Category: Politics

Is it American to give up liberty to be safe, or to give up safety to have liberty? Don’t bother asking the gang in Washington.

The administration consistently reminds us that we must take these steps [eroding our fundamental freedoms] to protect our lives. Perhaps it needs to be reminded that when our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to protect the fundamental freedoms they held so dear and not the other way around.

Well, I wouldn’t feel safe without liberty, and I think that should be the basis of any discussion of what is to be done, since safety without liberty would be an illusion at best, and safety can only be enhanced by a citizenry with liberty, especially if we are willing to share liberty with the rest of the world.

Let’s see what else can we do to destroy the country while no one is looking? The Cheney administration hasn’t gotten anything right yet. It seems to be (fortunately) doing pretty well at messing up even its own pet projects (especially the golden-egg-laying goose) while it destroys everything that has made us as a nation successful and admired. But now it wants to bring in the military to whip us all into shape at home.

They are considering it. They are re-thinking the military’s role in policing domestic affairs. Because as we all know it is a time of forced paranoia and false terrorist warnings and of increasingly obvious co-opting of 9/11 for oil and powermongering and political gain on both sides of the aisle. And you know what that means. Exactly: The government does whatever the hell it wants, calls it anti-terrorism, and please repress your deep cringing.

Mark Morford’s spectacular column is one of the most dramatic responses to this latest villainy from the Junta in Washington, but the drama of the proposal merits such a response, and he does it justice.

I for one don’t think there is a chance, a chance that they will pick up the challenge, but here’s the case outlined.

The big, unacknowledged picture is this: The people in power represent an economic clique whose interests are only superficially tied to the well-being of the country as a whole. In collusion with their delighted big-money supporters, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their Cabinet-level entourage spent years lining their pockets with sweetheart loans, option deals and golden parachutes from oil companies and other related industries. They built political careers thundering against regulation, fueled by a cozy camaraderie with Enron and like companies that grew fat on–surprise!–deregulation. In office, these men make energy policy in cahoots with their ultra-wealthy sponsors, a club of very special Americans whose membership list they still keep secret. They consistently fight to secure America’s energy dependency on oil and related fuels. Toward that end, defying the understanding of virtually everyone else in the world, they have denied the existence of global warming, willfully distorting the scientific evidence. When its own government scientists sounded alarms, the Bush posse dismissed them as ”the bureaucracy” and kept galloping down the oily path toward even more catastrophic global climate changes associated with petroleum dependency.
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Democrats have a golden opportunity now to pound the podium and make a case to the nation that the interests in power–the interests who won a minority of the ballots cast but a majority of the Supreme Court during the 2000 presidential election–cannot be relied on to solve problems that their entire careers were devoted to creating. These interests are in revolt against plain American value and virtue. Even the honest men and women among them cannot muster the resolve to reform–their thinking is too deeply molded by the lives they’ve led.
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Now, the Democrats need to do more than win the votes for this or that new corporate regulation. They need to move beyond merely feeling smug about how the Republicans have sabotaged themselves. They need to confess their own sins–as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done. But even more, they need to back the Republicans into their chosen corner. They need to connect with the healthy side of American skepticism. They need to be thunderous and clear on the essentials.
If the Democrats forfeit the opportunity now handed them to connect all the flaming dots, they are truly as flabby, corrupt and venal as Ralph Nader says.

It’s painful to even have to describe the Dubya team’s latest assault on a formerly free society, TIPS, enlisting citizens spying on citizens. I thought I had already read of the proposal’s actual demise, and had thought it unnecessary to address it, yet it’s apparently still out there festering.

The Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism tactics — secret detentions of suspects, denial of the right to trial and now citizen spying — have in common a lack of faith in democratic institutions and a free society. If TIPS is ever put into effect, the first people who should be turned in as a threat to our way of life are the Justice Department officials who thought up this most un-American of programs[my italics].

Unfortunately I can’t locate the documentation for this at the moment, but a recent poll of Berliners found that fully 61 percent believed our dear Shrub is a dangerously incompetent maniac. I don’t know any people who might be better equipped to make such a judgment, and the scrappy Berliners would probably agree about their qualifications.
If such an estimate matches my own, and it does, what shall I do with it as an American resident in America?
I saw this related observation today on a discussion site, and it should disturb or provoke each of us:

I am a citizen of the United States. I see the PATRIOT act, I see TIPS, and I think to the folks I grew up knowing as a kid, the German Jewish couple who “saw the signs and got out while they could”, and remember stories of many others like them who saw where their country was going and had the foresight to get out before it was “patently obvious there was a problem”… which brings us to the modern day…

But it’s not just that I don’t want to live under a government that is repressive, or worse. I don’t want to have to live with people who have no problem with government moving in that direction (who will never go to the barricades, or even contact their people in Congress or, damn, at the very least, talk to each other about their apprehension), and that is what we are experiencing already.
How bad does it have to get before the alarm bells go off?
[I gratefully acknowledge my Partner, Barry, as the source of much of the above material.]

Sure might help to explain why we’re willing to risk world conflagration by wiping another country off the map in an unprovoked and very aggressive act of war!
“Washington” is very concerned about diversifying sources for our present dependency on oil and satisfying the wasteful gluttony of our future oil appetites. Let’s simply grab Iraq and its oil for ourselves before anyone else has a chance to make friends there, even our own friends, who also need oil of course.

Access to Iraq’s vast oil supplies are a key, if unspoken, reason why the Bush administration has initiated plans to attack Baghdad. Of course, as yet, no senior official in Washington has publicly acknowledged this. To do so would be to eliminate whatever remaining credibility the Bush administration has in Europe and the Middle East. It could also provoke opposition in the United States among those who question the sacrifice of blood for oil.
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But there can be no doubt that the White House — made up, as it is, of ex-oil company officials — is aware of the oil situation in Iraq and the problems this will pose to successful realization of the administration’s long-term energy strategy. Only by occupying Iraq and choosing its new government can the United States be certain that these problems will be overcome.
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But if sanctions are lifted, and the current regime (or one that it allows to be formed) remains in power, Iraq’s vast untapped reserves will fall under the control of non-U.S. companies. Some of these companies will, no doubt, want to sell their output to the United States; others, however, may prefer to send their oil elsewhere, or to use these supplies for political advantage. In any case, the United States can have no assurance that they will be available to satisfy America’s future energy requirement. Obviously, the only way to prevent this from happening is to engineer a “regime change” in Baghdad, and install a government that will cancel these agreements.
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At this point, it is impossible for outsiders to know what, exactly, is driving the administration’s campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. No doubt many factors are involved — some strategic, some political, and some economic. But it is hard to believe that U.S. leaders would contemplate such an extreme act without very powerful motives — and the pursuit of oil has long constituted the most commanding motive for U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf region.

But it’s all our oil, ain’t it?

A headline like this works on Lefty depression like a genuine palliative.

BUSH SAYS CHENEY DID NOTHING WRONG AT HALLIBURTON
“I’ve got great confidence in the vice president. … When I picked him, I knew he was a fine business leader and a fine experienced man.”

And now dead meat.

“But (he or she) did it first!” goes the plaintive rationalization with which every parent is familiar. Don’t expect anything better from the so-called oposition party in the campaign to return government to the voters, or the voters to government. Both Republicans and Democrats were bought out long ago.
But why do we only hear about the very latest, if banal, still no less egregious, evidence of the rape of democracy from a gossip column?

They’ve been calling for a crackdown on corporate abuses, but that didn’t stop Democratic senators from flying corporate jets from Washington to Nantucket for a weekend schmoozefest with 250 campaign contributors.
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The Democratic mouthpiece pointed out that the National Republican Senatorial Committee will have a similar event at the Greenbriar resort in West Virginia this weekend.

Last night the Senate unanimously passed a bill supposedly designed to overhaul corporate abuses that have rocked Wall Street. I guess they’re afraid the pay-off money might dry up if the market totally tanks. Hadda do something.

So, it’s up to the person posing as president to decide who is an American and who has a right to a lawyer, so long as he says he’s protecting us!

[The judge] said the executive branch of the government is “best prepared” to exercise the military judgement regarding the capture of alleged combatants.
“According, any judicial inquiry into [the American citizen] Hamdi’s status as an alleged enemy combatant in Afghanistan must reflect a recognition that government has no more profound responsibility than the protection of Americans, both military and civilian, against additional unprovoked attack.”

Are we feeling safe yet, from our government and the world outside?

We are being misled, and all is not what it seems.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone but the truest I-believe-everything-Ari-Fleischer-says jingoists who actually believes this “war” has become anything but a grand excuse, a marvelously leveragable plaything which the Bush cadre can point to as their very own personal holy shroud, some sort of sacrosanct shield to protect them from criticism and claims of blatant impropriety and selling the nation’s soul for pennies on the barrel.
The more pleasant idea is that the war excuse is becoming thinner and thinner, the populace increasingly fatigued and wary of false terrorist warnings, fearmongering, lopsided Us-versus-Them posturing, the sucking dry of the budget in the name of accidentally bombing Afghan weddings.
Wary, in addition, of the idea that simply sending in troops and bombing caves and infuriating Middle Eastern countries even further will somehow solve the problem, stem the tide of terrorism, eradicate the numinous, germinating terrorist cells, make everyone look away as Bush Sr.’s sinister investment company the Carlyle Group rakes in millions from War on Terror defense contracts. Shhh.

Get out your (slash war) buttons now, before we bomb Iraq and the buttons, and those who would wear them, are banned forever.