Image courtesy of Morning Calm Weekly Newspaper Installation Management Command, U.S. Army under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
One thing we know and understand about authoritarians is that their solution for every problem that develops in a society will be a military one. The Bush administration’s response to the dangers of a Bird Flu outbreak in the United States would be “quarantines” enforced by the U.S. Military where entire regions of the United States would be subjected to martial law.
This is a somewhat perplexing political reality in America today; President Bush and his administration are increasingly relying on militaristic behavior in a dictatorial attempt to deal with domestic problems. Considering Bush’s approval rating hovering around 40%, and American support against Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq now at 67% according to a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, it is mind numbing to see President Bush continue to rely on military solutions to complex problems facing the United States in foreign and domestic issues.
As a war leader, President Bush is a miserable failure. A majority of Americans now rightly believes that the Iraq war was unnecessary and that the reasons pushed by the neocons for going to war were erroneous and in some cases criminal.
So why does President Bush continue to behave in a way that more and more Americans believe that he is not capable in doing a good job; as commander-in-chief, Bush is increasingly regarded by Americans as a humiliated failure.
The answer to why Bush behaves the way he does is a simple one; neoconservatives rely on military force because they are idealistic authoritarians, their vision in “creative destruction,” to spread by “force of arms” their version of freedom and normal government is what drives these men and women of lust, greed, and glory. It is simply in their nature to send other people to die for their idealism and hubris.
The megalomaniacal policies by the Bush administration is increasingly bringing dissension within conservative ranks towards the radicalization of the Republican Party by the neocons, which under the exaggerated threats in their “war on terrorism,” have effectively – with the pusillanimous consent by the Congress – diluted the “checks and balances” in governance that controls the centralization of power from gathering too the executive branch of government.
Despite the promise of a veto by President Bush, the Senate, in a 90-9 vote attached an amendment to the 2006 defense appropriations bill to ban cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment against anyone in US government custody. It is a belated attempt by the Senate to reign in the “torture masters” within the Bush administration who continually have laid waste to the premise that the United States government adheres to “rules of conduct” in time of war outlined by the Geneva Conventions and signed by the United States.
Does one need to ask why congress has to attach an amendment to a defense appropriations bill to curtail the federal government’s illegal excesses towards prisoners when by constitutional law under the 8th Amendment the legal protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” already exists?
President Bush is in somewhat of a political quandary, he increasingly faces a hostile public when it comes to his continued insistence for the sacrifice of American lives for a war that most Americans now regard as a complete waste in blood and public expenditure. The Bush administration has lost all moral credibility in its conduct on the ground in Iraq, and the real war on “terror groups” has suffered a near fatal blow. Iraq is a costly and dangerous diversion from the struggle against Islamic extremism that is now being fueled by the Iraqi quagmire.
Then there is the sleaze factor, the Bush administration is riddled with criminal conduct. New York Times reporter Judith Miller has revealed that Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was her source in the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame by the Bush administration. How far up the White House ladder does this criminal investigation by federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald go?
Federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has summoned Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser to testify for a fourth time before the federal grand jury. Rove is under investigation for his part in “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame.
The two indictments against Rep.Tom DeLay is another blow to the now floundering Republican Party which ran in the 2000 election on the premise that they would restore honor and integrity back to Washington DC after eight years of hedonism under the Clinton administration.
The obvious hypocrisy by the Republicans has revealed once again that the two-party cartel is a detriment to individual freedom and constitutional law. The “realpolitik” that inundates the American political system has presented itself as a diabolical anti-liberty scourge that is destroying like a cancer the honorable democratic principles that the United States was founded upon.
Hurricane Katrina was another blow for the Bush administration; the bumbling of the aftermath of Katrina by all levels of government illuminated the reality that in a time of a “national emergency” the federal government tends to demand from the States a surrender of their 10th Amendment rights. The struggle between States rights and the federal government in the Katrina disaster resulted in days of inadequate manpower being deployed in the Gulf State region devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The continued onslaught against the Posse Comitatus Act, that bans the use of federal military personnel on American soil as a police force by the Bush administration is a testament to the establishment’s contempt for all constitutional restraints that the US constitution provides to protect citizens against governmental abuses.
Gone is any notion within the Republican Party of true conservative virtues, virtues which once demanded policies in limited government and States rights only to be replaced by a perverse idealism by political whores who’s only interest is to obtain power and wield it as an instrument for their utopian vision in violently creating a “democracy” in a part of the world which sees the modern Anglo-American version of “democracy” as decadent and corrupt.
It is a mind numbing reality when the President of the United States sends Americans to kill and die in a useless conflict because President Bush gets his instructions to wage war directly from God, and to prepare for the deployment of military forces on American soil because of a strain of Bird Flu.
More than just New Orleans went underwater after hurricane Katrina, so did the last remaining legal constitutional restraints that prevents the federal government from using the military on American soil. Under the guise of security from whatever “national emergency,” the prevailing policy by the authoritarians in Washington DC is the classical fascist one.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”