The Bush administration gets more frightening by the day.
And the public, for the most part, remains mute, soothed into submission by
threats of terrorism.
We are headed down the path to tyranny.
This is a government that tortures prisoners. This is a
government that holds detainees for years without charging them or giving them
access to the justice system.
This is a government that turns on military officers and
intelligence officials who disagree with it, and goes after newspapers and
reporters who publish unpleasant truths.
This is a government that wiretaps its citizens without
warrants — and gets telephone companies to give it access to the records of
millions of law-abiding citizens.
This is a government that has repeatedly lied to us: about
the extent and nature of its spying, about the treatment of detainees, about Iraq’s
relationship to September 11.
This is a government that wants the president to have almost
unlimited power, that shrugs off international law.
The Bush administration is compiling and analyzing
information about the private phone calls of millions of Americans. And because
the administration says it’s for national security, more than 60 percent of us
are happy to be spied upon.
(“I don’t wanna be attacked,” conservative columnist and
Bush apologist David Brooks explained on Friday’s NewsHour.)
There are legal ways, of course, for the United
States to go after terrorists. But George
Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld don’t want to bother with legalities, don’t
want to bother with the checks and balances of democracy.
We are witnessing a power grab by an administration gone
mad. And the American public does not care.
Every once in a
while, Republicans and Democrats in Congress seem willing to wrest control
away from the White House.
But their outrage withers after a few press conferences. And
the administration keeps right on doing what it’s doing.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld will control the White House for
another two and a half years. But next fall’s Congressional races offer a
chance that balance will be restored.
The president’s low approval ratings, the mounting deaths in
Iraq, the
saber-rattling on Iran,
the chaos in the CIA, the difficulty over immigration legislation, the fiasco
of the feds’ Katrina response: all could spell trouble for Republicans running
for Congress.
But it’s getting harder to differentiate between Democrats
like Hillary Clinton and their Republican colleagues. And barring outright scandal,
gerrymandering has made it nearly impossible to unseat an incumbent.
The public could rise up in protest, of course, and do its
duty. But Americans seldom cast votes for Congress out of a national vision. We
may despise an administration or a Congress, but we like our own
representatives.
And there’s a war on.
And we don’t wanna be attacked.
The campaigns leading up to the November elections won’t be
pretty, I suspect. But the results will be enlightening. Will voters begin to
recognize the administration’s demagoguery for what it is?
Or has the Bush administration sold us on giving up the very
things we say we’re fighting for in Iraq
and Afghanistan?
The poll numbers on the telephone spying don’t give me much
hope.
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This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.
