Year end is a good time to look back and reflect on what's ahead. If past is prologue, however, the outlook isn't good, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise....
It's been that way ever since 9/11 with both sides of the aisle complicit with the administration. This article looks back at the record, and year end is a good time to review it. It's hard imagining another as bad with a President defiling the law and once telling Republican colleagues the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper."
He didn't just say it. He governs by it, gets away with it, and former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says "a coup has occurred (with another to come from) the next 9/11....that completes the first (that's) seen a steady assault on every fundamental (aspect) of our Constitution (to create) an executive government (to) rule by decree" no different from a police state.
Author Naomi Wolf spells it out in her April, 2007 Guardian article - "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps." In it, she argues the Bush administration is following the same script any "would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms," and she lists them. They range from "invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy" to "creat(ing) a gulag" to spying on everyone to harassing opposition to controlling the media to calling dissent treason to "suspend(ing) the rule of law." She also notes how much "simpler" it is to shut down democracy than "to create and sustain" it, and that's today's threat.
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This article began and will end with the same chilling thought. It past is prologue, the outlook isn't good in "police state America" under neocon rule that won't appreciably change when the White House has a new occupant in 2009. The nation is at war and laws are in place that end constitutional protections, militarize the country, repress dissent, and our government is empowered to crush freedom and defend privilege from beneficial social change it won't tolerate. It's the price of imperial arrogance we the people are paying, and that won't end until the spirit of resistance gets aroused enough to stop it in our own self-defense. We better hope that happens in time with potentially little of it left.
