I was trying to stick to a Monty Python theme for blog titles today, but I need to abandon that.
I have been reading some of the coverage of the just released Bush memos ans well as perusing a few of them. We have much to be thankful for in that George W. Bush's administration was made up of incompetent party hacks.
For those memoranda laid the foundation for a dictatorship. The Bush Department of Justice claimed that Bush could, in essence, send the Army into the interior of the United States, arrest whomsoever that Bush wanted to be arrested and all without warrants, charges, arraignments or access to counsel. If George Bush had decided to arrest you or me, the entire Congress or the writers of any newspaper, there was fuck-all that could be done about it, other than violent resistance.
According to the fascists in the Bush Justice Department, the president had the power to override damn near every civil right accorded to Americans. He could sent the military to search your homes tap your phones, arrest you (and probably even summarily execute you) without any legal recourse whatsoever.
We have only to thank the sheer inability of the Bush Administration to do anything more complicated than organize a two-car parade for the fact that we still live in a free country. (More or less.)
LGBTurkey
1 minute ago
2 comments:
Right on. I was reading the NYT's article a little while ago and shuddering. It felt a little weird 6 and 7 years ago to suspect they MIGHT be trying this kind of crap- I felt like I was being looney and over reacting. But God help us all, they WERE trying to turn the country into a dictatorship. And as you point out, apparently it was only their incompetence that prevented them from succeeding.
I'm not so sure that Bush was as inept as you think. My feeling was that he was more lazy than inept. He liked being President, but didn't do a whole lot of Presidentin'. Imposing a dictatorship on America would have required more work from him, so he wasn't interested, no matter how much his underlings and Darth Cheney tried to push him in that direction.
- Badtux the Lazy-knowin' Penguin
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