Which Way?
It is no exaggeration to say that America is at a crossroads.
We've been led to this dividing point by President Bush, who ironically used to call himself "a uniter, not a divider" before the falseness of that claim became so glaringly apparent. It was one of the first of many false claims made by this utterly unprincipled president.
No other administration has dared exceed its moral and constitutional authority to the extent that the Bush administration has — not Nixon's during Watergate, and not even Reagan's during Iran/Contra. Nothing in our history even comes close to this:
Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war...on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.
There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.
America under the Bush administration is not a dictatorship. But we are at a crossroads, and one of the roads before us leads straight to that destination. If that is where we do end up, it will not be the actions of the Bush cabal that takes us there. You and I will take us there:
The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form.
It's our choice. And in fact, millions of Americans already heartily support this president and his government by executive fiat.
Who says it can't happen here?
