Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake: "On Duty"

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http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/07/23/on-duty/#more-10488

On Duty
By: Christy Hardin Smith

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The radical nature of the Republican party must be understood in full context in order to comprehend the broad scope of their grab at power — and their wholesale rejection of the principles on which this nation was founded, in favor of whatever means is necessary to consolidate their hold on power, whatever the cost to the rest of the nation as a whole. Rick Perlstein’s seminal work on the Goldwater political insurgency is a great place to start in understanding this.

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This speaks volumes all by itself. The fact is that these actions are an outgrowth of a wholesale attempt to shift the foundations of government toward an imperial control by the privileged few, rather than a republic in which the laws and the people themselves are king.

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The lessons that Dick Cheney and George Bush took away from the Nixon Administration were not that overreach would get you in the end, or that adherence to the letter of the law was important. No, what they learned was that if you are going to consolidate your grip on power, you had to do it wholesale and demand that you not be held accountable — it’s the Iran-Contra message replicated across the whole of government. If you are going to break the law, then you have to first consolidate your control of the very means by which you might be caught and/or held responsible.

But this only works if we are willing to allow them to continue down this path without redress.

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What Harry Reid was able to do last week was begin to wedge a few “sure thing” support votes away from the Bush Administration through the time-tested means of public pressure and political threat of electoral reprisal next year. Which is exactly why the likes of Fred Hiatt and David Brooks are so very afraid, because suddenly the punditocracy has been proven so very, very wrong. “We, the people” have a say in our nation’s governance — do not ever let them tell you differently — and we have a duty to stand in the face of injustice.

Republicans are running as far and as fast as they can from the Bush Administration when they are back home in their districts. But back in DC, they are keeping up appearances and trying to be the docile rubber stamps that we have come to know and loathe, in order not to rile the financial backers that are still under Rove’s pudgy thumb. What hangs in the balance is the fate of the nation — and it is time that we all started to tip the scales. And I’d like to talk about some ways that we can do just that…

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