White House are only somewhat more sophisticated. They still torture and kill, although they attempt some legal and political rationale; their actions are legalized by bought judges, just the way the Mafia used to operate. Unlike the Mafia, the White House mob has wonderful PR, because their members own the media. When someone like Seymour Hersh indicates that the VP's office is involved in funding Sunni terrorist groups with black money (to attack the Shiites), the media doesn't investigate, it just stifles a collective yawn: after all, one doesn't talk about your gang's operations in public!

The only fly in the ointment is a Congress which is no longer entirely craven in the face of the gangsters' threats, and a media-independent minority that keeps on making noise.

In Rome, the Senators were the gangsters who drove the Empire into the dust, first through their corruption and their refusal to fund the state, and then through actual betrayal. Will the gang in the White House attempt to hold on, as the Senators did, or will they take their loot and retire to places like Dubai, following the CEO of Halliburton?

Only time will tell.