Things that will scare you

Via Americablog, the good news is that the ACLU is on it, with full-page ads running this week in the New York Times urging full congressional investigation of the lies and law-breaking by the Bush administration.

The two points to keep in mind--and to include in every discussion of Bush's constitutional transgressions--are these:

• Preserving our constitutional form of government, and its protections for its citizens, is a concern that absolutely trumps partisan politics.


• Our constitutional system is built on checks and balances: Congress has a right and duty to step in when the Executive branch violates the law.

These are truths upon which the republic is founded. It would intolerably cheapen them to call them "talking points." They are not matters of political calculation; they cannot be traded away for expediency's sake. They are principles for which, once upon a time, men pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

Quite a distance we've traveled, from there to an administration of chickenhawks, inside traders and war profiteers, and barefaced liars, isn't it?

Molly Ivins often tells a story about two boys who unexpectedly find themselves eyeball to eyeball with a chicken snake. (You can read a full version of it here, although it's much better if you can manage to hear Molly tell it herself.) The punch line of the story is that there are some things that--even though they won't hurt you--will nevertheless scare you so bad you'll hurt yourself.

Robert Steinbeck catalogues the harm that fear--with a generously assist from Bush, Rove, Cheney, and the rest--has caused us to bring upon ourselves:

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution - and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it - I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Never would I have expected this nation - which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty - would cower behind anyone just for promising to "protect us."

Indeed, this is probably a good time to remember the observation Harold Meyerson made last spring: He was reviewing claims to likeness between the still-exalted-by-the-right Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush--claims of which the latter and his followers are fond--and listed the ways in which they just don't hold water. And yet, if one really wants to find Bush's equal in American history, Meyerson says he's right there in plain sight:

There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.

May 2006 be the year that Americans--and their elected representatives--realize where the worst threat to the republic resides.