- The Founding Fathers wanted this democracy to last forever
because they understood that mere empires come and go.
-
- To that end, they established an intricate system of
historic checks and balances to make sure the sort of tyranny they'd just
fought to defeat never rose up again. They gave us the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights to guarantee our freedoms.
-
- Americans would never have a king, but instead a popularly
elected President, and they'd always be free to openly express their opinions,
especially about the government and its policies. The people would be the
master of their own rulers.
-
- It was a unique experiment in liberty which evolved and
endured for more than two centuries, until one day in November 2000.
-
- The Founding Fathers never figured on the Imperial Presidency
of George W. Bush, and his court-appointed "Government of the neo-cons,
by the neo-cons, and for the neo-cons." A self-righteous minority
of ruthless profiteering ideological extremists was never supposed to dominate
all three independent branches of the American Democracy. It's in your
old high school civics book. Look it up.
-
- While we were all busy with the breathless search for
the elusive Iraqi A-Bomb, Mr. Bush and his handlers have apparently secretly
passed the ÎFreedom of Disinformation Act,' under which the Republican-controlled
Senate and House have finally issued their long-delayed and heavily rewritten
version of the Î9/11 Report,' laying blame on EVERYONE but the White
House. Imagine that.
-
- Imagine also that 28 key pages in that report related
to Saudi Arabia were blacked out. Mr. Bush's people apparently thought
that redaction was the better part of valor, considering that the bin Laden
and Bush families and the Saudi Oil Princes all go back so profitably for
decades. The Presidency is temporary, but big oil money is eternal.
-
- Do you like political intrigue?
-
- Take a moment now to envision the Republican response
if a DEMOCRATIC President who allowed 3,000 Americans to be murdered and
never caught the man behind the plot after promising to do so, issued a
softball report carefully produced by a totally Democratic Congress with
key clues to the actual people responsible missing --- especially those
that might impact his own long-time business and political associates.
-
- Are you envisioning?
-
- Now envision that back on September 12, 2001, the day
after the mass murder, that Democratic President had reportedly allowed
a private jet to collect the closest relatives of the key man behind the
murderous attack so they could leave the country ahead of any untidy FBI
questioning. Imagine that same Democratic President had then tried to block
an outside independent probe of the worst U.S. terrorist event in history
demanded by the attack's own victims and their families.
-
- Are you following this so far?
-
- Now imagine that to divert attention from his botched
domestic economy and his failed quest for the killer of those 3,000 Americans
that this Democratic President instead invented reasons to attack a whole
different country and got us stuck in a pointless holy war there costing
a billion dollars and seven dead U.S. soldiers a week.
-
- Got the picture? Can you see it?
-
- It's a good thing the Republicans were totally in charge
when all this actually happened. If it had been Mr. Clinton, we'd have
never heard the end of it.
-
- Can you imagine the bleating on neo-fascist Talk Radio
across the land? Can you see Rush Limbaugh's head explode? Ann Coulter
would go postal. Can you hear the calls for impeachment? Fox News would
brand it treason, with good purpose. Matt Drudge would be up all night
dishing online dirt about the idiot Democrats who'd foolishly allowed 9/11
to happen, covered it up, and then created Saigon on the Tigress. Bill
O'Reilly would have kittens, and cable news ratings would go through the
roof.
-
- Actually, few folks seem upset. Can you really imagine
the American people are so stupid they'd buy all this without question?
The Republicans are banking on it.
-
- The regents behind ÎKing George the 43rd' realize
that voter apathy and ignorance have become increasingly critical to their
neo-conservative re-election game plan. A majority of Americans polled
even mistakenly think that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.
The Bush folks must figure that as national policy, stupidity works. That
includes the man currently serving as President.
-
- It's not just that the Emperor Bush has no clothes, he
has no clue...
-
- If we leave it to the enfeebled Democratic Party, Mr.
Bush and his handlers will probably get away with all this, but thankfully
there are good people in Washington ready to act. The Republican monolith,
which had seemed invincible, is starting to show some cracks. The Cheney-Halliburton
Administration is quietly running scared. This is due to a growing revolt
in the single constituency that the Bush folks can't dominate: their own
Republican Congress.
-
- The neo-cons apparently thought they'd bought it, but
it appears now they only leased it.
-
- On November 2, 2004 (66 weeks from today) all the members
of the U.S. House and one third of the U.S. Senate have to stand for re-election,
and they represent the ONE group that will dump Mr. Bush if they sense
he's spoiling their chances to keep power. As a national Republican candidate
in 2000, Mr. Bush had very short coat tails.
-
- If you seek political change in this country, here's
the key. The REPUBLICANS are the only people who can effectively defeat
George W. Bush. The Nixon years ended with a coverup, but the Bush years
began with one, and it apparently continues to this day.
-
- When this is all sorted out, the original crimes will
doubtless pale in comparison to the misdeeds of those trying now to rewrite
reality into a winning patriotic saga. When it starts to go bad all the
Îgood' Republicans will book. The smart money never goes down with
the ship. Never.
-
- Consider the following. Over the weekend, two key conservatives
went public as they calculated the diminishing electoral potential of the
Cheney-Halliburton Administration.
-
- Richard Shelby, Alabama's senior U.S. Senator and Chairman
of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, is a top Republican investigating
intelligence failures before 9/11. He's openly criticized White House pressure
to censure the 9/11 report. Mr. Shelby said he'll dig into the financial
connections between governments and terrorist groups. You can reach him
at <http://shelby.senate.gov/>http://shelby.senate.gov/
-
- Even more telling were the words of Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana on NPR Saturday, who said the
White House knows there's a big price tag for rebuilding Iraq, "But
they do not wish to discuss that." Lugar supported the war but now
admits U.S. post-war planning was inadequate, and he estimates the rebuilding
alone might cost $30 billion. You can reach Senator Lugar at <http://lugar.senate.gov/>http://lugar.senate.gov/
-
- These two men are hardly lefties, and their public shift
away from Mr. Bush is something of a sea change in conservative willingness
to distance the President's actions from those of other Republicans. Interesting.
Meanwhile, the "father" of the stalled Iraq war, U.S. Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was all over TV on Sunday defending the
invasion as a prime example of how the Administration must be prepared
to act on "murky intelligence" in the war on terrorism. Odd that
many inside the CIA reportedly think the Bush people as a lot more Îmurky'
than the Intel, which was apparently extensively Îrefined' until
it Îmade' the case for war. More than 200 American kids have thus
far died for Îmurky.'
-
- Also, there's one other place the dreaded Iraqi WMD is
missing, from Mr. Bush's new speeches.
-
- Rising to Mr. Bush's defense is Ed Gillespie, the new
GOP chairman who reportedly told the 165-member Republican National Committee
that the Democrats are feeding Americans "a steady diet of protest
and pessimism" in absence of real solutions to the economy and Iraq,
according to Reuters. If you're theparents of a U.S. soldier who was killed
in Iraq or one of the over 3,000,000 people who've lost their jobs in the
919 days of the Bush reign, perhaps you are getting a little pessimistic.
-
- This brings us to Admiral John M. Poindexter, Ronald
Reagan's former national security adviser, a principal in the Iran-Contra
Affair, and the resurrected head of something called the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is reportedly setting up an online
futures trading market, where speculators could bet on forecasting terrorist
attacks, assassinations and coups. In response to growing howls of laughter,
the White House has since apparently altered the Web site at <http://www.policyanalysismarket.org/>http://www.policyanalysismarket.org.
Mr. Bush sought $8 million through 2005 for the project. This is a REAL
story, although we must admit that the Admiral's adventures always sound
like something written for ÎThe Onion,' or ÎThe Daily Show.'
-
- Finally, there are press reports today that indicate
Al-Qaeda, those same great folks who helped bring you 9/11, and whom Mr.
Bush never quite found time to actually defeat on his way to Iraq, are
openly planning more high flying mischief. Maybe THEY have the WMD.
-
- Let's face it. It's becoming very clear that Dick Cheney
and his ilk are really running the show. To be charitable, Mr. Bush, were
he the son of anyone other than ÎGeorge Herbert Walker Bush', of
Midland, Texas, who got him a legacy admission to Yale, would be lucky
to rise to middle management at Wal-Mart.
-
- As more of the blood of our brave, believing, faithful
kids irrigates the fields of Babylon, a lot of folks are starting to ask
some very untidy questions. We've sent our best young people to fight and
die for oil in Iraq, while many of their young families at home subsisted
on food stamps, and got screwed out of a child income tax credit that Mr.
Bush gladly gave other Americans.
-
- We now have the best Government corporate money can buy,
and that's the problem.
-
- The people behind Enron and WorldCom and Halliburton
are encamped along the Potomac and fully in charge. It's good the folks
who fought for and set up this country are all dead. An hour watching America
today as reported by Fox News would kill them anyhow.
-
- If any of this bothers you, the solution is available
66 weeks from now. Get organized. The people who don't care and never bother
to vote must be made to care and be motivated to go to the polls. If we
give the neo-cons four more years, the Canadians will have to fortify the
border to keep all of the impoverished refugees out.
-
- This is no longer about liberal or conservative, or party,
or ideology. If the American people want a country to come home to, they'd
better take it back for themselves.
-
- Our favorite observer of the Bush Imperial Presidency
is the great Roman Historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (55-120 AD). He
had an eye for this sort of thing and two thousand years hasn't dimmed
his vision. He said, "In stirring up tumult and strife, the worst
men can do the most, but peace and quiet cannot be established without
virtue."
-
- If you think the search for the WMD is tough, try finding
virtue in any of this.
-
- Brian Rehak, from <http://www.columnleft.com/>www.columnleft.com,
is based in Southern California. He is a contributing writer for Liberal
Slant. He can be reached at <mailto:mail@columnleft.com>mail@columnleft.com
-
- http://www.liberalslant.com/br073003.htm
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