Over the past three and a half years, many people have been aghast at the unbridled hubris of the Bush administration. An unbroken stream of jaw dropping effrontery has left us gasping "he governs as though he received a mandate."
I am here to tell you that George W. Bush has NOT governed as though he had a mandate. No president, no modern president certainly, no matter how large his margin of victory, has ever governed with such utter contempt for decency, legality, pluralism, or transparency.
George W. Bush has quite simply governed as though he seized the presidency in a bloodless coup. Which of course is exactly what he did.
And it is my sincere belief that everything-EVERYTHING-the secrecy, the dishonesty, the unilateralism, the cronyism, is the result of this fact.
Think about it for a moment.: You've stolen the highest office of the world's only superpower. You've used your brother the Governor, your cousin the news consultant, (and perhaps your father, the ex CIA head?) to turn America, MY beloved nation, into a banana republic. You've committed the greatest crime ever against the American populace as a whole (Native American genocide, Japanese American internment, etc. being directed at specific segments .) Are you now going to be hesitant to protect your old man by repealing, by fiat, the Presidential Records Act? Are scruples suddenly going to prevent you from appointing your friends from the extractive industries to write your energy policy?
The ugly truth is this: Once the first great crime was committed, the rest became easy. For George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have second thoughts about waging an illegal, preemptive war based upon lies, after first obtaining their power illegitimately, would be akin to
Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate hesitating to write a bad check in order to gas up the getaway car.
And we let it happen my friends. It was this loss, in this first great battle, that set the stage for all the other battles that have followed.
We foolishly focused on chads, hanging and dimpled; on butterfly ballots; on discerning voter intent. All the while George W. Bush's brother and his henchwoman Cruella DeHarris were illegally
disenfranchising sixty thousand (mostly black, mostly Democratic) voters.
We caved, immediately, on ineligible overseas ballots with late postmarks, or no postmarks at all, because we were afraid of being labeled as
"antimilitary".
We sat by, helplessly, as Gore's lawyers waged a wholly incompetent and wrong- headed battle in front of the nation's Republican stacked court (read
Vincent Bugliosi's book for an excellent dissemination of this.)
And we sat, dumbfounded, as Gore himself gavelled the spurious electoral college votes official.
AND WE MUST NOT LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN! There is every indication that the Republicans intend to once again
steal Florida. It is very likely they will attempt to do so in
other states as well.
We must adopt, with absolutely no disrespect intended, the motto of those targeted by the Holocaust: NEVER AGAIN!
We must vote in large enough numbers to make any thievery irrelevant to the outcome. We must poll watch. We must monitor.
And if the results are in any way questionable, we must take to the streets! We must not wait for permits. We must flash mob. We must be peaceful, but we must be ANGRY. We must surround the White House, we must surround the Capitol building, we must surround the Supreme Court building, and we must surround the offices of our local newspapers so that our supposed guardians of democracy are not once again complicit in an act of murder against democracy.