Dissent Ad Naseum

I am watching an edition of "Front Line" on PBS concerning the abuse of presidential power in the Bush White House and it is making me nauseous. We are allowing this "president" to do things so outside the realm of constitutional sanity that the document, this very essence of what America is all about, is becoming dangerously irrelevant. We pretty much should have crowned Dubya "King George" when he stole the first election.

I really don't understand the politicians that presently occupy the halls of Congress. These men have been elected by the citizens of 50 separate yet united States to exercise their share of government oversight and power, and yet they allow what has amounted to an attack upon our constitution to go unanswered. Yes, there has been bluster and "investigations" and testimonies of the most outrageous conduct imaginable by White House officials, including the President and Vice-President. And yet no one has been held accountable.
Instead, everybody seems to be ignoring the cancer festering in our capital while we all focus on the upcoming elections, with the thought that we shall soon easily rid ourselves of this bafoon and replace him with a Democrat, who will miraculously repair all this damage and make it all go away.

Really.



Even as I type this post to my blog, there is a computer deep within the bowels of the NSA that is data-mining everything we Americans say on phones and type on computers. This computer is looking for catch words that hint at disagreement, disloyalty, and maybe, just maybe, the scratching of terrorist rats in the undergrowth of our society. Should this computer compile a collection of words from this post that the administration does not like, it is very possible that I could disappear without a trace, for presently there is no one in any branch of government with the balls to prevent such an atrocity from happening. This is a very real risk that you, I, and every American undertakes each time we get on our computer and dare to question our leadership. That is NOT the America we were born into, but it IS the America we shall hand our children if we do not stand up as a nation and put a stop to this bullshit once and for all.

We still have the ballot box, and hopefully, enough of the right people watching closely to insure that we are not subjected to another debacle that forced this idiot onto us as president. We are also capable of changing the entire status quo by getting rid of ALL the career parasites that now inhabit the Congress and replace them with citizen-legislators who can get us back to the form of government our forefathers gifted us with; a nation OF the people, FOR the people, but only possible with a government BY the people. We also need to return the appropriate power BACK to the people, such as ballot initiatives for Congressional pay raises, rather than this plunder that is presently going on. AND, for once, we need to divorce ourselves from this idea that we can only function under a two party system, and start giving our independents a chance to step up to the bat and prove their mettle. I personally have had enough of these two extremes tearing at each other rather than serving the people who elected them to do a job.

Perhaps you don't like me saying this, but we, the average American, has become detached and lazy, absolving ourselves of the responsibility necessary to maintain the freedoms we are taking for granted, which as a result are now under assault, with precious little protest from the heartland. Using the same tools that dictators throughout history have employed, namely FEAR and hyper-patriotic fervor, this government has scared you, middle America, into accepting draconian measures disguised as protection against terrorism, rather than the rape of our freedoms our forefathers paid dearly for in blood. You disgrace their memory when you blindly send off your sons and daughters to give their lives to ensure the profits of such monsters as Haliburton and Brown & Root.

This is my rant for today. I served my country once in the armed forces and proudly live with the knowledge that I helped win the REAL war, albeit a quiet one, that we fought against the Soviet Empire. Now I cringe in shame as my own country slowly becomes the new evil empire that the rest of the world has painted a target onto. This didn't have to happen. We didn't have to make the panicked and ill-advised choices we made which put us where we are now. However, we CAN make the right choices from here on out. Let's CONSIDER our choices carefully this time around and NOT fall victim to fear and bigotry. Let's act like Americans again.