of skill so you’ll throw a ball to drown him in the waiting barrel. The pitch invites the mark to throw the dart, what could be easier, win your girl a stuffed toy, and put your dollars down again and again until you pay double for the doll and then some. Sideshow barkers like past president Ronald Regan began the shill that guided American politics down the rabbit hole of the last quarter of a century and whose legacy is carried on today in every cheap twist and turn of illogic that spews out of the Executive branch and cascades through the waste stream of Congress: put economic pressure on the disadvantaged, blame societal failures on the voiceless, make accountability an issue for the poor.

George Bush was elected on the three card monte of ending partisanship, bringing accountability to government, being a uniter not a divider. That con game was imbibed by an electorate sleeping peacefully after gorging on Regan’s Iran Contra jelly beans, Bush Sr’s war for the Saudi and Kuwaiti oligarchies, Clinton’s hypnotic “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” as Wall Street sundered the productivity of our economy.

Now in Iraq the Vichy government of Maliki is to blame, not the horror of Rumsfeld bombing the Iraqi infrastructure into the 19th century, Bremer’s dismantling of every constraint and civility that would have allowed progress and the return of control to the Iraqi people, Bush’s mercenary army and born again pal Eric Prince, his Blackwater “professionals” shooting civilians on sight like the carnival or video games our foreign policy has regressed to, the "Salvador Option" sectarian war that Negroponte, Poindexter, Armitage, Abrams and all the bad actors in the Bush diplomatic sector including Gates at CIA led in Central America and have returned like vampires from their coffins to pit Iraqis against Iraqis in order to obscure the American military occupation.

How to describe the corruption of Bush’s Pentagon with Halliburton, Parson’s, KBR, Bechtel and the sewer stream of corporate cronies that have turned Iraq into a "free fraud zone" delivering nothing but billion dollar invoices against the most disgraceful banana republic performance since the late great Russian façade of fake factories and non-production hid behind uniform and ideology. Accountability, for the lost billions of dollars, for the corps of twenty something Christian fundamentalists hired into state department positions of responsibility with no sustentative knowledge but a myopic perspective on one book useless in the reorganization of a nation, for the destruction of city after city until two million Iraqis are displaced within the country, millions are expatriated into the lowest social order of their neighbors, hundreds of thousands are dead and the remainder in horrifyingly repetitive traumatic shock; accountability by Team Decider: none.

Then there’s the Congressional corruption of the DeLay - Hastert - Abramoff squad of bribers, pederasts, pedophiles and con artists making sure the trough remained oiled and sloped to their corporate compatriots, promoting sweat shops in the Marianas and fostering sex and other forms of chattel slavery throughout east Asia, eastern Europe and the Caribbean, the environmental despoiling of the metastasizing corporate growth promoted by Clinton and Bush father and son beyond the limited confines of US law and what little remained of its enforcement thanks to industry cranks like Gale Norton and Christie Whitman who hid the truth about 9-11 toxicity condemning thousands of New York workers to lifetime infirmity or early death.

Bush ratcheted up the gall meter this week though by showing up at a press conference to announce his coming veto of a congressional plan to extend help to disadvantaged youth, surrounded by black and minority children, conning them with his twisted imperious smile, his crooked finger beckoning them closer like an old witch to his personal barbecue, roasting their future because the cost of helping them was “just too expensive” although admitting that "childrens do learn" - just not on his watch. Accountability, for the fortune Bush’s brother and family have made on “no child left behind," for the scandalous profits channeled into privatization of public education, for the utter failure that has resulted from making testing the benchmark for education; accountability for Team Bush: None.

No, there’s no accountability in the Oval Office, the Board Rooms and backrooms of wealth and privilege where the Regan Bush Clinton Bush dynasty was conceived, founded and funded to this day. No, accountability is not for the rich or the privileged. Accountability, it’s for the poor.