This Week in Democracy

I was going to collect a nice fat set of links for you that covers this most miserable week in American Democracy–the most miserable in my lifetime, which includes Vietnam riots and Nepalm, by the way. I was going to edit one big post that covers:

• White House clearly lied about Jack Abramoff’s contact and influence. “Four contacts” was really over four hundred, in emails, meetings, and visits. Another story concludes, via some of those emails, that Abramoff, through Rove and the pretentiously-pious Ralph Reed, killed the nomination of an Interior Department official, Angela Williams, who would have directly overseen one of Abramoff’s clients. That, in and of itself, should warrant a special prosecutor for Rove at least. But it won’t. Accountability goes out the window.
  

• White House pushed through its torture provisions by painting anyone opposed to it as a friend of the terrorists. Yes, even the wise old Speaker of the House charged that opponents of the GOP provisions were the equivalent of Communists of the 50s. A few democrats caved, but not many, yet the bill passed. Human Rights go out the window.
  

• White House pushed through its unconstitutional Geneva convention-defying powers, which gives Bush the power to call anyone he wants an “enemy combatant” and detain them as long as he wants, without that person ever knowing the charges, being able to get a fair hearing, or even see the evidence against him. Eight hundred years of Law goes out the window.

• Oh, and Congress passed a Half Trillion dollar military budget too, at a time when perhaps tens of billions are still unaccounted for, where Halliburton is guilty of ripping off the American taxpayers, nearly everyone but Bush thinks Rumsfeld should resign or be fired. And yet nothing happens. Fiscal responsibility goes out the window.

I was going to document all that for you, this great airplane of ours falling, diving down from on high, and everything we need to keep it flying is being thrown out the window.

But I decided not to. By this point, you are either aware of what’s going on, or you just don’t care.

So for all the people who bury their heads in People magazine (and lately, even Newsweek — see the “special” retarded US edition at right vs. the rest of the world) and have your nose up Paris Hilton’s ass as a way to improve the smell of the world, you need to understand this one point, if nothing else:

Your freedoms are being taken away, wholesale. And if you’re content to live your life being a slave, as long as you have your People magazine to keep your company, then just keep on doing nothing.

If you care about your freedoms, and those of your children and their children, if you care about living in anything close to a Democracy, which allows you the freedom to choose to read People magazine and the right to a fair trial if you’re accused, then this may be your last chance to do something about it.

You need to choose carefully, when (not if) you vote this fall. You need to show them that you will vote them out ot office. And for now, we all need to show the Republicans (who may be worse than Democrats only in the degree of sleaze and incompetence) that they will be sent home on their asses this November and, for some, sent to jail come next year. If the Democrats fuck up their shot, then we’ll kick them out too and, if appropriate, lock them up alongside their old friends. But right now, the direction has got to change or that plane will hit the ground.

This isn’t about party loyalty anymore. It’s about taking back control of our lives, our destiny, and not squandering the gift we were given by being born in or allowed to come to the USA. This is not business as usual anymore.