Surely politicians and presidents “bend over” and succumb to pressure.  Rarely do they so willingly and welcomingly do it;  so much so that they have “thinktanks” and media lapdogs (and in the case of Fox, “attack dogs”) to plant their “public persona” in the minds of their “victims”.  Gore ,  in his book ,  issues one of the more scathing assessments here:

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors and powerful political supporters, he is morally timid – so much so that he seldom if ever says “no” to them on anything – no matter what the public interest might mandate.

And the issue that baffles me most as to how this has escaped the rage of the public is this:

Just as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former employers results in a kind of institutionalized corruption and the abandonment of law enforcement and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to brazenly grant sole-source no-bid contracts worth $10 billion to Vice President Cheney’s former company Halliburton – which paid him $150,000 annually until 2005 – has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism, and corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq.
Not coincidentally, the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the U.S. authorities in Iraq now show that billions of dollars in money appropriated by Congress and Iraqi oil revenue have disappeared with absolutely no record of where they went, to whom, for what, or when. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread.

The only thing these people are interested in managing is “where the money is”,  and then covering their tracks when the money has gone wherever it went.  To use an oft worn-out barb:  “When you look up corruption in the dictionary,  it says : “See the Bush administration”.  In their case,  they provide several definitions represented by all the ways they have devised to funnel all available wealth straight up,  and “pretend” at all the oversights with which they have been so mistakenly entrusted. 

found via Google on a key phrase from the above quote in Time for change’s Journal – The Demise of our First Amendment Rights – And How that Enables Rampant Militarism