Wednesday, May 03, 2006

A little noted victim of Bush's tyranny: the individual conscience

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Among Bush's many crimes is one that few have written about. Bush has required of our soldiers that they violate their own consciences. And, at the end of the day, it is either a strong individual or a hopeless kiss up who can say that they served Bush in Iraq without violating or burying forever their own moral code. On the home front, support for Bush on any issue has now become a Faustian bargain. At stake is your very soul, or, less theologically, the individual conscience. This is one of the defining characteristics of dictatorship.
George W. Bush: An American Hitler

In George W. Bush's petty, pathetic, partisan world, laws he doesn't agree with don't have to be obeyed, Congressional actions that differ from his political agenda can be ignored and the Constitution of the United States is just a "goddamned piece of paper."

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe brought this point home Sunday when he revealed Bush has chosen to ignore more laws passed by Congress than any President in history, appending more than 750 laws with "signing statements" that say, in effect, that he doesn't give a damn what the law says because he will do whatever he pleases as a "wartime president" and "commander-in-chief."

Of course it doesn't matter to him that he became a "wartime president" because he lied out his ass to justify an illegal invasion on Iraq based on fake intelligence and a determined policy of ignoring facts that disproved his lies. ...
As I had written earlier: the Bush administration is no longer a "presidency", it's a criminal conspiracy. An increasing number of astute observers have emailed me advocating that Bush and his regime be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Make no mistake —the Bush regime has become a tyranny. The first victim of tyranny is the individual conscience.

As individuals act upon what they believe to be true, a people does so collectively. American hubris, self-importance, and self-appointed moral superiority are, like all falsehoods, the source of much evil throughout the world; and it is all the more egregious that those evils are manifested recently under the worst American presidency in our history.

Aggressive war, torture, duplicity, deliberate deceptions, the abrogation of the very instruments by which Americans instituted the rule of law —all are hallmarks of this Bush "administration", best described as a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law.
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another 30 to 40 years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. ...

Exporting the American Model

Of course, Bush KNOWS that making the middle east safe for Democracy is absolute, right wing crap! A party that has to resort to election theft in its own country is hardly in a position to propose "free elections" in another.

A ruthless dictator who abjures the Constitution in America is hardly in a position to demonize Saddam Hussein.

A lawless bigot in the White House is hardly in a position to talk about the blessings of democracy if they could but wipe out those mean ol' "turrsts" in Iraq!

As more and more is learned about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the torture flights and cold blooded murders of civilians by U.S. troops, I've concluded that the war against Iraq was not even about oil, though Bush's base —the robber barons of big oil —have profited exponentially!

There are no rational explanations for continuing to perpetrate the counter productive policies of bluster, aggressive war, war crimes, torture, and murder. Therefore, Bush's real reasons for attacking and waging an ongoing war crime in Iraq are personal. Bush, a known alumnus of the super secretive Illuminati society called Skull and Bones, apparently just wants to get his jollies by murdering folk by proxy. For Bush's base of oil oligarchs, it's about the plunder of oil; but for Bush it's about the psychotic perversions of an out of control maniac in the White House.

A related update:

Dear President Bush; about that "goddamned piece of paper."
    “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
Let us start out with the fact that the Constitution is actually written on parchment, not paper. A trivial point, I grant you, but one that reveals (along with your inability to correctly pronounce the word "nuclear") a shocking lack of education in a head of state.

But to get to the point, the Constitution is not the parchment itself, but the ideas written upon it; ideas which form the foundations of our nation, ideas which would carry equal weight if written on stone, glass, metal, or even paper. These ideas are the soul of the nation. They include the recognition that the people of this nation have certain rights, rights which the government does not have the authority to remove. These rights include freedom of speech, to say what we think about the nation at any and all times, to write that opinion down and share it however we choose to. These rights include the freedom to worship as we choose, free from coercion. These rights include the right to privacy, in our homes and businesses, free from government intrusions other than in very specific and well-defined circumstances.

Maybe those rights are inconvenient to you, as such rights are always inconvenient to tyrants, but you are not allowed the choice which rights you will abide by or not. That too is spelled out explicitly in the Constitution. ...


8 comments:

Jennie said...

Len, this post got me reminiscing to the Omega Glory episode (#54, first aired 3/1/68) from the original Star Trek. Although I am not a true Trekkie, I remember seeing this show when I was young, and the overtones of our US civilization stuck with me.

Wikipedia has a nice overview of this episode (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory). Their summary of the Omega Glory: Captain Kirk must battle a deadly virus and prevent a meaningless war.

Sound familiar? In 1968, the good and bad guys were different than today, but it can easily be changed to today's political climate within the US. Can you see the word "freedom" turn into a "worship word"? I can.

Close to the end of the show, Capt. Kirk finds what looks like a tattered copy of the US Constitution and says "Look at these three words written larger than all the rest, and with special pride never written before or since -- tall words, proudly saying "We the people" .. these words and the words that follow ... must apply to everyone or they mean nothing."

Is the Omega Glory predicting our future?

Brian said...

Len, did you ever post on theopinion.com? I'm trying to see if you're the same Len Hart who used to be my (probably imagined) nemesis on that site.

I suspect there can't be all that many people named "Len Hart" who are virulently anti-Bush, but if this isn't the same man I apologize for the interruption.

Unknown said...

I am, indeed. Unfortunately the Opinion is no longer with us; I stopped posting there long before 911 as I recall. And I am even more anti-Bush now than then. Bush has had more time to commit more crimes against humanity.

Unknown said...

Jen, I remember that episode vaguely. It was quite a while ago that I saw it. Star Trek was always one of my favorites. Thanks to Rodenberry, it always managed to work in some often inspired philosophical insights. Another series that likewise benefited from having been the creation of a talented writer was the original Twilight Zone. And your analogy is right on target.

Unknown said...

fuzzflash, you wrote: The Constitution is an idea. One day soon the spoiled, sadistic faux texan is gonna tumble to this. That day can't come soon enough.

And a profound idea it is too. In the meantime, we can only wonder why the Bush crime family not only hates America but, it would appear, our very founding.

Jennie said...

Yes, I enjoyed watching reruns of the Twilight Zone growing up, as well, along with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Something about mystery, intrique and the unknown that interests me, although it is more likely that many of those shows were hinting a parallel with current events and daily life that piqued my interests.

Although now, it seems the sci-fi and mystery of those shows are alive now. A bit scary.

Jay Allbritton said...

Good post.

You might enjoy Doug Thompson's take:

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8548.shtml

He's the one who wrote the story about Bush's "GD piece of paper" comment.

Unknown said...

thanks for the link, Station Agent. Indeed, I credited Doug and, on another forum, I defended his credibility. Of course Bush said what Doug said he said. It's consistent with Bush's Neo-Strassian Weltanschaunng...which I am sure Bush cannot pronounce. But he has one whether he knows it or not.