How Big Is It? With Update

It's not a Leno (really, a Carson) joke line--it's a question with profound implications for the United States at this delicate moment in human history.

How big is the group of American voters who support the the reactionary-beyond-belief politics, the violently angry far far right?

We know how loud they are. We know that their most extreme views are increasingly embraced by Republican office-holders and aspirants, right up to the leadership in the U.S. Senate.

The latest manifestation is Senator Jim Bunning's ongoing filibuster which is holding up extension of unemployment benefits, affecting millions. As well as other projects that affect the poor and working people. Here's TIME's Joe Klein today:

As this comment from the Number 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, makes clear, the Republicans are turning toward a form of reactionary radicalism that is well to the right not only of traditional conservatism, but also of post-Victorian concepts of government and--not to put too fine a point on it--of common decency as well:

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

The idea that those who have lost their jobs in this Wall Street/mortgage-scam recession are simply deadbeats, choosing to stay on unemployment rather than look for work, seems more appropriate to Scrooge's London than the 21st century. But Kyl has spoken his version of the truth, and we should be grateful for that: this is what the Republican Party is now all about. The America they--and the Tea Partiers--want would have no Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security (just ask the rising Republican star, Paul Ryan, who would privatize them all), no social safety net, no environmental or workplace regulations, no highway or infrastructure building."

Before this spectacle, there was another, that Frank Rich wrote about over the weekend: the sudden embracing by right wing media mouths and politicians of the guy who flew his plane into a building containing IRS offices, calling him a hero. Referring to Times reporter David Barstow's investigation into the Tea Party movement, Rich writes:

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

While Rich cautions that the Tea Partiers and the Republican officeholders have little in common, the officeholders are falling all over themselves to adopt extremist--and violent--rhetoric.

I've seen a lot of explanations of this "anger," not many of them very convincing. The latest is Michael Lind in Salon, who says that the movement is the last cry of a declining demographic group, the white working class, and that groups in decline tend to want to obstruct the change that is overwhelming them and their world. That's more or less been my working theory (though the rest of Lind's piece makes pretty doubtful conclusions and offers impractical solutions.) What makes absolute sense is that there is a lot of racism involved, and not just black and white, but towards everyone who isn't white. President Obama is the obvious center of projection.

Those emotions are being exploited, fueled and guided with their usual subterranean skill, by reactionary corporate interests, while shameless GOPer politicians are all too obviously trying to ride the wave.

I get all that. I still don't know though how big it is. It's a declining minority (racist whites) of a declining soon-to-be minority (whites). But if you listen to Hardball or CNN, you get the impression that this unhinged anger at Obama and Washington is very big. CNN in particular is promoting the idea, citing its poll that claims that 56% of Americans believe the federal government threatens their freedom.

Here's what I do know: an awful lot is being deduced from one election in MA, which some folks up there think was due largely to state politics. And poll questions of such a general nature bring together people who are never going to actually vote the same way. There are lots of ways to interpret "broken government." Maybe it's Obama to some, maybe it's Republican obstructionism in the Senate to others.

I do think a certain unhinged quality, a mindless lashing out, a feeling of helplessness and general anger, is probably real, and rooted in fear. But all kinds of fear, by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

How big is it? is in the end a political question, that elections will settle (without necessarily addressing the question directly.) It may be that Jim Bunning is leading the political equivalent of the Terry Shiavo moment, that was followed by hefty GOPer defeats. We just don't know yet. But if healthcare doesn't pass, this is going to grow.

But there's another important question: how dangerous is it? That doesn't always depend on size. Given the right circumstances, you'd have to say that right now: dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.

Update: The Southern Poverty Law Center issued a new report on Tuesday that quantified growth of right wing extremist groups--at 244% rise in the number of these groups in 2009.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Reality Series

Here's the movie/ TV series we're apparently living in: Marty McFly goes back to the future and discovers that in the early 21st century the United States is becoming a totalitarian oligarchical pseudo-theocratic no-nothing paranoid dictatorship, thanks to the accession of George W. Bush to the presidency. Let's hope he's back to the past, figuring out how to prevent it so that this time-line can end.

Those of us inside this sad story are deep into Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the series, updated with cell phones and Internet Newspeak babble. Latest evidence centers on torture and the denial of Constitutional rights, and the astounding fact that Guantanamo, the American Gulag, is still open for business, and the Bushites are still fighting to retain their anti-Constitutional powers. There's the news that the CIA destroyed tapes of a torture session, and at least some outrage about it. It's clear now that so much of the Bushites' furious activity defending torture and spying is to protect their asses against courts to come.

Speaking of which, the Supreme Court is determining at this very late date just what rights those swept up by the Bushite Shock Doctrinaires in their war of terror really should have. On anything before the Court, I've found Linda Greenhouse to be the very best guide. Surprisingly, she seems to sense that the Court is not going to rubber-stamp the Bushite retrenchment to police state barbarism, but the actual decision won't happen until summer.

Another subplot of the series is the skittering towards theocracy and further intolerance, with damage not only to Constitutional freedoms but the unfettered creativity of thought so necessary to our particular future.The Christian Right's political and organizational disarray, and the silence coming from the White House since reelection, may have suggested this is yesterday's news--until Mitt Romney's speech this week showed just how far we've fallen in recent decades.

That the speech was billed as this Mormon candidate's statement mirroring JFK's famous speech to hostile Protestant ministers about being Catholic and running for President--that in fact Romney used JFK's speech as a virtual Cliff's Notes for his--showed how far we've moved from the Constitution.There are a couple of good articles at salon on the subject (and as they point out, Mike Huckabee is an even more direct threat), but getting to them can be pretty annoying. And there's this specific comparison, with links to others. The JFK passage that's so telling is this one:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

Granted, that the "no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote" was a bit tongue in cheek, because even then the more fundamentalist wing was willing to do so. But it wasn't the norm, and it wasn't done openly. Of course now, it's become standard, and because it's accepted, so much more dangerous. Go back another 30 years to Sinclair Lewis warning that when dictatorship comes to America, it will come under the banner of Christianity.

Romney's speech didn't come out and call for America as a Christian nation (nor is Huckabee likely to, though he comes close), but he does attempt to hijack the Founding Fathers to support his notion that we've got no America, no Constitution, without organized religion and belief in God. Which god, whose god, that's never said, but it's part of the tradition to make a few references to "our Jewish friends" and even "our Catholic friends" while meaning the Protestant God.

These days it's a little different than in the Christians vs. Communists 50s--there's more common cause among the most rabidly conservative wings of Protestant, Jewish and Catholic religions, as they come more and more to represent the whole of their bloc. Conservative--meaning traditional-- beliefs are honorable. Intolerance is another matter entirely, and that's where these folks are heading. Some of them are already there, openly. The next step is the Christian police state.

Romney's announced enemy is the "religion" of "secular humanism," a patently political attempt to make common cause with this contortion of categories spawned in the Reagan era that never quite caught on except as fund-raising bait in fundie mega-churches. Maybe a little better than the War on Christmas for rallying the Christian soldiers marching not as to, but to, war. Still, the implication leads to Guantanamo for secular humanists. Far-fetched? Look around, and tell me about far-fetched.

They'll be marching to war against their fellow countrymen, who must no longer be free to muse and make the most personal and most human judgments imaginable on the basic issues of our existence. To differ is to be cast out. It's as totalitarian as you can get, and leads directly to 1984 oppression and, even more directly, to dullness and stupidity.

Too bad. Really too bad. Because if we're going to have a future, we won't get there by mindless adherence to dogma, by blindness, dull comformity and stupidity. It is in enforcing these that religion becomes--in a kind of ultimate irony--soul-destroying. And these days, future-destroying too.

"Good Germans"

The earliest reference the Wikipedia has to the expression, "good Germans," is a New York Times report from 1945: "There's a saying among our troops, that there are no real Nazis in Germany, only 'good Germans.'" The phrase dripped with hypocrisy, and came to mean Germans who claimed not to have supported Hitler, but did nothing to oppose him.

The truth is, for a long while, that described many people in Europe and elsewhere, but the phrase stuck, and as the Wikipedia says, "The term has come to be used to refer more generically to people in any country who observe reprehensible things taking place — whether done by a government or by another powerful institution — but remain silent, neither raising objections nor taking steps to change the course of events."

Like anything to do with Hitler and the Nazis, the phrase is heavily weighted. And so when on Sunday New York Times columnist Frank Rich used it to describe contemporary Americans, it ignited a controversy that still rages across the Internet.But it is an historical analogy that is work taking seriously, especially given the case Rich assembles. “BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves, he begins.

That the Bushites have been able to perpetrate a dizzying array of policies and activities that for at least the past few generations would have seen impossible, that no Americans would stand for torture, rendition, domestic spying, armed thugs, better equipped and much better paid than U.S. troops, acting beyond any laws in Iraq and then brought back to the U.S. to patrol the streets of New Orleans; the attempted hijacking of the justice system for partisan and ideological gain; the suffering being caused or tolerated in Iraq, Africa, so many places...the list just goes on and on. And a President, with the support of less than one quarter of the country, continues without effective public outcry. How in the world can this be explained?"Good Germans" comes as close as anyone has. Maybe because people don't want to lose what comforts they have--and those closest to centers of power have quite a lot.

Rich begins at the centers of responsibility: Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top. But he does not absolve the rest of us, nor should he: As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

He brings the analogy closer to the source: Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Sometimes such a shocking analogy cuts through the fog, helps us find a moral definition. The analogy of the Good Germans is much too close for continued comfort.

Signal v. Noise on Iran: S.O.S.!

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it. Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't.

Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon (as reflected in my post yesterday.)

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishment is apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.

Broken

The United States of America is founded on two basic functional principles: our democratic system and our rule of law, both set forth in the U.S. Constitution. In both categories, thanks to the Bush administration, this nation is in grave danger of failing. And by failing I mean setting itself up for chaos and blatant dictatorship, which in effect will threaten the future of the civilized world and perhaps life as we know it on Earth.

Our rule of law is challenged again and again, so obviously this past week when the Bushites try again to override a court decision that denies them their ability to destroy constitutional and international rights. The principle of habeus corpus is obscurely named --perhaps it should be repeated as "the right to your day in court" or to be charged and put on trial according to law. But its bad branding shouldn't obscure how fundamental a right it is--basic to every other right in the Constitution, including free speech and freedom of religion. As Constitutional law expert said on Countdown: "...it is actually the foundation for all other rights. When the president—when the government throws you into a dungeon for what you say or who you pray to, it‘s habeas corpus that‘s the right that allows you to see the enforcement of the other rights."

We learned more last week about the lengths to which the Bushites go to deny these rights, in the effort to circumvent the law by appealing to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he had relinquished his authority temporarily to have surgery and recover from it.

But these are not new efforts--the Bush administration has been doing all this persistently, and yet they continue to do so, with no one effectively stopping them. Such brazen success emboldens others to defy the rule of law, such as the Republicans who lined up last week to demand the immediate pardon of Scooter Libby, despite his lawful prosecution and conviction, despite the fact that he was convicted of obstructing justice by preventing effective investigation and possible prosecution of larger, underlying crimes in the Valerie Plame affair, and despite contravening the established procedures for pardons in the most outrageous ways. Pardons are normally given after the sentence is served or at least begun, and after the convicted admits guilt, repents and asks for mercy. But Republicans want the law and the courts to simply be ignored and overpowered by the executive.

What if President Clinton had looked at the Supreme Court decision of Gore v. Bush that gave the election to Bush in 2000, rightly concluded that it was a flawed decision, against precedent, and made by justices with political conflicts of interest, and simply voided it? The principle is exactly the same.

But from this, we get supreme irony. Clinton respected the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary. And so we got a guy who doesn't.

In other times, actions of which President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are accused or have admitted would be sufficient cause to bring articles of impeachment against them. But no such congressional action is forthcoming.The Bushite challenge to the rule of law is an aspect of their challenge to the fundamentals of our democratic system. The Iraq war is opposed by three-fourths of the American people, yet it goes on. Three-fourths of the American people believe the country is on the wrong track, and yet the Bushites persist. Even though the Bushites are legitimately in power until the next election, this indecent ignoring of the opinions of citizens is very dangerous to democracy.

More serious still are the Bushites direct threats to electoral democracy. The pattern of firing and hiring officers of the law in the U.S. Justice system based on political party and ideological loyalties is itself a major threat to our system. Yet the people responsible for this have not been held accountable. After many calls for his firing, after many predictions that he would not last out the week or the month, Alberto Gonzales is still the Attorney General of the U.S., despite evidence which continues to mount that he has been dishonest, incompetent and acted against the rule of law, and against fairness necessary for the democratic electoral system to function.

Moreover, the intent of these manipulations of justice seems more and more clearly to be to suppress votes that may go to Democrats, by appointing judges who would prosecute charges of voter fraud against Democrats, no matter how dubious those charges might be, and to ignore charges of voter suppression and fraud against Republicans, no matter how substantial the evidence might be.

The intent clearly is to create a permanent majority for Bushites, who might more properly be called Rovians, because they intend to continue beyond this administration (possibly with Fred Thompson.) So simply waiting for Bush to leave office won't be enough. The intent is to subvert the electoral system.

The Bushites have so far successfully acted like a dictatorship, and no one has stopped them. There are ongoing investigations but they are painfully and perhaps fatally slow. The Bushites, the Rovians seek to establish the means for further dictatorship, and no one is preventing them. The U.S. is in deep trouble, and so is the future.

Exposing the Masters of Deceit

They lied us into the war that began four years ago today. They said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and were collecting materials to build nuclear bombs. We now know that they knew there was little evidence that those weapons existed, and the one bit of supposed evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear material was false. They not only insisted it was true--they went to treasonous lengths to keep their lie from being exposed.In an effort to destroy the credibility of the messenger--Joseph Wilson, who the CIA sent to track down the nuclear rumor--at the interfering insistence of VP Cheney--the White House exposed the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA officer, and falsely accused her of sending her husband to Niger. (As if, by the way, that alone is enough to make the fiction of Iraq's nuclear attempts true.)

On Friday, Rep. Henry Waxman began his hearings into security breaches with a statement in which General Hayden, current head of the CIA, affirmed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent when her name was published, having been distributed to the press no fewer than 20 times by multiple members of the Bush administration. In her testimony, Plame said under oath that she had been on covert status, that she had in fact travelled outside the U.S. as a covert agent within five years (a technicality in the law protecting the identity of covert operatives), and that her outing had destroyed her 20 year career investigating weapons of mass destruction programs that might threaten the U.S.

Despite President Bush's statements that he would investigate the leak of her name, and fire anyone involved, there was further testimony from the Director of the White House Office of Security that there was no investigation whatever. And Karl Rove, one of the leakers, is still an official force in the White House.

Plame said that she knew that her identity might be discovered and exposed by a foreign government. She never imagined it would be exposed by high officials of her own government.

Still, the supporters of Bush, the right wing TV and radio babbleheads, continue to insist that Plame was not covert, and that this is mere politics. Which leads to the question: if killing more than 3,000 American soldiers and maiming thousands more, as well as killing and maiming countless thousands in Iraq as well as destroying that society, all based on lies, and the outing of a U.S. covert agent for political purposes, and the continung defense of these acts by means of more lies--if all this is not treason, what is?

It Can Happen Here (Latest Chapter)

The Bushite scandals come so fast they are hard to keep track of, and start becoming indistinguishable, but the latest is worth isolating for its meanings and implications.

What is it? A number of federal attorneys--at least 7, probably more--were fired by the Bush Justice Department, officially by the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. After some local news stories and blogger investigations, congressional hearings revealed that many of them appear to have been fired for not being sufficiently zealous on behalf of Republicans, in several cases after improper questions and pressure on their current investigations--suggestions that they ought to be prosecuting Democrats (for "voter fraud") and not prosecuting Republicans (for corruption.)

At first, Gonzales denied to Congress there were any political considerations--these were personnel matters, based on performance. When evidence of good performance reviews etc. appeared, Republicans changed their tune to: the President has the right to fire these officials, and all Presidents do it on a political basis. But, in fact (they said) it wasn't political, at least the White House wasn't involved, specifically Karl Rove.

Now it's come out that this was a political decision from the beginning, going back to early 2005, and that Gonzales was involved even before he was Attorney General, when he was on the White House staff, and that Rove was involved--in fact (according to emails revealed Thursday), he was a chief instigator.

What's the underlying problem with this? Presidents often change federal prosecutors at the beginning of their terms, as Bush did--they are in that sense political appointments. But firing prosecutors selectively based on how they are prosecuting Republicans or not prosecuting Democrats strikes at the heart of the justice system, already admittedly weakened by the political appointee tradition. What the Bush White House is doing in this instance, as in others, appears to be unprecedented. It's also unusual to replace one Republican appointee with another because Karl Rove wants a pal in his place--especially when the office is in Little Rock, where yet another round of investigations into the Clintons could begin, just as Hillary runs for President.

What else is behind this? Howard Fineman for MSNBC points to the practices and intents of Rove and the other Bushites as far back as Texas:

Judges are elected in Texas. Karl Rove made his fortune not by running George W. Bush for office, but by training, building and running slates of conservative Republican judges. If the judges are purely political, what does that make the lawyers who practice in front of them? Surely not just “officers of the court.”The Austin Gang – Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers – saw the legal world as something to control, if for no other reason than if they did not, the Trial Lawyers – the backbone of the modern Texas Democratic Party – would.

Gonzales made his bones literally keeping Bush out of court when, as governor, Bush was called to jury duty. Had Bush been subject to questioning by attorneys over his suitability to serve, he would have had to reveal that he had been arrested for drunk driving. Not a good thing to do before a presidential campaign. Gonzales managed to get the Boss out of the jury pool.

But it's even more specific, according to a New York Times editorial:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings. In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

The integrity of the election system, the integrity of the justice system--just two attacks on the integrity of the Constitution that characterize this Bush administration. I don't know if it is possible, but impeachment is more warranted now than ever.

The Lies That Bind

It's a sad day in a sad time. With the Lewis Libby conviction on obstruction of justice and perjury, we have the spectre of a White House--most specifically, the Vice President's office but also others in the Administration-- that consciously lied to get the country to invade and occupy Iraq, then tried to suppress the truth, then tried to punish Joseph Wilson, the former Ambassador to Iraq under Bush Sr. who actually saved lives there, for exposing one of these lies, by revealing that his wife was a covert operative at the CIA, thus endangering her life and ending her career, as well as ending her decades-long work in uncovering weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the U.S.

President Bush said repeatedly that he would fire anyone who leaked Valerie Plame's identity. During Libby's trial, several other officials were implicated in doing so, including Rove and the VP. The statement about firing people who committed what some would call treason is currently inoperative.

Lewis Libby obstructed justice and lied to the Grand Jury to protect his boss, VP Cheney, and the White House. Some speculate he did so after being given assurances that he will receive a presidential pardon. A sad-eyed John Dean appeared on "Countdown" to say he expects that Bush will pardon Libby before Libby spends a single day in jail. The corruption of this White House was further revealed today in congressional hearings that are showing that several federal prosecutors were fired because they didn't play politics with their offices.

Other congressional hearings are detailing how this administration, after sending young Americans to Iraq on false pretenses, for brutally long tours of duty, with poor planning, confused mission, and insufficient resources, including insufficient armor and other protection that led to needless serious injuries, failed to provide the proper care to those who were so injured after they returned.

I've said here before that to confront the problems ahead, we need to get away from knee-jerk us/them, either/or responses. We need in many cases to understand the concerns that underlie the otherwise inexplicable positions and behavior. We need to listen to contrary evidence and arguments. We need to honor sincerity. We need to communicate and find common ground.But we also need to be clear. What this administration has done and is doing is evil. It is corrupt and corrupting, and it is dangerous.

It also goes hand in hand with practices and attitudes by those who identify themselves as conservatives or the Right, that are unacceptable in a civilized society, let alone a democratic one. Though the left is not without its vitriolics, its knee-jerk responses to opposition, I believe Kos was right today in noting that "Michael Savage is the third most popular talk radio host in the country, a hero to millions of conservatives" thanks to venomous rhetoric." Like Coulter, Savage knows what the conservative movement craves and delivers -- a steady diet of hate and rage." In an earlier post, Kos quotes another blogger, Glenn Greenwald on Ann Coulter: [T]he significance lies not just in this specific outburst on Friday but in the whole array of hate-mongering, violence-inciting remarks over all these years. Its significance lies in the critical fact that Malkin expressly acknowledged: "She's very popular among conservatives." The focus of these stories should not be Coulter, but instead, should be the conservative movement in which Ann Coulter -- precisely because of (not "despite") her history of making such comments -- is "very popular."

I heard Coulter herself on TV say that the lesson of this latest flap should be that conservatives need not restrain themselves, because she's done this many times and it hasn't damaged her career at all.

We have reached this point where baseless accusations, open bigotry, and expressions of hate and rage are normal discourse, and this is not unrelated to the ideological justifications for an us/them partisanship that knows no bounds--not the law, not the Constitution, not common decency, and certainly not accuracy or the truth.

Our leaders feel justified in doing anything they can get away with, and they are supported loudly by the most watched news network which routinely distorts for ideological effect (Fox's coverage of the Libby conviction was a screenful of "Libby Not Guilty," which applied to one of the five counts, and that, according to a juror, because a single juror voted against that particular count) and by an entrenched ideologically driven political force that has no respect for the truth, and traffics in hate, rage and venom. It's a sad day indeed.

Creating Dictatorship

It's easier and quieter than you think. Bush has gone pretty far towards this goal, if it is his goal, by simply asserting he has total power: to imprison without charges or trial, to spy on Americans without showing cause, to make secrets, reveal secrets and prosecute others who reveal secrets according to how he wants to; to say which laws he will follow and which he will not. He's defending torture, trying to expand his power, and threatening the press with prosecutions for reporting his secret excesses. His popularity may have tanked, close to 3/4 of Independents now disapprove of his administration, but nobody is even trying to stop him, and the idea that he is paralyzed by bad poll numbers is disingenuous.

Now he wants to appoint an Air Force General to head the CIA. He's getting some opposition, but word is he's announcing the appointment anyway. For awhile it seemed to some that the military would be the countervailing force against Bush's imperial excesses abroad, like nuking Iran. But the military is also a potent tool which the Bushites may want to use. Bush has announced military takeover as his solution for emergencies like Katrina and a bird flu epidemic. Control of the military, and control by the military, is essential to a dictatorship.

Plus his apparent choice to head the previously civilian intelligence agency is a General of the Air Force. The Air Force is the service that will get to drop their favorite bombs if he orders action against Iran. In Seymour Hersh's article revealing the Iran plans, several high ranking military leaders were said to be appalled, but he could quote some in support--from the Air Force. And those dissident retired Generals who made so much noise? How many were Air Force? I don't recall one. The Army and Marines are bearing the brunt of Iraq, the Navy will take the brunt of an Iran counterattack, but the Air Force gets to shock and awe.

But fascism doesn't depend entirely on dramatic action in Washington. It can be promoted with budgets and expectations. Why do you think FBI and other government agents spy on meetings of Quakers in Florida--because they really believe they are dangerous terrorists? Probably some do, but probably some local directors needs to generate reports and paperwork to justify salaries and operations.

Besides the NSA wiretapping and FBI spying revealed months ago, we are also seeing an increase in local police monitoring and strong-arm tactics against lawful groups and individuals, including bands of dangerous vegans. The atmosphere for this is created in Washington, but it is also financed and promoted there actively. If you know anything about how people operate when they are dependent on grants and allocations from government, you know that they do what they can get the money to do. If that's survelliance and riot equipment, they get and use survelliance and riot equipment; if money comes to support people doing those things, then those are the things that get done. And when there's a benign demonstration in your precinct, you still have to get out the helicopters and the riot gear, just so you can say you did. But you may need a few arrests as well.

As DarkSyde at Dkos points out, we're spending a trillion dollars on an unnecessary and largely immoral war in Iraq. If we had spent a trillion dollars on alternative clean energy, do you think we'd be up against it because of gasoline prices, and faceing global disasters and the distinct possibility of future wars and devastation because of the Climate Crisis? We'd have enough left over to install a decent health care system, so many of us wouldn't face the distinct possibility of dying because we can't pay for medical care, and a public health system so we wouldn't be talking about turning over the country to martial law and a military dictatorship in event of a serious epidemic.

Fascism may be coming in on little cat's feet, but by the time soldiers are in charge of American streets, it will be too late to rescue freedom. It will just be a sign that the rest of the pieces are in place--electronic survelliance, economic control, a subjugated internet, the already corrupted press, a powerless Congress and compliant judiciary. And some emergency to clean house of the remaining dissidents. It can't happen here? I'm telling you my dear, that it can.

A Private Big War

As the Bushites continue their Iraqnam war, they are waging another war at home, on the American people and on America itself. Contempt for the Constitution and civil liberties is just part of it. The whole of it is a private big war, on behalf of corporate profits, feeding off the people who don't profit.

The Iraqmire that's killing thousands and turning a country into a weaponized hell, is a privatized war. Taxpayer billions (to be paid for generations) are going to Halliburton and various private armies, just as the current Medicare prescription drug debacle is designed not to help seniors or safeguard their health, but to enrich corporations and their obscenely overpaid executives.

Meanwhile, cuts in programs affecting people in the U.S., especially the poor, the sick, the old and others outside the Bushledged few, became law in late 2005. Now at the same time as they are demanding a trillion more in war spending for their corporate pals, the Bushites are asking Congress for more war on America in its proposed 2006 budget.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that among the programs targeted for elimination are:

• The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food packages for some 400,000 low-income seniors.

• A preventive care block grant, which helps states provide preventive healthcare for "underserved populations."

• The TRIO Talent Search program, which helps colleges and universities assist disadvantaged teenagers so they can finish high school and go to college.

Among programs facing major cuts, according to CBPP:

• Section 202 housing for low-income elderly, which would be cut 26 percent below the 2006 level.

• Section 811 housing for low-income people with disabilities, which would face a 50 percent cut.

• A 79 percent cut for Community Oriented Policing Services, which aims to put more police on the streets.

• Child Care and Development Block Grant, which would face more than $1 billion in cuts over five years. CBPP reports that by 2011 the number of children receiving child-care assistance would drop by more than 400,000, compared with the 2005 figure.

There are proposed cuts in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Cuts in enforcement for missed child support, and cuts to environmental programs, including the restoration of the Pacific salmon, and cuts to National Parks. All of these have already been cut, and cut again. Some are barely functioning. And as they function less and less well, people blame government more.

On the day this budget was announced, the Big Smirk himself had an unusual experience when he attended the funeral of Coretta Scott King: he was forced to be present while people were criticizing him. As the Los Angeles Times reports, there were pointed references in particular from President Jimmy Carter, who referred to the illegal wiretaps and other survelliance endured by Martin Luther King and Coretta King.

"This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over," he also remarked, "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Rev. Joseph Lowery noted Coretta King's opposition to the war in Iraq, and could have been commenting directly on Bush' s budget. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar. We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."

Is This The Way The Republic Ends?

It was supposed to be where the issue, not to mention the outrage, of the cheerful assertion of dictatorship was going to be focused. The Alito hearings, whatever they would mean for the eventual acceptance of the nominee to the Supreme Court, would serve notice that Democrats and even some Republicans weren't going to stand for Constitutional democracy being dismantled before their eyes by a government headed by an embarrassing self-parody in the Oval Office.

Well, it was an awfully good idea. Too bad the Senators on the committee were so lame, and so easily flummoxed by a nominee who failed to dramatically screw up, mostly by sitting utterly still and saying as little as possible with as many words as possible.

And of course the media utterly fell for the only not entirely boring photo op, which was the nominee's wife in tears, after a question by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Graham, sitting in judgment on the judge, was also the guy who helped prepare him for testimony, and was he ever prepared. Most Little Leagues don't let coaches umpire, but Congress is apparently different.

Maybe that should be their motto: Congress: always a lower standard.

Could it be that the tears were also coached? The woman could have been an actor playing Alito's wife and our ace investigative newshounds would never know it. They're too busy, getting the money shot, doing inserts for teasers and interviews for other shows on their network, and bantering with pundits and drive-time djs, then rushing back to the office to read the blogs so they can find out what's going on.

The anti-dictatorship crowd hasn't run out of opportunities yet--it's said that Al Gore will shout about constitutional crisis in a speech on Monday, though the drama is a bit diluted by this being known several days in advance, so the speech itself may be old news before it happens.

And some anti-dictatorship folks are trying their own pr campaign, like the series of town meetings which are laudable in themselves, but to puff them up as "impeachment talk is growing" and "350 people are packed into the hall" is pushing it. Yes, maybe they were packed, but they were still just 350 people.

I've been thinking about a short email I got at Christmastime by an old friend from the 70s, which referred to these as "the worst of times." She and I lived through Civil Rights and Vietnam, assassinations, Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Iran-Contra, and Bush War I.

She may even remember aspects of the Blacklist---after all, her father was I.F. Stone, one of the few wholly admirable men of our time, whose courage is partially measured in his lack of company as a voice of informed dissent. Yet she called these the worst of times, and she may well be right.

But they may not be the worst of times to come, if this pale slide into dictatorship isn't halted.
It's not the wiretaps themselves, not even Alito, that make it so terrible. But the confidence that Bushcorpse has in asserting their evil ways, in destroying this nation's economy, its natural environment and the world's, sending poor young men and women to their deaths, justifying torture and continuing cruel and unusual punishment without even charges, leading a system in which medical care is denied to the non-wealthy, and public health is falling apart, and in Bush's obscenely and absurdly cheerful blather about the ruins of New Orleans...what word is there for this but decay?

Is this how the Republic will end, not with a bang but a simper?

Opening Today: The Winter of Our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent, not to be made glorious summer by the daughter of New York, its Senator. At least not yet.

Even with the first out-loud Impeachment talk in December, it's still very likely that the American people and the entire world are stuck with G.W. Bush as President for the next three years. A Republican Congress arranged a bogus impeachment of a Democratic President but since they've more than proven that their partisanship trumps their patriotism, this Congress will take the ship of state down before they'll permit a Bush Impeachment.Democrats have a chance to win a slim Senate majority in November, and with the likelihood of a major scandal affecting a score of GOPer House members, some possibility of taking both houses.

But even then we run into the major barrier: impeach Bush, get Cheney. Of course, Cheney might be forced to pull an Agnew and get out first to avoid jail...but that's a lot of ifs.

Still, the discontent starts ringing big time today, Monday, with the beginning of hearings on Samuel Alito for Supreme Court. Until recently this shaped up to be a fight over Roe v. Wade, but revelations of White House spying on Americans in defiance of law has changed the dynamic, though Roe is still a mighty factor.

Now, as the Nation summed it up, " The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito represent the first major battle in an emerging constitutional war over the authority of the President."Alito has left an alarming paper trail. For instance, he picked the perfect year--1984--to write a memo supporting the federal right to wiretap American peace activists without a warrant.

This also indicates a consistency with Bush's last attempted appointment, of Harriet Miers. Right wing fanatics were puzzled (and yes, admit it, a little hurt) that Bush appointed somebody without proven right wing fanaticism on key issues. Why on earth did he choose her? As he tried to rally support among fundie fanatics, GOP party chair Ken Mehlman was quoted as telling them of the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism.

That what Miers was all about: the loyalty to do the right thing if the court tried to restrict the President's power to do whatever he wants, as long as he says it's necessary to defend the U.S. (which may actually mean to him, his rich buddies, his church and a few of his favorite corporations.) Having failed at that, Bush chose somebody who'd shown evidence on the record of supporting such power, even if he didn't happen to be a proven personal toadie.

This of course is only the opening act of what is likely to be The Winter of Our Discontent--the Series. There are the unfolding scandals involving ace lobbyist Abramoff, the delayed justice to De Lay, as well as two other dubious snooping campaigns, by the Pentagon and FBI respectively. The White House National Security Agency buggings (if such an arcane term can be used for a whole new era of electronic spying) are the most clearly contrary to law, though the White House is aggressively asserting its Constitutional right to ignore the Constitution. This is going to be a matter for the courts first, and I suspect it's the reason for Bush taking this stance and doing what John Dean said was unprecedented: a President admitting an impeachable offense. Aggressive assertion of his presidential power would tend to make this a matter for the Supreme Court to decide (insulating Bush from congressional action), which would make sense if Alito wins confirmation, as so far is expected.

But that's not all. The Plame Game isn't over, and Rove is still a favorite to be indicted.In the meantime, Bush is taking the same damn the torpedoes full speed ahead rhetorical stance on Iraqnam, where the news is not changing American public opinion in Bushcorpse favor. Like more death and destruction, news of poor oil revenue, a Pentagon study that up to 80% of Marine casualities could have been prevented by the use of body armor which is available but the Pentagon won't use, and now, a study by a Nobel Prize winning economist and a Harvard budget expert that the real cost of the Iraqmire could eventually be over two TRILLION DOLLARS. This is more than ten times the official estimate.

As this news gets into the national bloodstream, discontent is likely to increase. Bushcorpse stopped its free fall to the bottom in opinion polls at least temporarily, but its much publicized "rebound" still has 60% against him. A month from now the free fall could be back.Especially as it sinks in: three more years...

The American Christmas Wins the War: A Holiday Happy Ending

It began in earnest several weeks ago, launched by politically and doctrinally extreme Christian fundamentalists, with their designated media loudmouth Bill O’Reilly providing the show-biz fulmination, basically to promote a book by John Gibson, a Fox News producer, called The War on Christmas.

Its other political and economic dimensions were expressed by Agape Press, with their slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo.

What most people heard about it was the sudden anger over store clerks saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” But what it was supposed to be was far more audacious.

In his Agape essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians! Christmas is definitely ours.” He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.” The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”

He continues: “There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries -- such as the American Family Association (AFA) -- to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.”

So the idea was economic intimidation, which is certainly the vulnerability that business presents, as anxious as they are about anything affecting retail in the very serious season where they make upwards of half their sales for the year.

There is another economic factor that bleeds over into politics. Baker begins his essay by pointing out that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. This therefore is supposed to be another such issue. It has the special advantage of being a new one, which means political fundamentalist groups can raise lots of money by scaring people with it.

For even true believers get a little soft on the old issues that don’t raise fears so dependably, out of sheer boredom and weariness. The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively. It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping---with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.

Stuck somewhere in this mess is the perennial charge that the true meaning of Christmas is being lost. Usually the culprit is the profit motive, but Gibson and others added regulation and political correctness. They have lots of Swift-Boating examples, many of which have been debunked, though finding overbearing acts of misinterpretation by clueless bureaucracies is not that difficult.

As Christmas approaches, the noise is abating as this attempt has deflated. Yet these groups have found a real danger, and a real war on the American Christmas---in the mirror. They have met the enemy, and it is them.

The most alarming core of fanaticism is the same as at the core of the attempt to change the science curriculum in the Dover PA schools. The recent ruling by Judge Jones reproduces statements of the fanatical fundamentalists on the school board, as summarized by georgia10 at Daily Kos (with page numbers from the Judge's decision):

1. The board members wanted a 50-50 ratio between the teaching of creationism and evolution in biology classes (p. 95)

2. The President also wanted to inject religion into social studies classes, and supplied the school with a book about the myth of the separation of church and state. (p. 96)

3. Another board member said "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." (p. 102)

4. At a meeting, a board member's wife gave a speech, saying that "evolution teaches nothing but lies," quoted from Genesis, asked "how can we allow anything else to be taught in our schools," recited gospel verses telling people to become born again Christians, and stated that evolution violated the teachings of the Bible. (p. 103)

5. Other statements by board members included "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state," and "liberals in black robes" are "taking away the rights of Christians, " and "2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Notice how similar even the language is to the Agape essay.

The fanatical anger over Christmas being stolen from Christians is in a factual sense nutty as a holiday fruitcake. First of all, nobody is trying to take away a single Christian religious celebration, anywhere in America. Nobody is going into anybody’s churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ.

Plus the idea of the “Christmas holiday season” being stolen from Christianity is historically ludicrous. Of all the elements of the traditional American Christmas, about 95% of them have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. Many predate Christianity by centuries, going back to indigenous celebrations of the winter solstice, the celebrations of fire and light in the winter darkness, the post-harvest feast, the mysteries of death (winter, darkness) and resurrection (spring, light) that is as least as old as the very ancient recognition of the bear as a sacred animal that "died" in the winter and was "reborn" in the spring.

Many indigenous cultures see the winter as a time of the earth’s pregnancy, and so birth and children are part of it. Though gift-giving probably has its roots in Greek festivals at the New Year, the Roman Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools and Misrule, the Christian emphasis on the Christ child probably had something to do with gifts to children becoming the focus. The whole “naughty and nice” aspect also predates Christianity, as does the Yuletide, the so-called Christmas tree, holly, etc.

Other “traditions,” developed independent of Christianity and well after it began. The modern “Santa Claus” is mostly a combination of various mythic and folk figures (both gift-giving and punishing ones), given his contemporary form by Coca Cola and other businesses.

So nearly all “Christmas” traditions are “heathen”, Pagan and secular in origin. The early Church readily admitted that it used the Roman mid-winter festivals to celebrate a birth that more likely took place in the spring or summer.

But what’s truly serious about this is the attempt to assert exclusive power over the American Christmas, as it has evolved (there’s that word again!) along with the country.

Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions. I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews. In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.

But there was tolerance and more—there was sharing. That was the spirit of—the meaning of—Christmas, as America practiced it. The songs we sang give it away---they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.

Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions. In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.

These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area. That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.

Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.

And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.

So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community. The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.

These are appropriate in another way. Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along. But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals—and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)

The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions. They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them. They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.

Without a direct or conscious intent perhaps, this attitude informs religious freedom in the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.

It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century. There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world---from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.

And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.

Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate. And it never was all that Constitutional. But diversity gives us the compensation of much more to be shared.

“Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.

So the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth. Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.

All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.

Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s—European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.

Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations. But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)

Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice. I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a great time.

In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.

Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians. In their churches it can be true. But it simply isn’t the case otherwise. In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.

This is the way the Republic ends?

Let's review some of the events of this extraordinary week, in which serious threats to American democracy were revealed. They bear a striking resemblance to the growing evidence of the climate crisis. Both conclusions come from data accruing over time, suddenly exploding in terms of quantity and threat, so quickly that it is difficult keeping up with each revelation.

What's going on politically now can be summarized in this way: if this is not an ongoing campaign to establish a dictatorship, we are headed there anyway.There were two sets of revelations. The first pertains to controlling dissent through intimidation, harrassment, disinformation and spying, though the major issue of civil liberties and the important issue of wasted resources applied to the wrong problem are also involved.

Mid-week it was revealed that the Pentagon has been spying on the activities of various antiwar groups, including Quakers, and designating their lawful and constitutionally protected activities---especially protests against deceptive military recruiting-- as terrorist threats.Late in the week there were reports of repeated instances of spying on hundreds and probably thousands of individuals within the U.S. authorized by the White House---but not by any law.

These revelations created a furor in Congress, and added to other civil liberties concerns, and concerns about government gone wild and going after the wrong targets while neglecting quite obviously necessary matters to protect the public (like ensuring that first responders can communicate), led to the U.S. Senate refusing to renew and extend the Patriot Act. The Act extends provisions that allow for unwarranted intrusions, and mask them in secrecy.

The political firestorm resulting from these revelations forced the White House to gamble on becoming highly aggressive. Yes, said the President in a radio address Saturday, I authorized the spying, to protect the American people, and if you are against it, or against the Patriot Act, then you are making it easy for terrorists to strike again.It's a ploy that worked before. However, when put in context of related news this week and earlier, it may be the most important moment so far in Bushcorps attempt to overrride democracy and accelerate its own reign of terror against political dissent and opposition. If American public opinion doesn't continue to bang away at Bush's credibility, this will be a Republic we can't keep, after barely a wimper.

These were only the most publicized of such revelations. Proposals to reorganize Homeland Security to perform domestic spying and to use Transportation Department operatives to spy on Americans in the transit system were exposed by E Pluribus Media.

In addition to the abuses to peace groups revealed this week, there was the story of a college student who was visited by federal agents because he requested Mao's Little Red Book through an interlibrary loan system for a political science paper.

Such acts of government terrorism are familiar to anyone who was part of various movements in the 1960s---for peace, Civil Rights or Native American rights, for example--as well as to anyone familiar with the Red-Baiting 50s. Computers and the Internet add a new patina, as well as new ease for tracking and intrusion.

Whether by evil intent or simply misguided priorities, once the bureaucracies involved get these marching orders, abuses are automatic and fully predictable. Spying is done, reports are generated because the more threats, the more funding, and the more power.

All of this, plus earlier proposals for giving the military more power domestically, is only possible if Americans are both cowardly and stupid enough to fall for the fear mongering again.

There is however a new and even more insidious element to this undermining of democracy, if not blatant attempt to establish a one-party dictatorship. This is the activity that could shake this nation to its foundations: the growing evidence that the sanctity of voting has been violated, that voting results have been falsified, and that the result has been the election of George Bush as president, in 2000 if not also in 2004. And the continuing operations and plans to make this secret theft of democracy permanent.

The GAO report last month was sobering---so sobering, that the mainstream media is in major denial. The collection of evidence of vote-tampering, etc. continues, last week centering on the issue of electronic voting machines, specifically those of Diebold.After years of accusations, fragmentary and anecdotal evidence, including the views of insiders, a test was conducted last week in Florida which conclusively proved that a hacker could manipulate Diebold machines from a remote location to change the votes, and it would be undetected.

Not only the results of the test but its pattern convinced a Florida election official to conclude that votes in his county were changed in the 2000 election, enough to change the outcome in the state and then in the nation. Diebold protested the test itself, but not the facts of the test's outcome.In 2004 Diebold's president guaranteed that Bush would win the election.

Last week it was widely publicized that Diebold is being sued by some of its own stockholders for withholding information from them, including the vulnerabilties of its voting machines. Not as widely reported, while Diebold was competing in several states to install their machines for future elections, their officials continued making contributions to Republican politicians, even after these contributions were supposedly halted.

That Republicans continue to plan staying in office by manipulating elections was made clear by the Bush nomination to the Federal Elections Commission of a man notorious for concocting and carrying out voter suppression schemes, including the haphazard listing of Florida felons in 2000 that robbed thousands of legitimate voters of their voting rights.

These machines are still scheduled to be used in the 2006 elections in a number of states, some of which succumbed to Diebold and Republican pressure last week to approve them. Except for Democrats on the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Kerry's quiet observation that he lost every single precinct in New Mexico that used touch-screen voting machines, regardless of whether it was a Republican or Democratic area, the political consequences of a loss of public confidence in the vote has perhaps made Democrats very hesitant to strongly raise this issue.
They have reason to be afraid, for a crisis of confidence could be exploited by Bushcorps, to install the dictatorship it seems to be preparing on all fronts.

Fox in the Henhouse, Wolf at the Door

Sure, we're all sick to death reciting the tragic actions, bold and destructive deceptions and mind-boggling mistakes of Bush Corps, and sick to death of hearing them. But we aren't being inundated only by Bush-bashing as politics or as Internet sport. There is real damage being done. One by one, our public institutions are being dismantled, corrupted and destroyed.

Our ability to respond to the challenges of the future, which could become crucial at any moment, are being greviously wounded if not utterly demolished.

Think Katrina. Think FEMA. And if anyone believes that private corporations are up to the challenge, they've earned an all expenses paid vacation in Iraq, where the privatization of war and intelligence gathering has resulted in one disaster after another, even given that it was a fool's errand to begin with.

A lethal combination of ideological dogmatism, cronyism and corruption has led to psychotic priorities and actions. The evidence is hitting hard every single day.The worst is that it affects institutions and offices that even ideological, politically and economically corrupt and crony-prone leaders of the past have been sane enough to leave alone. Like public health. Transportation. The Army.

Iraq is the playground for psychotic priorities based on ideological dogmatism and a truly frightening ignoring of facts that contradict those priorities and assumptions when they conflict with the ideology. The tragic harm has been done to the people of Iraq, to American soldiers (and those of other countries) and families, to American prestige, and by creating new reasons for terrorism and a huge training ground for terrorists---all of this damages our present and our future.

We also saw what the Iraq war has done to our National Guard and its ability to do its historic job that Americans depend on the Guard to do, when its personnel and equipment were in Iraq instead of Louisiana and Arkansas in the aftermath of Katrina. Now there are fears for what it is doing to the armed forces.Bob Herbert wrote this in the NY Times: The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment. ..Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

What happens when psychotic priorities are wedded to this administration's penchant for cronyism? Again we saw that in Katrina, and now we're seeing it in the potentially greater challenge of avian flu.

As Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation and on Democracy Now!, Bushcorps has "systematically de-funded" public health programs, specifically those that would prepare the nation for an avian flu threat, and provided massive funding for research into technologies to "fight a possible anthrax or smallpox attack, which almost no one in the public health or national security community was saying was an imminent threat, except people close to Dick Cheney." Specifically, Scooter Libby.

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, also interviewed on the same DN program by Amy Goodman, we are completely unprepared for any sort of health emergency. Why not?

"... the influence of politics and ideology and strategies to promote a particular point of view, undermining something that should have been above and beyond any kind of political consideration...The problem there, of course, is that the whole health care system is so fragile and so eroded over this last couple of decades that we don't even have that capacity in place right now to make anybody feel very confident that we can handle the number of people who might be affected by a pandemic flu."

One reason for this now is that these efforts are being run by a Bushcorp crony, Stewart Simonson, who has no credentials other than being an ideological Republican. 'I mean, every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions," Dr. Redlener said. " But normally, typically, those people get – you know, they become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce, where, in effect, it really doesn't matter who's in those positions. What's striking about this administration, since they got into power, is the placement of people into critical positions, where the national security or the public health is at stake."

Here as in all actions by Bushcorps the cronyism and neocon foreign policy is all in the service of the ideology that began reshaping America in the Reagan administration: the destruction of public institutions, to be replaced by "private" corporations, with the purpose of profit, not public service or the public good.

This is clear in Bush's new flu initiatives, and Republican backed legislation called Bioshield 2. It would, said Scahill, "remove all corporate accountability and liability for pharmaceutical companies that manufacturer vaccinations -- vaccines that hurt people or kill people, and secondly it creates a federal agency that would be the only agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act."

"This whole thing has gotten so bizarre and Byzantine, "added Dr. Redlener," and permeated with this sort of electrifying high intensity politics and economics that the real goal of all of this, which is to literally make us safer in the event of a pandemic or any kind of major disaster, that gets lost in the shuffle. You can't even sort it out now. So even issues like the Bioshield bills, which are terrible bills, basically, for a variety of reasons..."

One of which is that this proposal does nothing to ensure there are mechanisms to produce vaccines and anti-viral medications when they are needed. In other words, the entire public purpose.

Bushcorps relentless push for privatization made news this week as well when the administration fired the president of Amtrak because he wasn't going along with their plans to break up and privatize pieces of the national railroad transportation system.

According to the New York Times, the man they fired, David Gunn, " is known as a rail-turnaround artist. He was brought in to fix the New York City subway system in the 1980's, and provided leadership in the construction of the subway system in Washington. "Just two months ago he was praised by the chairman of the same governing board that fired him: "Mr. Gunn has done, as far as I am concerned, a splendid job." He said Mr. Gunn had "righted a ship that was listing and about to spill over."

But Gunn wouldn't agree to their plans. "They want at least one transportation mode that is totally free market," Mr. Gunn said. But highways, airports and ports are all federally subsidized, he said, decrying "all this angst over an operating deficit of 500 million bucks for the whole country, and the bulk of money going into capital or infrastructure."

What's this relentless privatization about? "...the largest transfer of public wealth to private pockets in the history of this country," says Si Kahn, co-author of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, interviewed this week on Democracy Now!

He continued:"We're seeing this in Iraq, where the goal of this administration is to see how much of the money that should be going to all sorts of other issues and other causes can be put into private pockets. Think Halliburton. Think Lockheed Martin. This is what is going on, and it is the undermining of public space, of the public good, of public welfare, is a deliberate strategy to undermine the ground that belongs to all of us: the common wealth, the commons, those things that create public good, that create a humane society."

Added his co-author, Elizabeth Minnich: "The most important thing to emphasize over and over again is precisely that shift from the public, that which belongs to us, services, goods, values that we have held dear, that we have government established to protect and to provide for us, being opened up to for-profit exploitation, in which case two things key happen. One is, goods that are supposed to be for the people, that we set aside, that we established as rights for the people, which is democratic to the core, being taken over by for-profit corporations for private pockets, dispersed away from the people most directly affected. This is anti-democratic in the extreme. "

But it's been consistently sold as simply a more efficient way to provide services the public wants and needs, using the invisible hand of competition, the magic of the marketplace, instead of bureaucratic waste and abuse.

And it's all a lie. "The whole notion that gets repeated time and again is that the privatizing corporations can do a better job," Minnich said. "People ask us this every time: 'But aren't they more efficient?' No, they do not do a better job. "

"And efficiency," Kahn added, "in corporate terms, means efficiency in generating a profit. It means efficiency in returning the maximum amount of money to the corporate directors and executives and to the majority shareholders."

And the result is, as everyone who say The West Wing debate knows, that wasteful government delivers health care through Medicare with administration costs of under 2% of revenue, while private health care insurance corporations typically devote a third or more to administration, not to mention lobbying and advertising.

We have done worse than letting the fox guard the henhouse, these author say, we've invited them inside. Is there any wonder that our health care system is shambles, our privatized prisons and schools are a scandal, our privatized war is beset with expensive failure and lack of accountability for hired killers and torturers? Or that public institutions bled dry by ideologues of privatization can't meet their challenges?

Critics may claim that alarmists have been crying wolf over failures caused by ideologues, corporate greed and privatization, but we made it through the 80s and we're still here.They should be reminded that even in the cautionary tale about the boy who cried wolf prematurely, the story ends when his cries are ignored, but unfortunately for everyone, the wolf finally comes.

Eternal Vigilance

Two news stories I noticed—each of them also flagged by a prominent southpaw blogger—contribute to a disquieting trend in recent proposals from the Bushcorps White House.The first was Bush’s own suggestion, made at his press conference Tuesday. It was significant enough for an AP report to lead with it. He was speaking to the concerns of a possible global pandemic if something like the Asian bird flu mutates, which the UN estimated could kill as many as 150 million people worldwide. Bush chose to talk about a new role for the military in such an outbreak.

Jennifer Loven reported it this way: “President Bush stirring debate on the worrisome possibility of a bird flu pandemic, suggested dispatching American troops to enforce quarantines in any areas with outbreaks of the killer virus.

Bush asserted aggressive action could be needed to prevent a potentially crippling U.S. outbreak of a bird flu strain that is sweeping through Asian poultry and causing experts to fear it could become the next deadly pandemic. Citing concern that state and local authorities might be unable to contain and deal with such an outbreak, Bush asked Congress to give him the authority to call in the military. The idea raised the startling-to-some image of soldiers cordoning off communities hit by disease.

"The president ought to have all ... assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant," Bush said during a 55 minute question-and-answer session with reporters in the sun-splashed Rose Garden.As Lovin noted: The president has already indicated he wants to give the armed forces the lead responsibility for conducting search-and-rescue operations and sending in supplies after massive natural disasters and terrorist attacks — a notion that could require a change in law and that even some in the Pentagon have reacted to skeptically.

She quotes Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness, as calling the president's suggestion an "extraordinarily draconian measure" that would be unnecessary if the nation had built the capability for rapid vaccine production, ensured a large supply of anti-virals like Tamiflu, and not allowed the degradation of the public health system."The translation of this is martial law in the United States," Redlener said.

Bush is not alone in believing that the military should have a larger role in disasters, as apparently they already will have in something like a terrorist biological weapon attack. There are some reasonable arguments for this, as there are for an armed forces role in public health emergencies, because they have the manpower and some applicable resources, the ability to transport quickly, and other capabilities. But that’s really not the issue.

First of all, Bush proposes the troops for “security,” not general response. That’s what supporters miss (and I found myself in the unusual position, watching the PBS News Hour last week, of disagreeing with the representative from the Center for American Progress, and agreeing with the man from the Cato Institute, on this issue of the military’s role in disasters.)And even stranger, I think Bush is right about one thing---the military would be most useful in security, because that’s what they do. They carry guns, and shoot them. They are trained in various methods of mayhem. They use force, and that’s what they know best. They simply aren’t trained well or at all for the tasks they would be most useful in performing in a domestic emergency.

This is not the World War II army. They don’t provide support even for themselves. Halliburton feeds them in Iraq. They pay corporations to do just about everything except fight, and they pay some corporations to do that as well. When the armed forces were given peacekeeping duty in Kosovo, their commander got himself a few weeks training, and the rest of them had none. The National Guard gets some training in disaster relief, and they are more experienced in it.The lack of training shows up in the pattern of alienating and often brutalizing civilians in Iraq, and it certainly showed up in the prisons there. Until the military is trained for these new missions, they are going to be nothing but a blunt force, and if deployed in America, a potential threat to the lives and liberties of American citizens. (On that threat, I was interested to see that Plutonium Page of Daily Kos agrees.)

Now ask yourself, why is it that the first thing Bushcorps thought of was the military---the security issue---rather than the public health tasks? Is it a fixation on the wrong thing, like thinking the solution to terrorism was to invade Iraq? In the Katrina postmortems, there seemed to be the sense that a major reason that the Red Cross wasn’t allowed into New Orleans sooner was security concerns---which have turned out to be much less of a factor than first thought. When the federal government did show up, they showed up in force, literally: with thousands of troops and mercenaries armed and read to secure a nearly empty city.But there might be more to it that this.

Which brings us to the other story, as dug out by BooMan of the Booman Tribune blog . He focused on this paragraph from a report in the congressional newsletter, the Hill, concerning Bushcorps efforts to convince conservatives to support Bush's new nominee to the Supreme Court, his lawyer:

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, yesterday held a conference call with conservative leaders to address their concerns about Miers. He stressed Bush’s close relationship with Miers and the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism, according to a person who attended the teleconference.

BooMan interpreted this phrase “who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism” as code for support for the Patriot Act and everything else Bushcorps wants, including abrogating civil and human rights at Guantanamo Bay, and a freer hand to use torture there and elsewhere, and to keep evidence of it out of the public eye.

It’s certainly something the Senate needs to ask Miers. What about the Bushcorps policy of not allowing Americans to be sanctioned by the world court or other courts of international law? Does the U.S. have a responsibility to obey the Geneva Conventions? And so on.To be appropriately blunt about it, put these two stories together and you have the outlines of a military dictatorship in the making. Now maybe Bushcorps would be sincerely scandalized by such a thought, but it wouldn’t be entirely inconsistent. In some ways, it’s not even inconsistent with our history.

In the early 1890s, the Pullman Company was one of the largest and most powerful corporations in America. They made and maintained the train cars for America’s long-distance travel, especially by the wealthy. They also forced their workers to live in a company town, where they fleeced them for much of their wages. Then they used an economic downturn that didn’t affect them directly as an excuse for cutting wages by a third. The union went out on strike, and other railroad unions joined. Then before the strike could disrupt the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago---where American corporations showed off their vision of the future to the world---President Grover Cleveland sent federal marshals and half the standing army for “security,” to break the strike.

It wasn’t the first time that the military was used to benefit the ruling oligarchy, and it wasn’t the last. This one happened in George W. Bush’s great-grandfather’s time. It’s well within memory of the perpetual ruling class the Bushes belong to. None of this has to be conscious to be a factor.It makes a scary kind of sense from their point of view. They've enriched the rich and impoverished the middle class, and eventually that could lead to trouble. The rich might need additional "security" for their gated universe.

When Thomas Jefferson said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” he wasn’t talking about vigilance directed outward, to foreign powers. Nor did he mean the 18th century equivalent of environmental activists, or even pinko subversives. He was talking about bad laws and big time tyranny. He would not be surprised either if the party that promises to get government off your back is the one who winds up giving you government’s bayonet in your face.