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The GOP and The Separation of Powers

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Matt Carmody

Maureen Dowd almost got it right in her excellent column "DeLay, Deny and Demagogue." Whereas she stated that, "The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of power" she is completely wrong.

This criminal administration believes in separating the people from their power to be informed about what actions government is taking in their name. It believes in separating the people from their powers of analytical thinking by completely controlling the subservient news media and manufacturing "news" items to be fed to the slavish audiences, some of whom cannot for a moment accept that their government would ever consider lying to them.

This is what comes from allowing criminals to label as conspiracy theories honest to God evidence concerning honest to God conspiracies in the murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Robert Kennedy, not to mention the attempted assassination of George Wallace, and the very convenient wounding, and removal from power for a period of time, of Ronald Reagan while George H. W. Bush waited in the wings just a heartbeat away from taking over the office.

It's easy to ensure that no one will question what happens when the very people who should be looking behind events trip over themselves to be the first ones on the television to state that there is no basis to the rumors that....... Fill in the blanks. No basis to the rumors that prisoners in Iraq were hidden from the Red Cross. No basis to the rumors that the commanding officer of the entire theater of operations knew that prisoners were being tortured at Abu Ghraib. No basis to the rumors that the secretary of defense knew that prisoners of war had died while undergoing interrogations by unidentified members of that "Other Government Agency" a nice euphemism for CIA. No basis to the rumors that contractors with ties to the current vice president are pillaging the US Treasury while said vice president snarls at members of the press who have the temerity to question his ethics.

If anyone in this country had been awake during the 1980s instead of becoming enthralled by the spectacle of a movie actor and his off-beat wife traipsing around Washington in designer clothes while homeless people were dying in the streets, they would have become aware that the news media had stopped asking questions and had begun to supply pabulum to the masses, pabulum just as poisonous to us as the powdered baby formula that Nestle was prohibited from selling in this country, but which it was able to export to millions of foreign babies through our State Department's foreign aid programs.

Pabulum that appeared in such rags as the New Republic, that bastion of neo-liberal bullshit, which endorsed the Contras while failing to question why it was OK for a member of the National Security Council to solicit contributions to the "Enterprise" when Congress, speaking for the American people, had cut off government funding for such adventures by enacting the Boland Amendment. People like Morton Kondracke making oh, so, intelligent musings on the propriety of one branch of government supporting actions which broke the law, both the spirit and the letter of the law. Actions, by the way, which proved that as far as they were concerned, to these members of the executive branch and their supporters, the will of the American people didn't amount to squat. Just look at what's been promulgated by this administration, an administration peopled with criminals from that previous administration. Laws that permit the agents of government to enter our houses and remove our belongings without having to tell us what they took or why they were there. Our medical records available for scrutiny and no one has to tell us they have been accessed. Our tastes in music, reading material, and travel preferences an open book, so to speak. What I am reading today could very well become a prohibited tract tomorrow. It is a matter of record that I have obtained the book if it was purchased over the internet and that information is stored somewhere just waiting for the day when the possession of such a book becomes a criminal act against the state.

What was once the fear of not fitting in on the playground has now been replaced with not fitting in with the general crowd. You know who they are. They're your neighbors who never bring in the flag even though there's a brutal nor'easter blowing it around and it is getting ripped; they're the guy in the SUV next to you at the light, the one with 15 American flags attached to his vehicle, all of them tattered and falling off their sticks; they're the millions of people with those annoying fucking yellow ribbons attached to the back of their cars. Something these people have forgotten is that those yellow ribbons came into use during the hostage crisis of 1979-81 when, it is rumored (with very strong circumstantial evidence to support it), George H.W. Bush and Bill " Mumbles" Casey engaged in secret meetings with the Iranian government to ensure that the hostages would not be released before the election of November 1980 when it was hoped that Reagan and Bush would be voted into the White House, thereby dragging out the amount of time that these people were kept in captivity for purely political reasons.

But hey, where these people are concerned, there are no other reasons. Politics is the raison d'etre. Forget humanitarianism, forget moral imperatives, forget what is best for this country and its people. Unless the cause of the Bush family and its party is to be advanced there is no reason to do anything.

Our electoral system is on a par with Guatemala. The IMF has issued warnings concerning the level of debt that this country is carrying (maybe that's why Wolfowitz was nominated for the post). The union movement in this country is worse than dead: the majority of unionized workers are now employed by some element of government and the right to strike is nothing but a vague memory. Hell, the history of the labor movement isn't even taught in school any more, and kids aren't learning in school that it's OK to question authority. God forbid!! Where's the seroquel? Medicate that child!

I must admit, I never liked Richard Nixon (surprise) even after he tried to rehabilitate himself as some eminence grise in foreign policy. This is, after all, the man who gave us Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George H. W. Bush, and through him, Karl Rove. He rewarded Gerald Ford for his treachery on the Warren Commission by appointing him vice president. Upon Nixon's resignation, Ford became president and he brought Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney into the Oval Office where they tried to convince Ford to veto the Freedom of Information Act. Cheney decided to go one better when he became vice president, just ignore requests for information or claim national security and smirk at those requesting the information.

Earl Warren, when asked when people would learn the secrets of the JFK assassination, replied, "Not in your lifetime." That's Cheney's attitude towards when the American people will receive the proper deference from their elected officials in the executive branch of government.

Yeah, they hate us for our freedoms, but "they" aren't al-Q'aida. They are the men running the GOP and their ancillary propaganda arms, the subservient, frothing at the mouth mainstream media. It's only a matter of time until Ann Coulter becomes Press Secretary.

Matt Carmody
Washingtonville, NY

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION