Achtung: Bush and Cheney are not through. We are inching closer to fascism even while we are looking forward to the apparent end of the boy-king’s reign. Hyperbole?
Here are two factors to consider in addition to the recent retroactive immunity congress granted telecom companies for breaking the law, one of which has flown under the radar quite successfully:
1) A federal court yesterday ruled that Bush can, after all, pick up whoever he wants (and yes, that includes you) and detain them without charge:
Jonathan L. Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri [the "enemy combatant" in question] with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, called the Fourth Circuit’s decision deeply disturbing.
“This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country–citizen or legal resident –and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial,” Mr. Hafetz said.
By all means, go back and read that quotation again.
How exactly does that differ from the powers of a dictator or king? That is the state of affairs in the United States, right now. Feel safer?
The ruling was quite complex in its definition of who qualifies to be called an "enemy combatant." So there’s that ray of hope. And the Supreme Court could eventually reverse this travesty. But until that (possibly) occurs, you and I do not live in the America we grew up in.
2) David Neiwert points out a Kafkaesque affair that, for the pessimistic among us (and when has pessimism proven anything besides realism in the Bush era?), points to a practice run for evils to come. It seems to have barely registered on anyone’s scale. It sounds so arcane and harmless. Neiwert writes:
"It seems there was good reason to be concerned about the unusual handling of the cases of illegal immigrants caught up in last month’s massive raids at Postville, Iowa — where, as we noted at the time, immigrants not only were treated like cattle, the prosecutors engaged in questionable tactics as they processed these cases: deploying the unusual tactic of threatening the immigrants with felony identity-theft charges and sending them to prison when they either plead guilty or were quickly found guilty."
…
"As Camayd-Freixas [a court interpreter called in to help] makes clear, these workers were charged improperly with a crime of which they were innocent as the means of forcing them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, for which they then accepted five-month prison sentence."
…
"It’s perhaps worth remembering that incipient police states always target the most vulnerable members of society when they start out. And in today’s America, there are no people more vulnerable than those millions of workers here, for a human universe of reasons, illegally. That’s not to say we are in an incipient police state, but the warnings are unmistakable — especially in tandem with the Bush administration’s massive acquisition of previously unimagined executive-branch powers — and should not be dismissed blithely."
For fun and profit, it’s also worth examining a subject Naomi Wolf covers in great detail, the steps toward fascism. How many can you check off on your bingo card?
All I can say is, we must pray for Jan. 20, 2009 to arrive with a President who is not McCain, and then, perhaps, we can climb down off this terrifying ledge. It’s a long time till then in our current fix.
Here’s Wolf’s list:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create a gulag.
3. Develop a thug caste.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Dissent equals treason.
10. Suspend the rule of law.
