The word is evil!

In my 60+ years I have disagreed with all administrations some of the time and some of them most of the time. Until three years ago I had never thought of an administration as evil. Yes the Bush administration is evil.

I'm not alone. While he doesn't use the word evil Andrew Sullivan does use the word shameless to describe Dick Cheney today.

Pressing his attack, the vice president charged that congressional Democrats last month added billions of dollars to an emergency war spending bill "to cover items on their wish list - from fighting crickets to spinach subsidies." He added, "Even though it's still early in the session, when it comes to the appetite for tax dollars, the new Congress has already earned a place in the big-spending hall of fame."

I'm not defending Democratic pork - any more than Republican pork. But, again, what's staggering about these Republicans is their total shamelessness. No administration in recent history has presided over anything like the explosion of domestic discretionary spending and pork-barrel spending than Bush and the Republicans in the past six years. And yet only three months into a new Democratic Congress, they expect to be taken seriously for attacking the other side for the same thing. Cheney is a smart man, and a deeply intellectually dishonest one. From the same poisonous speech, addressing war critics:

"Critics enjoy pointing out mistakes through the perceptive power of hindsight."

Actually, of course, many pointed out mistakes with the perceptive power of foresight. Powell warned of suspending Geneva; Shinseki warned of insufficient troop numbers; even clueless critics like me could see over three years ago the flaws in the occupation strategy. Only Cheney was dumb enough to run a war as badly as this one; and shameless enough to blame others for it.

Shameless and "a deeply intellectually dishonest" man, not evil but pretty close for a former Republican and Cheney supporter.

Over at the Huffington Post Brent Budowsky doesn't have any trouble with the "E" word.

Today's radio address by George Bush included some of the most demeaning, deceptive, dishonest and delusional words ever spoken by an American President.

The President said that in the 2006 elections the American people did not vote for Congress to substitute its judgment for his.

What a bald faced lie and what a slander of the very idea of American democracy.

The President made many misstatements in his radio talking points today, but this one is most noteworthy because it dramatizes every reason that George Bush widely seen as America's worst President in history by a growing number of historians.

This is not an attack on Democrats, it is not an attack on opponents, this is an attack on the American voter, this is an attack on the very idea of liberty, freedom and democracy.

This is an attack on truth.

This is why Bush's Iraq policy has failed; has done extreme damage to the American military; has made Bush a despised pariah around the world, including and especially among the best friends of America everywhere.

To claim that the 2006 election meant that voters did not want change in Iraq policy is such an enormous, shameless, demented, and sick assertion that it qualifies as delusion as evil, or evil as evil.

I've been in this business a long time, and evil is a word I have never applied to any American President, including Nixon.

But to show such contempt and dishonesty about the American voters, in an American election, goes beyond Orwellian deceit.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and those who surround them are interested in one thing and one thing only - raw power. That includes the Jerry Fallwells and Pat Robertsons of the religious right and the neocons at PNAC. They will do anything to get that power and anything to keep it. That includes subverting the institutions and constitution of the United States. If that doesn't qualify as evil I don't know what does. Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini would be proud.