Washington D.C./Crawford, Texas--Just as Hitler was one of the few artists to use the world as his canvas (think of WWII as a Futurist form of performance art), Bush has taken America down a road that only a genuine product of America could conceive or imagine. Bush isn't from Russia, or Indonesia--he's ours. We made him. The crucial-step was allowing him to cross the American Rubicon, and stealing the elections in 2000 and 2004. Where was the opposition? It wasn't coming from the Democrats, and it still isn't in any substantial sense.
Remember January 20, 2001? There was a riot at the inaugural ceremonies (something that didn't even happen at Lincoln's second inauguration during the American Civil War). Most Americans never even heard of this riot until the summer of 2003 when Michael Moore included footage of it in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
When things like that happen, you know that there's been a takeover of some kind. From the first-days when the Bush-Cheney administration classified their energy policy meetings, to the lies in the run-up to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the lies about WMDs in Iraq, the U.S. Attorney firings, the pathetic response to Katrina that continues into today, the favoring of oil interests over national interests, the shielding of Saudi Arabia from serious 9/11 investigations, the coddling of other supporters of terrorism like the regime in Pakistan, misuse of public funds for political allies, unwarranted classification of the internal record, the war-profiteering in Iraq, rigged-elections, violent ejections of activists from speaking engagements by shadowy "security" posing as Secret Service agents--it all has the ring of a putsch to it.
The Democrats--knowing the end of American Empire is near--somehow thought they could control the Bush administration, that they would engage in fair play. That was their biggest mistake, and over time, many of them have been ensnared into the web of criminality spun by Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush. But there have been dividends to the public. Because of the narrowness of their agenda, they've done what many of us on the left have tried for a very long-time to accomplish: they've exposed most of the mechanisms of control and manipulation used by established power in this country. Thank you! Also, most of Latin America has gone socialist and consolidated relations with one another, out of our sphere-of-influence, thanks to the war on terror. Thank you again, it was overdue.
One part of their plan was brilliant: do things so criminal and outrageous that the opposition will be paralyzed when they realize that the options for making the Bush administration accountable might wreck the system. Otherwise, that's it, they're still essentially the same bumbling criminals with delusions of adequacy they were back in 2001--particularly on September 11, 2001 when they failed to prevent the attacks of that day. If they ever thought they could run a government competently, they were as profoundly mistaken as the people who voted for them.
It's possible that Bush really took conservatism seriously by taking it to the extreme of its own logic. They say that romanticism inevitably leads to totalitarianism. What could be more romantic than a cowboy president who lives most of his time on a ranch? There were no laws on the frontier, and some of us miss that. So, we import that lawlessness to other countries so we can bring it all back to life. The problem is, there's always a price to be paid for romanticism. How many Indian chiefs predicted a violent end for America? It must have been many.
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