[Crossposted from the Real History Blog]
Why is Bush still in power? Why are the Republicans letting this guy rip our system of government to shreds with impunity? Everything he does is taking the country further and further off course, with no correction in sight.
And that’s where the parallels to Watergate break down. Sure, we have secret, illegal spying. The enemies list. An administration hell-bent on plugging leaks. A President who believes the law doesn’t apply to him. So why can’t we expect a similar outcome? Because in the past, conservatives and liberals both respected that our system of government only works when there’s a true balance of power between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. The court was a balanced one, not a partisan one. And the legislature was dominated by Democrats who were not afraid to hold the President’s feet to the fire.
Now, we have a partisan court, and a Republican-controlled congress. In other words, we don’t have a two-party system in this country anymore. We’re down to a one-party system, and that party is running their cards. Destroy Social Security. Open up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to private drilling interests. Sell off our ports to private enterprises, even if they’re controlled by states that sponsor terrorism. Sell out our soldiers by putting them in an impossible situation. And of course, sell out all our allies in the United Nations. Why do you think they sent John Bolton into the UN except to destroy it?
Honey, if it looks like it, talks like it, and smells like it, you gotta call it what it is. Fascism. A one-party dictatorship, bent on serving the corporations over the people. That is the very definition of fascism.
Do the Republicans really want to go down in history as the party that brought fascism to the highest levels of government?
The same people who tell you burning the flag is horrible think nothing of burning the Constitution, our rights, our environment.
It’s hard – no, it’s impossible – for me to imagine that people can be so selfish, so small-minded, and so short-sighted that they would destroy the planet to promote their own profit, but the pattern now is undeniable. The religious right has a new leader, and it’s not Christ, or Abraham, or Allah: it’s the Almighty Dollah. The history of the past century is written in money. Wherever oil could be found, wars have been waged. Wherever people started to form a democratic system of government, including here in America, the leader of that government was overthrown or killed.
In the name of profit, we are killing our seas. We are losing our fisheries. We have deforested our lands. We have ripped a hole in the ozone layer. We are losing our planets’ lungs, the rainforest. We are melting the Antarctic ice shelf. We are polluting our soils. If we keep this up, in a few hundred years, we may not be able to inhabit this planet.
The only people who can stop this ship now are the mighty rich, the business class, the Republican Party.
Will they be patriots, or rapists?
Will they bow to science, or to personal greed?
Will they do the right thing and move to impeach the worst president in this nation’s history? Or will they count their tax cut dollars even as they poison themselves? Pollution cannot be kept out of gated communities, not even with all the bottled water in the world.
At The Crisis Papers, Bernard Weiner makes the following observations:
I’m more and more convinced that it will be Republicans, many of them of the true conservative and realist kind, who effectively will do in the Bush Administration.
In this, I am reminded of the behavior of Richard Nixon when he realized that he was fast losing his middle-class, bourgeois base: He called it quits on the Vietnam War, and likewise on his presidency after his crimes were exposed.
But unlike Nixon’s crew, Bush&Co. seem willing to take the country down with them, so desperate are they to hold onto power, deplete the treasury, pay off their corporate friends, carry out their ideological revolution — and keep themselves out of the federal slammer. The crimes of the Bush Administration are so many and varied that none of us should be surprised by anything that might happen in the coming weeks and months: Bin Laden captured or reported killed, a U.S.-Israeli air assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. to be followed by martial law, the announcement of a bird-flu outbreak with the military placed in charge.
I’m pretty level-headed and don’t usually think in these dire terms, but these guys have backed themselves into a tight political corner and are desperate — and dangerous.
Please. I’m begging my fellow citizens, my fellow Republican citizens. Wake up. Smell the planet you’re killing. Do something about it. You are the only ones who can.
You have the power. We don’t. You can save us all, or kill us all. I’d say the choice is a no-brainer, but then, you’re the guys who elected Bush.
May God help us all.
