The year 2006 will be historic for the nation, and probably for humanity. Texans Bush and Rove and their conspirators in the second Bush presidency have disgraced American democracy at home and in the world with debasements of our nation and our values that have now entered their climactic phase. What part will the rest of us Texans play in this decisive year?
As I have written in a review-essay that appears in the tenth-anniversary spring issue of Yes!, the quarterly of new solutions published in Washington state by David and Frances Korten (YesMagazine.org), we are living and working in the very days and nights of the American Emergency, the climactic American Crisis. Our elections are bought, and our government is run by and for the major transnational corporations. Bush announced in 2002 his illegal presidential policy that the United States can and will attack other nations first, waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now waging, as if he were doing it in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, which on the face of it is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The President, the Vice-President, and their factors sold this war to Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and terrorize us about Iraq’s alleged connections to Al Qaeda and mass-murder endangerments to us from Iraq itself, all of which literally did not exist. In polls now six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest. Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and seems now to be maneuvering to use that control to wage another aggressive war on Iran, with literally incalculable consequences.
We Texans are a major source of this deterioration into crisis. The leading Democrats of the state so dishonored the liberal traditions of their party that in the resulting political vacuum, Bush was elected Governor here, and from Austin he mounted the campaign that a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court illegally decreed made him President. After that, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from Sugar Land, crafted his scheme to use corporate money to widen the Republicans’ majority in the Texas delegation to Washington, D.C., battening down right-wing GOP control of the House and the Congress. The third President from Texas and his Republican Congress then waged aggressive war on Iraq, drove the nation into insolvency to further enrich the already rich, and just for good measure tore up the Constitution.
As we in Texas bear guilt for this we have also begun to join the resistance and revolt against it, starting with Cindy Sheehan’s brigades in Crawford. By happy accident the Texas trip-root that now threatens to help bring the Bush presidency crashing down, crushing itself under its own arrogance, hubris, and criminality, is a law against corporate money in Texas elections that was passed a century ago in the state’s populist afterglow.
WHETHER a Texan takes responsibility for the outcome of our nation the truth of this pre-eminent dictatorship is right at our front door. For some of us have already realized the end product of warrantless searches that swept them away to torture in lands far from here. So undiscovered by any journalist that the government has not yet made the mistake to torture a journalist but only jail them in the USA and currently in Afghanistan. In Iraq the disgruntled Sunnis jail them and there may be some detained by the USA for all we know.
The assent of the criminal that sits in the Oval Office began with an election overthrown in 2000 in a state owned and controlled by his brother. The distinguished Black Congress that lead the rebuke of the court appointed president-elect met not with one Senator as if they were criminals themselves. Not one spineless Senator came forward to stop the insanity of the disenfranchisement of thousands of Black Americans. Americans ! Americans ! Not one Senator came forward to stop the insanity of that reality ! I suppose all those of the Black Representatives were wrong. Really? They were in contempt. Not within their rights. Not without cause. Really? Their cries a meager protest and nothing more. That is completely shameful.
Then the clown's crowning lead to a Chinese Spy Plane Incident, the gala on board the Greenville leading to the deaths of innocent Japanese, the crash of helicopter off of Hawaii with stepped up training. All that while our intelligence agencies complied a report entitled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the USA." The content of that report was rebuked by Bush and Cheney as vague and the result was September 11, 2001.
The Day America Surrendered.
Over the years since then this country has been exploited and used to the extreme unlike ever of modern day. The terrorist network that carried out the murders of nearly 3000 Americans are still at large along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border ready to repeat their task with a bigger network now endorsed by immoral leaders such as the president of Iran. Had the military been deployed in the strength it was sent to Iraq the network known as al Qaeda would now be history and the subsequent terrorist bombings in places like Madrid and London would not have happened.
Today we wage an illegal war in Iraq. One that diminished our importance as a country and like sheep the American people remained blinded to their own inability to be brave. They are unable to find the courage to stand up before a dictator - president and remove him from office. It can be done if the demand was heard loud and clear.
The people of Germany were the same sort of cowards and by the time they had become murderers they had bought so much into Hitler's Nazi Party it was too late to turn back. Without pride, courage or dignity they achieved a military machine that was finally thwarted and brought to justice ONLY when the Americans entered the war and found the determination to retaliate when they were hit with that reality on their own soil.
Today we have a president that addresses the current war activities of the USA as analogy to WWII. Please. Not even close. The propaganda war this administration has waged AGAINST the American people is well known, yet, still today in the face of government eavesdropping on civilians newsprint is selling a bill of goods based on 'the necessity' of warrantless invasion of privacy and wiretaps in opining polls that would seek to sway those that see it differently. That followed by a reassurance that spies now are seeking ethics to guide them. Yeah. Right. And the ethics of the Senate and House are outstanding in bringing down Republicans with their hands in the Abramoff Cookie Jar.
The United States of America is on a slippery slope without an analogy to the past. When pride in patriotism should include the destruction of a terrorist network that successfully carried out an attack on USA soil, you are all still cowering in fear unable to take control of your government while the current president and vice seek to ignore well established laws that have yet to fail their purpose.
The domestic agenda of destruction reigns without resolve. Storms of 2004 and 2005 still have residents in trailers, displaced to other areas of the country and worst of it is the ultimatum to bulldoze the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in order to rebuild while there are still over 3000 people missing and very, very likely buried in that mud. Yet, no one raises a voice to stop this insanity. The equivalent of the amount dead on September 11, 2001 lie buried in the dried mud of the wake of Katrina and no one raises a finger to excavate those remains. This country should be ashamed to realize the inability to rise to the occasion to honor dead citizens in the way we honored those that brought us to war. I suppose natural disasters can kill with immunity to loyalty or patriotism. Still and again bigotry still lives.
When the Jews went to Auschwitz, they did so in silence and obedience without a chance of escape. The did it in complacency and helplessness never knowing what was their destiny beyond those walls.
Americans are now ready for Auschwitz. They are passive. They are compliant to listening to the possibility that what is happening to their civil rights will protect their lives. They are helpless and obedient. They are cowering before their dictator without recourse or will. Some have been whisked away in the middle of the night only to be returned after months of torture on foreign soil. With the pace of regression of authority it won't be long before a court appointed by a maniacal president will repeal all the advancements of fairness and habeous corpus will be wiped away and then people won't have to be whisked away to foreign soil to be tortured to death under the status of enemy combatant.
How many are there in the USA? Enemy combatants? A thousand? Two thousand? An entire city maybe? At what point did the German citizens realize the Jews disappeared but simply kept quiet and compliant under the dictatorship they could not repeal.
To date, George Walker Bush has deployed military tanks to peaceful anti-war demonstrations in California. He has chronically spied on Americans without warrants in the face of a seamless system of checks and balances already set up during the Clinton years. Was it because of his hatred of Bill Clinton that he ignores or destroys every aspect of achievement of that presidency. I think that is a very viable answer. George Walker Bush wants no constraints. He wants to do what he wants to do with wild abandon to the purpose it serves this country.
The citizens of the USA have not very far to go to completely surrender their pride and privacy. They have only to continue to be sheep to a diabolical Shepard that has an end in mind for them that includes media propaganda including racism unrelenting that I witnessed as recent as Friday night on CNN's AC360. Blatant racism. Not much different than the abandoned House members during the Electoral College following the court appointed president.
The Americans will keeps getting weaker and weaker. I don't care the abuses of the past presidents. Richard Nixon was made to resign for his scandal during Vietnam. We, as a nation, have never been lulled into such a passive state, allowing assault on our private lives unlike this before. The major newspapers participating in the sheparding should be ashamed at the very least if not driven to resigning their newsprint no different than Nixon was.
The USA is ready for the train ride to Auschwitz. Who will be first? When the knock comes on the door by officers without warrants don't bother packing. You won't be back.
George Walker Bush stay away from my home. Stay away from my family. Stay away from my life. I am warning you !
