Soapbox

“September 11th changed everything” the president is fond of saying. Apparently this is not just hyperbole to George Bush- he thinks that it has even changed the Constitution.

Sorry, Mr. President: it hasn’t. And it’s a darn good thing for you, too.

In April of last year, on the campaign stump, the president twice went out of his way to assure the American people that all surveillance done under the Patriot Act “has to have a court order” and a warrant. In other words, he lied.

He didn’t mis-speak. He didn’t make a mistake; he wasn’t misled. He lied.

We now know that the president of the United States had been trapping e-mail messages, downloading laptops, inserting viruses and listening in on the business of American citizens without a warrant and without having to let anyone know what he was doing at least since September 11th 2001, if not from day one of his presidency. There was no reason for this lie. George Bush was not being questioned on this subject, he just strayed from his canned speech and took an extra moment to lie to America.

Now I happen to believe that this was not the first bold-faced lie he has told. I don’t even think it was the 10th or 20th public lie. In all those areas, though, Bush adamantly objects to the “L” word and resorts to the tired old line, “Mistakes were made.”

You know what? OK. Let’s say he didn’t lie about being involved in exposing a CIA operative. Sure. Let’s say he didn’t lie about the intelligence rationale used to start a war. Say he hasn’t lied about how many Iraqi batallions are ready for combat, about where the economic benefit of his tax cuts will fall, about a deliberate effort to supress democratic votes or where the permission to torture prisoners came from. Let’s say he didn’t lie about any of the dozens of things that I and many other believe he did lie about. Say he was mistaken, misled, quoted out of context: whatever. Go ahead. It doesn’t matter.

He lied to America in Buffalo New York when he said that all hunting down of terrorists was being done with proper warrants and authority. And no amount of name-calling, of labeling progressives “Christmas-haters” who are “soft on terrorism” or threatening that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if the President doesn’t spy on the Quakers, Cindy Sheehan, the Democratic Leadership Council or whomever he has been spying on, will change that.

So what do you do when the President breaks the law, lies about breaking the law and says “How dare you question my authority to do whaever I deem necessary?” The first step is for democrats in Congress to realize this is the issue and now is the time to stand up and say “No more!” No more hacking computers and stealing votes! No more propaganda, no more government giveaways to the rich while the poor go begging, no more raping the environment so oil executives can buy another villa in France. No more terrorizing and insulting and manipulating and spying on the American people to get what you want but most of all, no more lies damnit! No more lies!

Perhaps 2006 will be the year of the second American revolution, when the average men and women rise up and overthrow another King George. Who will be our George Washington ? John Conyers? Barbara Boxer? Something’s got to give, because I feel we are at a tipping point. There are too many angry, desperate people who aren’t going to shut up and go away.

What worries me is the form that revolution might take. President Bush has better hope that America does not believe that 9/11 negated the Constitution, despite his acting as if it did. He should hope and pray to whatever twisted, vengeful God he believes in that we still believe in the democratic process and rise up only in the voting booth. Scarily, thanks to 2 stolen elections, many people don’t believe that “Vote the bastards out!” is even possible anymore. In a time of war and economic fragility, the danger is that instead of a second revolution, we will have a second civil war, which would tear the country apart.

Given that possibility, impeachment seems the lesser of the evils.

I

There is a fundamental truth that George Bush and his dictator-apologists in the media hope the American people don’t see:

It’s not about the spying.

Because it’s not about the terrorists- it’s about the law. In America, the idea that no one is above the law is the absolute bedrock of American democracy. If the president doesn’t have to follow the law just like evryone else, it isn’t a law, and we have no democracy.

It is insulting in the extreme for the right-wing spin machine to flap their arms and shriek that if the president were to bother to get retro-active warrants, we would all be murdered in our beds. It is not an either/or situation: we can have surveillance of suspects AND civil liberties. But they don’t want you to know that.

President Bush was in fantasy-land yesterday when he snippily chastised the press and the democrats for caring about illegal white house wiretaps, saying that by breaking and discussing the story, they had alerted the terrorists to this vital program. Is he kidding? Hello! The terrorists already KNOW that the U.S. spies on suspected criminals! The only revelation is that Bush thinks the Constitution says that he can break laws at will. Maybe he should wander across the mall there in Washington and take another look at the thing.

The problem isn’t spying, it is that the government didn’t inform the courts AT ALL about whom they are spying on. If they don’t have to tell, what’s to stop them from listening in on anyone- congressional democrats, peace activists or whomever they consider to be their political enemy? (These days that would have to include anyone with 3 functioning brain cells!)

And if you don’t think a president would stoop to this sort of behavior, you need to read up on a little thing called “Watergate”.

President Bush says that it is actually a good thing that he has secretly been spying on American citizens without warrants for the last three years. Why?

~His crack White House legal team (the ones who said the Geneva Conventions were “Quaint” and that torture is the American way?) assure him it is OK

~Congress passed a bill giving him power to do “whatever is necessary” after 9/11,

~In bypassing the legals ways of wiretapping citizens in favor of illegality, he is keeping us all safer so he will bravely continue to do it, and finally,

~The only wrong committed was in the reporting of the act, not in the DOING of it.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the same ridiculous logic he uses in his speeches on Iraq!

**Bush claims congress “saw the same intelligence” and said he should invade Iraq (though of course they only saw part of the intelligence and actually actually said he could invade IF Iraq didn’t comply with weapons inspections, etc.).

**Knowing what he knows now, he would still do it (sacrifice over 2,000 American lives and an unknown number of Iraqis, make us the pariah of the world and damage our military and economic ability to respond to domestic crises) all again to advance the cause of freedom.

**Those nasty liberals are undermining the war effort and damaging morale of the troops by pointing out that the war is now a sucking quagmire that may never set us free (rather than considering that what undermines the war effort most is that it was a poorly planned boondoggle from the start!)

His supporters ( can anyone support this?) are all quick to point out that other presidents have taken “extreme measures” like this in times of war, for example the Alien and Sedition Acts and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Yes, and how does history look back on those actions? Do we say “Wow, it’s a darn good thing Roosevelt put all those American citizens in prison camps, too because he saved thousands of lives!” or is it a source of shame and embarassment for which later generations feel they should apologize? Surely our grandchildren will surely look back on this act and ask ” Were you all out of your minds?”

Remember this is a government who has spent untold dollars spying and infiltrating the Quakers because they think they may be a threat to national security! The Quakers, whose biggest weapon is oatmeal! Do you really trust these people, when given a blank check, to make a reasonable determination of who is a security threat and act judiciously? Or might they just cast a wide net and see what fish it hauls in? What if one of those mistakenly caught is YOU?

The neo-cons in power today say they’re all about the Founding Fathers, but they forget that one father of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, said “Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If we (or our elected representatives) don’t know what the government is doing, how can we consent? And if we don’t consent, then it seems clear that the government must be acting UNjustly.

Consider too, the statement “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety“.

Woah, what wild-eyed radical came up with THAT one, Mr. President? Michael Moore? Cindy Sheehan?

Nope. It was Ben Franklin.

And American will forget these words to her own peril and lasting shame.