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From: Corvuswire
Date: 7/8/2006 10:56:04 AM
Subject: It's the damnedest thing I've ever, ever seen in my life.
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From: Corvuswire
Date: 7/8/2006 10:56:04 AM
Subject: It's the damnedest thing I've ever, ever seen in my life.
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My husband hates politics, but when I have a nightmare, he listens kindly to my ranting. Here’s my bad dream: President Bush suddenly dies of some inscrutable injury secretly inflicted by the next President Dick Cheney, who appoints a worthless investigative commission, goes scot-free, and uses his brief presidency to orchestrate the succession of his fave cohort-in-conspiracies-against-the-Constitution, David S. Addington.
The few times I have inflicted my politics upon my husband, he’s listened with resigned patience. But this time he gently suggested that I might consider dreaming about something more likely to happen than Vice-President Cheney overthrowing the government. I told him that of course I hoped he was right. “But in my dream, it wasn’t a violent overthrow, you know, some kind of revolution…. All Cheney had to do was stage a mysterious assassination, and bingo, he was the government.”
“That’s what I mean by highly unlikely. Can’t you find something else to fret about…?”
But I’m still worrying. Will I wake up tomorrow morning to hear the unthinkable, as I did when the Kennedys and King were assassinated, as I did when the twin towers went down? Will I wake up to the death of another American president? Not that I’m that crazy about President Bush, but I want him to be better informed, not dead.
Is it legal to dream that our nation’s VP might be a traitor, a murderer? Is it treasonous? Libelous? I do hope it’s OK to wonder, because I do….
It was Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post who got me started on all this, by reminding me (in his column) of the three little words that kept him (and me) from calling for President Bush’s impeachment: PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY.
Right after I read Mr. Robinson’s column, I happened to flip over to the New York Times Book Review, to read the following question from the diary of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya: “Were we seeing a crisis in Russian parliamentary democracy in the Putin era? No, we were witnessing its death.” (My emphasis)
Quite suddenly, I quit denying the very real possibility that America’s brief and beautiful moment in the sun as a sincere attempt at a truly representative government could actually come to a shuddering halt, right here, right now, during our era, undermined by a Cheney/Addington presidency following the inexplicable death of George W. Bush….
Because Richard Cheney and David Addington, lifelong public servants, family men, talented hard workers, and clever strategists, are also feeling a bit cornered and desperate these days because their secretive machinations have finally irretrievably tangled them in their own web…..
Because no one would benefit more from an assassination than Cheney and Addington….
Because no one has done more to undermine the Constitution than Cheney and Addington, however pure their intentions in amassing great power to “save America” (their way)….
Because no one has so much to answer for, or so many wolves at their door, than Cheney and Addington….
I doubt not that Cheney and Addington are deeply unsatisfied with their measly vast powers. I’m confident that they feel increasingly marginalized by their own party, and threatened by mounting opposition from Congress, the State Department, the CIA, not a few top military brass, and even by President Bush, who recently reversed several of Cheney’s war-on-terrorism policies, who apparently is drawing back from Cheney’s influence, and who may even now be feeling the first tingles of fear in Cheney’s presence….
Am I crazy even to wonder whether Cheney and Addington would actually consider using their old military or CIA contacts to quietly engineer an insider-job presidential assassination? Apparently, neither of these men has had a single qualm about wasting hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East to further their purposes; what difference would one more life make, when you've spent your whole life pursuing executive power and only one man stands in your way? I admit I haven't had any real experience with power politics…but I've read Shakespeare….
Cheney has deflected negative attention in the past by creating diversions. If Congress calls Cheney’s bluff regarding non-compliance with the NARA executive order (and just why is it that Bush hasn’t stepped forward to interfere with this, hmmmm…?) or if the Justice Department crowds Cheney with BAE slush fund allegations, a presidential assassination might prove as effective and timely a diversion as a war with Iran (Cheney's other all-purpose fall-back diversion.)
Here’s a great comment recently posted by “razzi” in response to an internet article about Cheney:
“Let's have no game-playing with a man this dangerous who's just a heartbeat away from the presidency. Hearings on his abuse of authority and war crimes need to begin immediately and need to persist for the remainder of his term so that in the event Bush is incapacitated, the case for instant impeachment will already have been built. The evidence needed for an eventual war crimes trial after his term is over also needs to be built. This is a…man who needs to be investigated, prosecuted, and punished for what he is doing to the republic.”
After my dream, I googled “David Addington” to find a quantity of expensive, high-end investigative reporting (see especially Chitra Ragavan's 5/21/06 article in U.S. News & World Report) about how directly Cheney and Addington have been involved on every unconstitutional effort the Bush administration has pushed forward in its drive to amass executive power
I still hope that I’m delusional and conspiracy-theory-crazed, that my nightmare about all this assassination skullduggery is the sheerest nonsense and that I need to be taken off to the funny farm. I have my fingers crossed that Bush and Cheney and Addington will soon be politely deposed by Fred Thompson, or defanged to mere bumbler and bungler status by our blessed checks and balances, which will keep them from further running amuck and taking our beloved-if-benighted country down with them.
I’m writing, in fact, primarily in hopes that so many other people will begin openly discussing the idea of an assassination-plot-possibility, that anything of the kind will hastily and blessedly be abandoned.
Then, at least, if and when Cheney or Addington or Bush are brought low for doing desperate dark deeds, it will not be after another assassination, or after the death of American democracy.
Please send comments to njcpace@gmail.com.
President Bush stumbles over the nuances of that thorny word “ideology,” just as he struggles to understand the concept of “democracy.” Together with Humpty Dumpty, he wishes words could mean just what he chooses them to mean, neither more nor less….
Unfortunately, the word “ideology,” a “bad” word he once thought applicable only to evil, foreigner-type “isms” such as Communism, terrorism, extremism, Islamism, and facism, turns out to be nothing more than: “an organized collection of ideas…a comprehensive vision…a way of looking at things” (Wikipedia)— a definition far friendlier than Mr. Bush first envisioned, equally applicable to the many isms he rather approves of, such as Americanism, free market capitalism, Methodism, and certainly the organized collections of ideas constituting “democracy” or “freedom.”
Since all political thinking seems to fall under various ideologies, it would seem unwise to let ourselves become so caught up within our own peculiar favorite ideological flavor/s that we withdraw our support for human life anywhere in the world in the name of that ideology—whether it be democracy, freedom, liberty, utopianism, capitalism, nationalism, Islamism, fundamentalism, Zionism, Protestantism, patriotism, conservatism, liberalism…. After all, that's how all the bad guys in history justified their scummy actions, by insisting that their chosen ideologies were “righter” than others.
The thing is, one can go so far wrong searching for moral consistency within an ism, because isms and other ideologies always shut out some of the people some of the time, making them less than fully human, less than deserving of humanitarian concern—certainly all those who think differently than “we” do, who aren’t like “us” because “they” don’t think believe as “we” do, etc. Inevitably “we” come to oppose “them,” choosing “us” over “them.”
Ideologies can be a useful, interesting, creative way to organize one's thinking, but when taken too seriously–as “the truth”–they are very polarizing.
It is neither possible to decide how rightly to treat other human beings by looking to ideologies and isms for one’s standards, nor safe, nor ethical, to decide on an ideological basis whether to support or reject that highest and most sacred value, the sanctity of human life.
“Treat all others as you would wish they would treat you” remains the most widely-accepted, time-honored, one-and-only gold-standard rule of ethical conduct ever conceived; it is found in every world religion and every moral, ethical, and justice code everywhere in the world, superseding all ideologies and isms, and consistently useful in every ethical or moral decision.
Ideologues of every stripe, every day, everywhere in the world, try to manipulate people into voting, killing, and even dying for whatever admirable-sounding preferred ideology their audience is familiar with, justifying their most horrific recommendations—invasions, occupations, terror, bombing, napalming, maiming, stealing, starvation, murder, neglect, torture, indoctrination, abuse, imprisonment, exploitation, coercion, manipulation—always in the name of some heart-stirring and noble-sounding aspect of a popular ideology.
Whenever demagogues (“those who gain political power by appealing to popular prejudices, fears, and expectations, typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda”—Wikipedia) anywhere in the world attempt to persuade fellow-citizens to act unsupportively toward others, they always cover their dark deeds with a soft, cozy, comfortable cloak of locally-popular ideologies. (H. L. Mencken called a demagogue “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”)
Whenever anyone in any country has done something injurious to any other, or left undone what could have helped another, no matter who we were, no matter in the name of what ideology we acted, no matter how noble we thought our actions, we were wrong. And whenever we chose to support human life, we were acting aright.
Politics is as simple—and as complicated—as that.
We either contribute to another’s fear, or we offer them loving support. We either perceive their anger and wrong-headedness as an anguished cry for help, or we attack and punish them. We reject them, or we contribute to their acceptance and well-being. We light a candle or leave them in darkness. We offer them war or contribute to their peace. We lift them up or we abandon them. We share their dreams or take them away. We help them or we hurt them.
We choose love over fear, or we quibble amongst ideologies to gain power, and end up losing shared life itself on our tiny blue planet.
Please send questions and comments to njcpace@gmail.com