December 24, 2004

Having Faith When Tyrants Fail
By James Preston Allen, Publisher  

You can fool some of the people all of the time.

—Abe Lincoln

But you can’t fool half of the people who voted against you the rest of the time.

—James Preston Allen

     The walls in the house of Bush have already begun to crack, even as the time grows near for his inauguration. Not that the flaws in his first term of office have been wholly ignored and gone unnoticed, but what we are about to see is the kind of ignoble demise of the arrogance of power not witnessed since Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. “Wishful thinking,” my skeptical friends will say, “wild fantasy,” the neocons will mutter– no, the tyranny of this Bush administration can not stand the light of truth and it will fall of its own accord.
     First, consider national opinion in general, which finds Bush with absolutely no post-election bounce. Quite the opposite. A Fox News’ (yes, Fox News!) Opinion Dynamics poll, conducted Dec. 14-15, showed Bush’s approval rating falling five points since his election, to 48 percent. According to its website, Gallup ’s slightly more up-beat 53 percent approval rating, “is actually the lowest of any of the last seven presidents who won a second term in the first poll conducted after their re-election.” This compares to Bill Clinton at 58 percent, Ronald Reagan at 61 percent, Richard Nixon at 62 percent, Lyndon Johnson at 70 percent, Dwight Eisenhower at 75 percent, and Harry Truman at 69 percent.
     And then there are those pesky little facts.
     It started with the mere question of one single soldier asking Rumsfeld about sufficient armor for his compatriots in arms, and then devolved further with the revelation that the Secretary of Defense didn’t even sign his own condolence letters to the families of dead soldiers. These mistakes alone, along with the long line of others before them, would not lead to the fall of a sitting president, but what is about to follow, will.
     The following UPI news report, although shocking, will in the end prove to be the beginning of the thread that unravels the criminal conduct that has moved this régime from mere lying about the reasons for a “preemptive war” to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary for the impeachment of a president.
     Washington, DC, Dec. 20 (UPI) — An FBI document suggests the president authorized inhumane interrogation methods against Iraqi detainees, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday. The document is among those obtained from the government by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act suit in New York . A two-page FBI e-mail refers to “a presidential executive order,” and contends President Bush directly authorized interrogation techniques that included sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.,” The ACLU said.
     The FBI e-mail was sent in May 2004 from “On Scene Commander — Baghdad ” to senior FBI officials.
     The techniques are “beyond the bounds of FBI practice but within the parameters of the executive order...” The e-mail said some FBI personnel witnessed the use of the techniques, but did not participate. The e-mail was among a number released by the ACLU Monday.
     There is already bipartisan support for the removal of Rumsfeld. He is deeply unpopular with the American people. What’s next is actually getting a copy of the “presidential executive order” and seeing exactly what forms of torture our born-again moral leader of freedom and Christianity actually authorized, and then to expose the other secret directives that he has signed in his pursuit of his misguided war on terrorism.
     No, it is not that terrorism isn’t real, but at the rate that we are actually losing the war in Iraq, coupled with the amount of censorship covering up the failures of Bush and Rumsfeld’s handling of the war, plus the criminally corrupt policies Bush has used to pursue this war, Congress and the American people will finally rise up and scream enough! The only question is how soon? – Probably not soon enough.
     The only way to get rid of political tyrants in a democracy is to ferret them out of their offices with the truth, and publicly expose them in the press. Then indict and prosecute them and drive them from office. To do this, the press must be willing to risk being unpopular with those who hold power. The question for all of us today is whether there is enough courage left in the American press to ferret out a set of scoundrels like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Even more so is the question of if or when the Congress will get up off its comfortable fat ass to actually uphold the legitimate rule of law that is now being abridged by the abuse of power in the Oval office?
     Congress rarely acts with the courage requisite to its power, except when it is made so uncomfortable by public opinion that it has no where else to turn but to execute the will of the people that it supposedly represents. It’s time to make Congress uncomfortable once again.