(This blog has not appeared for several days because my 9-month-old Dell computer crashed Saturday, and I am just barely back up, with a number of things still to be fixed. I am very unhappy with Dell, and warn people thinking of buying a Dell to think again.)
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Coup d’Etat Trial Balloon. Newsweek magazine raised a furor in reporting a tentative plan by the Bush Administration to remain in power past its constitutional term by 'postponing' elections in the event of a "terrorist attack" on the day of or in the days (weeks?) before the regularly scheduled November election. Fortunately, the Federal Government does not control elections, even for Federal offices, however – thank you, federalism! – so this apparent attempt to stay in office despite a possible rejection by the voters will be hard to carry off.
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It takes very little imagination to see this as a means by which the Bush cabal could seize perpetual power.
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What is to keep Bush operatives from themselves instigating a "terrorist" attack to stay in power in the face of a likely rejection at the polls?
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Remember Watergate? It was only clumsy incompetence that kept the Republicans from getting away with a very serious violation of election laws at that time. The present crew may think themselves much smarter, as to be able to stage a "terrorist" attack and get away with it — even if it should be discovered and exposed by some media — even as other media refuse, or pretend to refuse, to believe any such attack could have occurred.
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After all, (a) the Bush invasion of Iraq has gladly killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds and hundreds of Americans (with more killed every day) and (b) the original justification for a first-strike war against Iraq has been shown with certitude to have been bullcrap, but an appalling portion of the general population has continued to pretend that war was justified anyway, by the latter-day rationalizations put forward about "liberating" Iraq and democratizing the Arab world. The cynical lies that the Bush Administration has piled six feet high (the same measure as the graves they have dug for over 850 young Americans) have met with eager public willingness to embrace nonsense, bad faith, and deception out of misguided "loyalty" or "patriotism".
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What level of proof of a "terrorist" attack actually carried out by Radical Rightwing Republicans would suffice to win the yahoos of the South and Bible Belt over to accepting that the Bush Administration is a criminal conspiracy that has no respect whatsoever for the Constitution nor any of our most fundamental institutions or principles? How many scores of millions will rush to assume that any asserted "terrorist" attack is precisely that, and reject as "conspiracy theory nonsense" any revelation that Bushites killed Americans to stay in office?
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How many times could a Bushite paramilitary cell carry out "terrorist" attacks, with the connivance or willful blindness of the "intelligence" services who regard the Radical Right as the true "Amuricans" and Democrats as enemies of the Nation? And what if the journalists who investigate the Bush Administration’s role in "terrorist" attacks become themselves "victims of terror"?
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Are we really secure in the stability of our institutions and the dedication of our protectors to the principle that every election affords the people a chance at bloodless revolution? Or are there in fact a very significant number of people in government, the intelligence services, and the military who believe that "security" requires that elections be "suspended", the Constitution itself be "suspended", and "freedom" be reined in to defend "freedom"?
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The United States is getting old, as societies go, and retrograde forces are everywhere evident. Many, many countries have seen militaries intervene to 'postpone', 'suspend', or simply void popular elections, with the excuse that the times are too dangerous to permit a change of government in the midst of crisis.
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The pretense behind the present trial balloon (which trial balloon should warn everyone that a coup d’etat is looming) is that the fact that a primary election in New York State on 9/11 itself was postponed without harm to that state’s democracy proves that it would be prudent and reasonable to 'postpone' a national election if a "terrorist" incident occurred in some unspecified period before the November election. But a primary is not a general election. It puts no one into office — and, more to the point, removes no one from office. New York’s general election went ahead on schedule.
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Moreover, calls by rightwingers to have Rudolph Giuliani remain in office as mayor of New York past his term because of the ‘emergency’ were, fortunately for this Republic, rejected, and Giuliani left office on time — in part because the incoming mayor, pushy billionaire Michael Bloomberg, would not permit him even to try to extend his term. If New York City, which suffered some 2,800 dead in September 2001, could proceed with its general election that November and stick to preset term limits to oust a 'hero' mayor despite vast devastation, surely no "terrorist" attack could be so grave as to require this entire, immense Nation to abolish ("suspend") democracy.
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Mayor of a city, even the Nation’s greatest and most powerful city, does not begin to compare with President of the United States. There is no New York Army to close down polling places and keep an elected official in office after his term has expired. The stakes are nowhere near as high locally as nationally, so the rationalizations for drastic action are nowhere near as compelling.
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I do not believe that the people of this country have the guts to stop a Bushite coup d’etat. Americans today are the greatest agglomeration of cowards in the history of great powers, as can plainly be seen in the gross overreaction to "terrorism" in Boston and New York City’s preparations for the major parties' conventions, and in the effective shutdown of Washington, DC to tourists — that is, to the people. The people’s palace, the White House, has been closed to the people. Pennsylvania Avenue, formerly the busiest thorofare in the Nation’s administrative center, is being torn up and made into a war-zone wasteland — all out of hugely exaggerated fear of "terrorism". (Washington is only the administrative center of this country. New York is the Nation’s actual capital. The New Year doesn’t start until the ball drops in Times Square.)
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No country has ever, for very long, preferred liberty to security. Despite generations of inculcation in the values of democracy and brave words in our national culture about the indispensability of "freedom", a very large proportion of Americans today are not just consenting to the erosion of their freedom but are actually begging government to take away ever more freedom to make them "safe".
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The grave is safe. No one can hurt you there. Freedom entails risk. Living entails risk. All in all, I prefer those risks to the safety of a national grave.
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The Republicans, under the influence of "neo-conservatives" (who aren’t conservatives at all, because the values they espouse are entirely alien to our tradition), have embarked upon "permanent war" against a billion Moslems worldwide, and are using the "danger" they themselves have created to justify ever tighter restrictions on Americans' traditional liberties.
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Cowed by alarmist rhetoric, perhaps 150 million Americans are demanding that government "protect" us by "suspending" what we used to think of as "unalienable rights". It is not possible to cow the brave. It is the easiest thing in the world, however, to cow cowards.
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This is NOT "the home of the brave", and if Republicans mount a coup d’etat, I am not at all sure this generation of Americans will have anything like the guts and integrity of the first generation of Americans — the truly “Greatest Generation”: the generation of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Revere, the Adamses, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale and the rest — that rose against tyranny and pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" in a struggle to the death for liberty.
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I worry today not about our “security” but about the safety of our National soul.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:27 AM