Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

|<<>>|579 of 714 Show listMobile Mode

Don’t Mess with Texas

Published by marco on

Bush acting as imperial president on SeattlePI is an editorial from Helen Thomas, one of the most experienced members of the White House Press Corps. This is the reaction of someone who’s seen a lot of Presidents and senators come and go and she’s scared by the direction we’re headed. It’s not just one thing, but the combination of policies that express an evil intent that isn’t what the U.S. should be. Most of the power in the U.S. is consolidating in the executive branch and “[t]he imperial presidency has arrived. On the domestic front President Bush has found that in many ways he can govern by executive order.”

This is from someone who was there when Lyndon Johnson escalated his power (and Kissinger’s) in similar ways during the Vietnam War. On the domestic front, things are arguably worse, with “outrageous invasions of privacy” written into law by the Patriot Act. For those detained under its provisions, there is no longer any law protecting them.

“… methods of extracting information are not disclosed. And the imprisoned suspects and material witnesses cannot get in touch with lawyers or their families. I’m not talking about Russia’s infamous gulags. I am talking about us.”

These are the acts of the ‘bad guys’, aren’t they? How did we get to the point where someone convinces us that this is the only way? Do people think anymore at all? It seems all those proponents of “constitutional law … are accepting Bush’s end-runs around the law involving some 2,400 detainees, who are reportedly being held indefinitely by U.S. authorities. Can Americans really tolerate the denial of rights to these people?” I think they can because it’s always somebody else and people have no problem infringing on the rights of others in ways that they are sure can never happen to them. The people will not rise until policy begins to affect them directly, as perhaps the Wall Street debacle is doing. Perhaps the draining of 401k and pension funds can wake people up more than the erosion of civil rights (though erosion is too mild a word).

She cites Ashcroft’s gleeful campain to “wiretap and access the e-mail of untold numbers of citizens”, “listen in on conversations between lawyers and clients”, “check… lists of readers at libraries and book stores” and “deny freedom of information requests from scholars and journalists”. When Reagan’s Presidential Records were due for release, “Bush simply overrode that law”, most likely to protect his father, whose name was all over those papers in relation to Iran-Contra. All of these acts over the last 9 months add up to a pattern that is getting harder to ignore, even for the hardcore. Their only choice on many issues is now to retreat into sullen silence, expecting the harsh outcry of “I told you so!”.

In international affairs, Bush has “t[old] Yasser Arafat that he has to go or [told] the Palestinians they cannot vote for Arafat in coming elections” and he has obvious [p]lans to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. These are only the nations mentioned specifically by the administration, for all the others, there is a standing order “threatening pre-emptive first strikes against nations suspected — suspected! — of wanting to harm the United States”. Dubya has carried his state’s motto to an international policy, “don’t mess with Texas!”.