That old 'Tammany Tiger'
not a threatened species

A Toronto Star story about the fallout from the "Saving Private Lynch" affaire de spin provides us with a startling new gauge of how deeply corrupt the US government has become after 20-plus years of consecutive Republican and neoliberal administrations.

Lynda Hurst reports, among other things that:

Critics are pointedly asking why the other surviving woman in [Jessica] Lynch's convoy, Army Specialist Shoshanna Johnson, also injured and taken prisoner, is set to receive only a 30 per cent disability benefit, while Lynch gets 80 per cent -- a difference of $700 a month. Anything to do with Johnson being black?

The doctors who evaluated the extent to which each of the two women were permanently disabled may well argue that the two injuries were different and so led to medically different outcomes.

But they would say that, wouldn't they?

Government corruption has always been about one thing: putting pals in power who will facilitate the plundering of the public purse.

This was open and blatant in the McKinley administration, that golden age of Robber Barons which the neocons are famously trying to revive in the US. New York'sTammanyy Hall was the most notorious, but city and state political machines ruled the rewards roost from San Francisco to Massachusetts.

Reaction to such fundamental favor-for-favor corruption of government institutions that are charged with treating all citizens fairly and equally gave rise to the establishment of the civil service -- another clean government institution the GOP slavers to eliminate.

How much Lynch's self-admitted unmerited celebrity may have contributed to the fatness of her disability check will be spun by the Bush Administration into uncertainty, like global warming, and causes of pollution.

But the mere fact that the Pentagon may be handingg out rewards to the politically useful pawns only goes to show how pervasive corruption has become. Not that the Pentagon was ever anything but a system of rewards for government contractors. The shock is that it as filtered all the way down to the level of calibrating pensions by ideological standards.

Jessica Lynch herself appears to be a "victim" of the corrupted system. She probably didn't actively leverage her usefulness into a fatter disability check. But then, there have been no reports that she tried to turn the offer down, either.

It's becoming all too clear. The day is soon approaching -- if it isn't here already -- when important government application forms will sport little political affiliation checkboxess, and "under penalty of perjury" loyalty statements.

How these statements will read will be the question. Will they demand allegiance to the US of America, forever and ever? Or just to the US Administration, currently?