Monday, January 02, 2006

2005 After-party: The Sobering Reality

Chris Floyd has a profound, moving question for we citizens of the Republic:

Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic
Wednesday, 28 December 2005


So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?

There is no third way here, no other option, no wiggle room, no ambiguity. The much-belated exposure of George W. Bush's warrantless spy program has forced the Bush-Cheney Regime to openly declare what they have long implied -- and enacted -- in secret: that the president is above the law, a military autocrat with unlimited powers, beyond the restraint or supervision of any other institution or branch of government.
Outed as rank deceivers, perverters of the law and rapists of the Constitution, the Bush gang has decided that their best defense -- their only defense, really -- is a belligerent offense. "Yeah, we broke the law," they now say; "so what? We'll break it again whenever we want to, because law don't stick to our Big Boss Man. What are you going to do about it, chump?"

That is the essence, the substance and pretty much the style of the entire Bushist response to the domestic spying scandal. They are scarcely bothering to gussy it up with the usual rhetorical circumlocutions. The attack is being led by the fat, sneering coward, Dick Cheney, who has crawled out of his luxurious hidey-holes to re-animate the rotting husk of Richard Nixon and send it tottering back onto the national stage. Through the facade of Cheney's pig-squint and peevish snarl, we can see the long-dead Nixonian visage, his grave-green, worm-filled jowls muttering once more the lunatic mantra he brought to the Oval Office: "If the president does it, it can't be illegal." This is what we've come to, this is American leadership today: ugly, stupid men mouthing the witless drivel of failed, dead, discredited, would-be petty tyrants.


Well worth reading in its entirety, it sends a sobering message in the aftermath of what historians will someday view as one of the worst years in American history.

Two roads, Robert Frost once wrote. . .

As it becomes increasingly, frighteningly clearer that we simply must choose the path that "makes all the difference" the only place my opinion really differs from Floyd in his eloquence regards what he calls "the Establishment."

Watching the news and then reading its shadow, news presented from the blogosphere, it's obvious the Establishment is still backing the Bush pony. Always was. Perhaps always will be. The only group potentially able to turn the tide is us -- the teeming masses. Given the seemingly laissez-faire public response to continued violations of law by this administration, it seems we're perpetually prone, when given the choice between law and order, to foolishly pick "order." And then blindly follow any and all that are given to us.

But Floyd is right; the time is now. It won't come again -- unless it returns too late to matter.

Our government is now known to be supporting Uzbekistan's preferred means of extracting "intelligence" -- through the boiling alive of individuals and subsequent torture of their relatives. Many of which America willingly extradited to them, according to the documents of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray

Wiretapping looks like a Busby Berkeley bathing beauty movie sequence in comparison.

It's past time to speak against these atrocities. Otherwise, we allow them to speak for us. To represent us. To define us. They will become us.
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