- As Americans we've gotten flabby about what has traditionally
made us strong, the right to exercise free speech.
-
- And we'd better get back to exercising soon, before the
stronger and less democratic government, run by the Bush and Dirty Dollar
Dynasty, further demolishes the hell out of our good Constitution, that
thing that assures our health and future as a free people.
-
- The health of our children, the vigor of our communities,
the survival of this nation - in fact, the centuries-old American wager
on liberty and good faith - depends on the courage to exercise, once again,
the right to criticize piggish politicians who don't want to hear what
you, as an American citizen, have to say.
-
- This nation started out in protest against despots. How
is it that they've found their way back into our government? And why do
we, as a nation whose light to the world has been the compact of certain
inalienable rights, held in trust by concrete constitutional freedoms,
allow them to continue to chop the limbs off Lady Liberty while tearing
the stomach out of the rest of the world?
-
- Our light is going out. Our freedoms are dying. Before
long we will lament the days long past when we could freely celebrate our
independence as citizens.
-
- The world, in fact, and Europe especially - the mother
of our ideals for freedom and the one-time admirer of our determination
to live by them - gawks in wonderment at our sleepy complacency, at our
flabby discontent, and at our prescribed willingness to tolerate and endure
the irreparable stupidity of our leaders.
-
- They wonder out loud, certainly more loudly than we have,
how a determinedly simple-minded man, who suspiciously resembles the smarter
and less daft Alfred E. Neuman, could get away with his own comic book
rhetoric to zap the "axis of evil," to fight the ongoing war
against terror. Who let this guy into the White House anyway?
-
- The goofy, flag-waving smugness of his eminence doesn't
impress Europe's better-informed and more politically astute populace.
They understand the shallowness of his commitment to social and economic
justice, the lack of substance to his politically motivated balderdash
to rid the world of tyrants. The emperor wears his new clothes like the
moron that he is.
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- We needn't be afraid to point out there's nothing there.
Europeans, Cubans and Venezuelans are already doing it.
-
- They know more clearly than we, and they have had the
readiness to show what they know through protests and demonstrations, that
our leadership is taking us for a ride. Americans are taking the downhill
slide to government by the cops, for the money and of the corporation.
-
- When will we finally wake up to the fact that our president
is a buffoon? That his advisors and corporate bedfellows, who fund modern
revolutions at home and abroad, are shameless crooks who laugh at the misery
of working-class people everywhere, but especially at those who trusted
in them for their guidance and pledges to protect their future?
-
- Do we really need another Enron to awaken us to the fact
that George W. Bush, and the buzzards who support his waspish bloodsucking
with our hard-earned money, would as much drill a hole in our ass as he
would a pipeline through Afghanistan and the Arctic Wilderness, or a billion
tons of arsenal into the heart of Iraq?
-
- Americans, led by the Pied Piper of penury and political
corruption, have marched right alongside the Doopus Domus Potis (the Dopey
Despot) of the New World Order to the precipice of lost liberty.
-
- We peer into an Orphean abyss of a great love lost, liberties
betrayed because of our own failure as American citizens to govern ourselves,
to right our government and protect our freedoms against hoodlums who steal
elections, spit on civil rights and piss on starving mothers.
-
- The American Revolution didn't stop with the cessation
of hostilities against England. The revolution is ongoing. It ends only
when men and women in government respect the rights of its people, by guaranteeing
and, in fact, encouraging their right to speak out, to criticize irresponsible
leadership, to hold their government accountable for its failures and actions.
-
- Who, by the way, is accountable for the Herculean failure
to detect the heinous plot to fly commercial airliners into the public
marketplace? Was it the FBI, the White House or the CIA?
-
- And why, silly me, can't I stop asking myself just how
much did George really know about this or similar plots before September
11?
-
- Then, there's another one of George's stupidly fascist
assistants, this time Dick Cheney, who questions our patriotic commitment
to freedom by telling good Americans that we shouldn't ask for, as commentator
Bill Press suggests, "an immediate, thorough, public and bipartisan
congressional investigation of whether the terrorist attacks of 9/11 could
have been prevented."
-
- That, my friends, would be - as the heart attack prone,
unfit-for-office multi-millionaire oilman from Halliburton, reminded us
- "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders
in a time of war."
-
- Did he say time of war? Who declared war? Congress? Who
are we fighting now? Was it Afghanistan or Iraq? Where's that pipeline
going?
-
- Did he say national leaders? With the exception of a
few - Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore, Jim Hightower and
others - our national leaders have been a huge disappointment, like a limp
noodle sucked this way and that by the lure of money, media-sponsored patriotism,
and gluttonous corporate kisses. Lately, our national leaders have done
nothing but hustle favors, dollars and a quick fix.
-
- So, scrap the national leaders. Forget them. Let's take
the burden of thorough irresponsibility and total unworthiness upon our
selves as citizens of the United States, and pledge our hopes and dreams
to the protection of our constitutional right to say, "You stink,
Mr. Cheney."
-
- The only way such a super-charged, dicked-up challenge
as Cheney's makes sense is that the Separated at Birth, Alfred E. Newman
look-alike in the White House isn't really president of the U.S. after
all. He's just the Resident Idiot, a bloated ego with dirt and oil on his
hands pretending to be a national leader.
-
- And he, being a cowboy of good stock, backed by crooked
money and the Bush family oligarchy, doesn't have to answer to nobody,
at least not to you or me.
-
- Why else does the Bushed Administration refuse to tell
Americans what it knew before September 11? Why else do these comic book
heroes oppose an investigation on how to really stop terrorism?
-
- America, as envisioned by those who framed our government,
was supposed to be about something more than re-runs of the Joker and his
riddles of non-specificity. Were the red flags the FBI waved at the White
House last summer "non-specific"? Just how non-specific were
they?
-
- Does the answer "non-specific" ring anything
like the request "define oral sex"?
-
- Excuse me, Alfred, would you know why your twin brother
couldn't decipher last summer's warning from Phoenix that Americans might
be in imminent danger? Didn't you also run a presidential campaign once?
-
- Our wise progenitors really believed a free people should
govern themselves. It's simple. The power of this government doesn't belong
to George W. Bush. It belongs to you. It belongs to me. The land, and the
compact for our government, which we hold in trust for our survival as
well as our good fortune, doesn't belong to George Jr. or George Sr. or
Monsanto or Enron or the CIA.
-
- Woody Guthrie put the jingle in our hearts when we were
children, reminding us that we are the inheritors of a great legacy of
hope.
-
- This land belongs to you; it belongs to me.
-
- As a nation, we were given a vision of freedom that we
haven't even touched yet. We haven't even seen the mountaintop. Why turn
back? Why give up on the vision of democracy now? Why let George W. Bush
sleep at the White House any more?
-
- Let's turn the government inside out. Shake it up. Scream
and shout. Demand answers. For instance, let's start with McKinney's unpopular
request of several weeks ago: What did you know, Condoleezza, how much
did you know, when did you know it and what did you do about it?
-
- We need answers. The American people deserve better accountability
than what Ms. Rice and George W. Bush apparently gave us in the weeks leading
up to September 11. We are asked to believe that there's nothing specific
for which they should be held accountable.
-
- Who's that Dopey Commander-in-Chief in the White House,
the one so clearly bent on squeezing dry the well of public trust, the
one who's given charge of the armed forces and numerous other agencies
we may know nothing about, to protect us from attacks on our land, our
good commerce and our children at home?
-
- Let's not forget that we have a right as American citizens
to demand accountability from our government, to speak out freely against
corruption and injustice, to tell Dick and Bush where they can get off,
and to elect representatives in touch with working-class values and experience.
-
- If Dick Cheney and other hooligans in the administration
attempt to stop us from exercising these constitutional freedoms, we have
the right, and the moral and revolutionary imperative of our nation's founding
mothers and fathers, to run their asses swiftly out of office.
-
- This is what makes America great and its people strong.
-
- - Stacey Warde is a really pissed off working-stiff who
washes windows for a living, writes from his home in Morro Bay, Calif.,
and frees his mind by reading the U.S. Constitution. He can be reached
at upanatom@thegrid.net.
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