As I was saying the other day, the only thing that makes me angrier than the Mark Foley scandal is the passage of legislation that allows President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their secret military tribunals to:
* Designate any individual, including American citizens, as an "enemy combatant."
* Hold that "enemy combatant" for an indefinite length of time without ever being asked to show _why_ they are holding him/her.
* Torture that "enemy combatant" as long as they can figure out a way to define what they are doing as not-torture.
You remember back in, oh, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004...you know, the early years...occasionally you'd be sitting around with your friends and you'd be talking about the state this country was in and you'd say, "Well, are we living under fascism yet? I dunno. We're still having elections, and we still have two parties in government, and so far nobody's making anyone wear yellow stars or swastikas, so...how would we know?"
This is how we know. We are no longer headed toward fascism. We have arrived.
Our legislature has just given the head of state the power to imprison anyone he designates as an enemy. He does not have to go through any form of legislative or judicial approval to do so, apart from a military tribunal that he himself convenes. Once someone is designated as an enemy combatant there is no legal way to challenge what the government does to that person.
What does this mean? It means that any one of us, at any time, can now be arrested, held indefinitely, and tortured until the authorities are tired of it. This would all be unconstitutional, of course; but remember that Bush's last court appointment was Alito, who believes in the "unitary executive," i.e., consolidating all federal power in the hands of the President, i.e., fascism. We tried to get the Senate to realize that confirming Alito was a very bad idea. They confirmed him anyway. Oh well.
I was talking to my sister about this last night. She thought it was funny that this law made me worry about my personal safety. I said, "I'm not worried that they're going to come for _me_. I'm not important enough. What I'm worried about is that this is going to make it possible for the Republican Party to intimidate its political opposition to the point where we have permanent one-party rule." But of course another effect of this law will be, won't it, that nobody wants to _become_ important enough to attract this kind of attention. Even people who don't have this law directly applied to them are going to be affected by it because it will make them less likely to do anything that will get them labeled as a dissenter. Because as we know, as soon as you criticize the current administration, people start saying that you're giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and that sounds a lot like "materially supporting hostilities against the United States," doesn't it?
Permanent one-party rule. That's what they have engineered. They have hackable voting machines, they have corrupt election officials in battleground states, they have a Republican-controlled legislature which may as well not exist because they function now purely as a rubber stamp, and they have built not a conservative majority on the Supreme Court but a majority of judges who believe more in the greater glory of Bush and the Republican Party than they do in the Constitution. That's not conservatism, it is revolution, and not in a good way. And now, they have legislation in place which allows them--should the Democrats ever manage to cause them enough trouble to make it necessary--to imprison and torture their opposition.
But of course the Democrats probably won't make that necessary. They are the minority party now, and they will be kept a minority party in the years to come, because of course if the minority party was completely obliterated people might realize what was really going on. Which is, let us all say it together now:
PERMANENT ONE-PARTY RULE.
I cannot tell you how angry it makes me that this thing passed with Democratic support. But even the Republican legislators--you have to ask yourself what is going through their minds. Is it that they got tired of doing actual work, and that they are grateful for the fact that they will no longer be called on to actually make decisions, but will simply have to file into the chamber once in a while for the ceremonial approval of Bush's latest decree? Are they glad to be able to give up the real work of lawmaking and surrender their function to their Supreme Leader? Because that's what appears to be happening. I mean really. Torture, detention without due process, suspending habeas corpus. Is there anything--ANYTHING--that Bush could send them that this Congress would _not_ pass? If Bush sends them a bill making Barney Speaker of the House, will it pass with unanimous Republican support?
Or maybe this is not about what they want. Maybe this is about what they feel is too dangerous to do. What if in fact Foley is _not_ the only Republican congressional representative who has left a paper trail detailing his sordid sexual crimes? What if this "party discipline" of theirs is already being enforced by a combination of blackmail and intimidation? After all, they've had basically unlimited power for years now; and we've seen how dirty this Congress has become. The gang in charge must know who's dirty and where to find the evidence. It would not surprise me at all to find out that blackmail is as much a part of the way this Congress operates as bribery.
Which really makes you look forward all the more to PERMANENT ONE PARTY RULE.
Yes, Plaidder, I hear you saying, calm down now. Nobody is arresting Democrats in the streets. Bush hasn't tried to amend the Constitution to allow himself a third term. We're still going to have elections in November. You're overreacting. Sure, this bill was bad, but it's not the end of the world. They're not _really_ going to put us all in camps.
Maybe not. Maybe they will never need to. This is, after all, not Star Trek; we cannot expect that fascism on our planet will be an exact replica of the Third Reich. They don't need state control of the media if corporate control of the media works just as well. They don't need to lock up, beat, and torture their political opponents if they can render those opponents permanently impotent. They don't need to pass out red crescent badges to Muslims and herd them into ghettoes when shipping them off to Guantanamo or to some other secret detention camp will serve just as well. There is no need to startle the populace by suspending the electoral process as long as you can manipulate it. And really, there's no need for them to start building death factories so that they can realize Ann Coulter's favorite fantasy by exterminating millions of "liberals." So far, vilifying them constantly in the media and emasculating their major political organization seems to be doing the trick. It will after all be easier to maintain their power as long as to most people, everything still _looks_ normal.
But not _that_ much easier, maybe. Look around at your fellow-Americans and ask yourself: if the Bush administration _did_ start interning his political opposition, what would happen? Would the courts stop it? Would Congress? Would the people? How? I don't see it. I think that by passing this law they have finally established that they can in fact get away with anything. Seriously. Look at what has happened with the torture issue. When the torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, when abuses at Guantanamo were exposed, when the secret prisons were exposed, when administration policies were challenged and rejected in the courts as illegal, did any of it stop? No. This administration was so determined to be able to torture and detain anyone it identifies in any way and for any length of time that they drafted this piece of shit and they got it through Congress with a short pause for some grandstanding by McCain and a few cosmetic changes which are nullified by the rest of the law. They have made torture legal. After that, hell, _anything_ can become legal. And when all "legal" means is "expedient," well, that's when you know that you are not living in a constitutional democracy any more.
And that's what it's like when you have PERMANENT ONE-PARTY RULE.
Also, just as a side note, once you do have permanent one-party rule, there is going to be all kinds of corruption, fiscal and sexual, in government because of course there's no oversight or accountability. So, you know, Republican congressional representatives can go around sexually molesting minors and the leadership will do nothing about it even after they find out that...oh. Wait. That's already happening.
I could be wrong. I hope I am. Maybe there will be a miracle in November and we will get the Congress back and some of these people will be brought to justice. But I'll tell you what: all of the Republican legislators who have been part of this government are tainted, complicit, corrupt, and dirty. None of them can afford to become the minority party and have all of this aired publicly. At the executive level it's worse. Bush and Cheney, if they ever do leave power, are in serious trouble. Their style of government may fly in America but it does not persuade anywhere else, and if some of the stuff that is still under wraps finally does come out and is documented, they could easily find themselves summoned to the Hague. A sitting POTUS, of course, would never answer such a summons. An ex-POTUS would be a different story. For the same reason, they cannot afford for the doors of Guantanamo to be finally thrown open. They simply cannot allow those stories to be told. Bush will be gone by 2008, everyone agrees on that. But the gang in power now absolutely _cannot_ allow power to be transferred to anyone not bound to protect them and their secrets. They will not do that until they are forced to do it. And I am afraid that we have reached the point where no election will ever force them to do it.
I don't like writing this. I don't like reading it; I don't like thinking this way. I hope I _am_ overreacting. But I look back over the history of all the things that I have hoped that I was wrong about, and I have almost always been right. And I am real tired of being right about this kind of thing.
The Foley scandal is providing a lot of us with some long-desired schadenfreude and entertaining us with the always-engrossing carnival of Republican corruption, cowardice, hypocrisy, and turpitude. It is possible that it will matter. It continues to amaze me how much more sex always matters to American voters than corruption, deception, war, torture, human dignity and human rights. But it is also allowing people to focus all their outrage on one sick bastard who has now left the political system, while the monstrous power of this administration continues to grow unchecked.
I remember when we first saw
the pictures from Abu Ghraib. A week later I remember writing
this:To go back to the image I ended with last time: after listening to the Abu Ghraib hearings, it seems to me like we are about waist-deep in the black river and sinking fast. We can turn around and wade to shore, or we can dive in once and for all. What we are not going to be able to do is stand there forever, up to our ankles in mud and slime, fighting the pull of the current. We have reached the point at which it will be decided. Either we get out, or we go down. In fact, of course, "we" were not allowed to make the decision.
They dove in and pulled the rest of us after them.
Ah well,
The Plaid Adder
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