The blogosphere is pulsing with excitement and purpose. A movement is afoot to contact our Senators and Reps follow this to link to read about ‘Operation Flabbergasted: Let’s Watergate Bush’.
Included here is a link to write your representative and your senators.
Get on the bandwagon, write today. More later
Update: There is a great post by blogger Glenn Greenwald which explains the FISA requirements and the Bush administrations clear violation of them. Additionally, he traces the genesis of an irresponsible ‘legal analysis’ which was picked up by conservative bloggers all over the country.
A blogger named Al Maviva wrote a staggeringly dishonest post which he said was based upon what he called a “little legal research” concerning FISA. He then proceeded to deliberately mis-quote the statute in order to reach the patently false conclusion that “the President probably does have the power to order NSA to monitor suspects, without a warrant, in terrorism cases.”
There cannot be enough emphasis on how serious this violation is. Bush trumpeted defiantly that the terrorists would not change our way of life. He declared that he would not allow that to happen. In this regard, we have already lost the war on terror.
A few disjointed thoughts in reaction.
Fascination with fascism by any other name.
Bush, psychotic perhaps not, but messianic corporatist combined with power can be far more dangerous than any organic psychosis. If only because the handles of modern governance are less likely to be accessible to anyone with a severe organic psychosis.
Prosecuting Bush after his impeachemnt is an extraordinarily minor concern. Though I am fully infavor of extraditing W to the World Court for prosecution. But I’m not holding my breath for any of these preferrable eventualities.
Freedom of information is of greatest concern to all of us. Unfortunately, in the tradition of Nixon, and by the same personell, it has been clamped down on in a huge way by this administration from day one.
Dear Dr. Fischer,
Although I think the likelihood of Bush’s being psychotic is minuscule, I agree with most of what you say in this essay.
I do disagree on a number of points. You refer to Bush’s pushing us toward dictatorship, which you say is one-man rule. Etymologically, one-man rule is monarchy. I think, instead, that he is obeying his backers, and that they want to rule as members of an oligarchy.
Oligarchy is what dictatorship really is. Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao, Castro, and every king or queen since the dawn of time all ruled with the help of others. Those others got paid in one way or another, and that compensation came out of their victims’ hides.
I too favor taking a principled stand, and that stand derives from the principles undergirding our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and that Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
The Founding Fathers gave us a government based on the natural law. Since then, we have descended from objective law to subjective rule; from the rights of man to the privileges of the favored; and from governance limited by a written Constitution to caprice restrained only by the public’s tolerance.
Firmly established objective principles restrain caprice. That is why our Framers wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Return to them, and new public guardians will not feel free to govern by the seat of their pants.
You accuse Bush of having committed treason. Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
These are tough standards. To qualify, Bush would have had to wage a war against our nation, or would have had to give aid to our country’s enemies; and, his guilt or innocence would hang either on the definitions of “levying” and “war,” or in the meaning of “giving,” “aid,” “adhering,” “enemies, “aid,” and “comfort.”
Persuading the House to impeach him and the Senate to convict him would be only the beginning. The hard part would be to convince twelve citizens that his actions match one set or the other. To make that case, the prosecutors would need access to every relevant document, regardless of its secrecy classification.
Here is where we come in. Merely learning what those documents contain would take us a long way down the road toward regaining our freedom.
Washington – President Bush said Saturday he has no intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-Sept. 11 [warrantless] secret eavesdropping program in the US, lashing out at those involved in revealing it while defending it as crucial to preventing future attacks.
    (The Associated Press Saturday 17 December 2005)
Take a moment and think about that.
There are some very scary things about that statement by President Bush. I’ll list a few of them:
First, there is the violation of our rights as citizens, the theft of our right to be free from invasion of our privacy, and our right to be secure in our own homes.
Second, there is the destruction of the contract between people, and between the people and the individuals they elect to govern them. Those specific agreements among the people, and between the governed and their elected governors, are spelled out in Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those are the rules that Americans have lived by for over two hundred years. Those rules are being arbitrarily tossed out at the whim of one man.
Third, there is the fear created by this violation of our rights. Without these precious rights, people must fear their own government. The violations, and the fears they arouse, will destroy people’s faith in government. It will drive a wedge between the people and those who govern.
Fourth, there is the chilling effect on freedom of expression. Fear silences people. Fear curtails the ability to speak freely to anyone about anything. By making people fearful of being wire-tapped, fearful that their e-mail is being read, fearful of having their envelopes and packages opened, fearful of being watched, fearful of being investigated, fearful of home invasion by government agents, and fearful of being put on an enemies list, the government cripples people’s ability to express their thoughts to others. People become afraid to talk to one another, afraid to talk honestly and openly even to their friends and family. People must now fear that anything they say may be taken down and used against them. They must be on guard against any casual remark or innocent comment that might be a red flag to an overzealous government investigator who is looking for any suggestion of criminality or hint of disloyalty.
But, none of those things, as important as they are, none of them is the really important point. What really matters is the fact that President Bush even made that statement in the first place! What is really scary is that this psychotic man, George W. Bush, actually believes that he has the right to invalidate our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is clear that he believes that he is so powerful that he is above the law, so powerful that he is the law. That’s scary because George W. Bush just happens to be in a position to act on his self-induced delusions of omnipotence, and in fact he has actually begun the process of undermining this society’s most precious founding documents, and no one, no group of patriots, no body of government, no agency of civil society, has made a move to stop him from doing it. That’s really scary!
If he is not stopped immediately, and I mean by political and legal means, then we will indeed have suffered a governmental coup, a revolutionary seizure of power, and a radical change in the nature of our government. This is taking place today, and most of us are not even aware of it. But, in fact, the United States of America is being subtly but rapidly transformed in the direction of a dictatorship. It will be a dictatorship with a near-moron at the top, but a dictatorship none the less. What is more, and what is worse, is that once the transformation is complete, it won’t go away when George W. Bush is replaced by some other egomaniac. Another dictator will take his place. And, then another. This nation will remain under a dictatorship until its citizens can gather the strength to make it a democracy once more.
Let me list some characteristics of a dictatorship, and you ask yourself if this is not the direction in which we are headed. These are some of the methods employed by dictatorships of the extreme left and the extreme right. But, right or left makes no difference, since dictators always use the same methods. They tell different sorts of lies, but they always use the same methods to govern, because these are the only methods available to them.
A dictatorship is government by one man who rules by fiat, a man with absolute and despotic power, a man whose word is law. Whatever he has commanded is the law, and everything he has not commanded is forbidden.
A dictatorship is a government with no counter-balancing powers, no system of checks and balances, a government that can do anything it wants to do, and no one dares to say anything about it, or to make any move to oppose it in the slightest.
A dictatorship is an authoritarian government, a law-and-order government, that demands and gets absolute obedience to its every rule, forgives no nonconformity, and tolerates no exceptions.
A dictatorship is a government where democracy is reduced to farcical rituals, with stolen elections, fake elections, show trials, and no trials.
A dictatorship is a system of governance where instead of freedom of the press and media, there is only propaganda and censorship, a system of government by lies, deception, concealment, and manipulation.
A dictatorship is a government that spies on its citizens, and creates enemies lists.
A dictatorship is a government that rules by means of the military and secret police, and arrests people for not being totally and fanatically loyal to the government and its leader.
A dictatorship is a government that demands that everyone glorifies militarism and war, glorifies the troops when they invade a foreign country, glorifies the flag and other symbols of the state, and demands that no one ever questions anything the government and its military does.
A dictatorship is a government that makes war on weaker countries, makes war on people who are different, and makes war on anything that stands in the way of it taking anything it wants.
A dictatorship is a government that oppresses the weak, exploits the powerless, terrorizes its critics, and exterminates its enemies.
A dictatorship is government that rules by disappearances, kidnappings, jails and prison camps, torture, assassinations, and mass murder.
A dictatorship is a government that promotes and rules by fanaticism, prejudice, racism, machoism, hatred, outrage, and atrocities.
Let me make it easy. Here is the point:
In a democracy, the people control the government, the police and the military. In a dictatorship it is the other way around.
A democracy is a government that is run by nonviolent means, and that guarantees people’s rights, and seeks to insure justice, equality, and fair play. A dictatorship is the exact opposite.
Democracy is what we will have lost permanently, if we cannot take back control of our own government. Dictatorship is what the neo-cons are in the process of imposing upon us right now.
Some of us in this country are not able to understand what is happening here. Those who cannot grasp this new reality that is being foisted off on us are people who are living in the past, and people who are living in denial. Those who remain loyal true-believers, and faithful supporters of this administration, are clinging to a particular model of reality, a model of America as it was perhaps in the 1950’s when “America” meant something entirely different from what it means today. They are still living in a time when America was a force for good in the world, when it had humanitarian ideals, and democratic values. America meant “the American way” which was the golden path of honor, honesty, moral strength and moral courage. Our values were noble, our honor was unsullied, and our country was respected around the world for its democracy, for it’s government of, by, and for the people, and for it’s ideals of equality of opportunity, rugged individualism, and respect for all people.
Those who have not yet realized that our government is being changed for the worse are living in denial. They deny that our nation is being radically transformed. They are good people, well-meaning people, but they have no idea about what’s is happening, or what it is they are supporting, when they enthusiastically cheer the President. Blindly loyalty, ignorant of reality, denying the truth, they cling to the beliefs that there is nothing happening here that should be resisted, and that everything is still the same as it has always been. These people are useful dupes, the willing, unwitting tools of a budding dictatorship.
Here is the most important point of all: If this government becomes a full-blown dictatorship it is never going to change back on its own. Democracy will not be restored just because someone will eventually replace George W. Bush. Dictatorial forms of government are not converted into democracies without a long, hard, bloody fight. It is much easier to prevent the extreme right from consolidating its power over the government, than it is to break its grip on it once it is fully established. The time to act is not, not later.
What we must do now, and the only thing we can do now, is take a principled stand, a highly ethical and fearless stand. We must insist that George W. Bush be impeached and tried for his crimes against the people of this country, tried for his treason, tried for his war crimes, his crimes against the peace, and his crimes against humanity. He must be impeached. That has to happen. To make it happen, we must organize, educate, agitate, demonstrate, and demand of our elect representatives that they do what the law requires them to do. We must force them to live up to their oaths of office — while we still have elected representatives, and the freedom to make demands on them.