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Bush's Sick Vision of 'Democracy'
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Perhaps the nation would be better served if all members of government simply played ring around the rosey or a good hearty game of tag, because this pantomime of a fully functioning system of checks and balances is an insult to those of us who actually believe in democracy.
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Constitution has more authority than the urinary expletive, err ... Unitary Executive doctrine of the Bush administration. In other words, the Bush fatwa against democracy is again depantsed and shown for the horror that it is.
The court ruled that the secret tribunals set up by the administration's power grab -- so that they can indefinitely hold without trial anyone they wish at a prison camp in Communist Cuba -- was in fact not legal, violating federal and international law.
Yet anyone reading the reports of this decision would think that the Supreme Court had simply bitch-slapped George across his twitching face and back into some limitations on his imagined power. While that is true to some extent, the real questions around this ruling, however, are once again shuffled to the sidelines of the byte-sized news cycle. And once again the castrated Congress is busy faxing and emailing all sorts of statements of support for the decision or outrage over the decision, falling exactly along political lines.
The obvious and serious issues around this ruling, and really around every action undertaken by this administration, are not addressed, nor will they be as long as there is no functioning Congress and a ratings-obsessed and obedient media.
What is the obvious set of issues here? The game goes something like this:
The president breaks a law. A court rules that the president broke the law. Our Congress then responds swiftly by vowing to introduce a bill that would make the president's actions retroactively legal, thereby showing that his astute reading of the Constitution was simply ahead of its time. Then the president signs the bill into law, which he has the option to disregard according to his own signing edict -- which he has already done at least 750 times.
The game is a sick puppet show of how our tax dollars are used to hire a theater troupe to play government and prop up simulacra of democracy, simulating essentially a "map" of a country that no longer exists and has not existed for some time now. Yet the show and dog chasing its tail must and do go on.
In a functioning government of a democratic society, the presidential "if the president does it, it's not illegal" delusion of grandeur would be promptly checked by Congress through the process of impeachment or at least a formal rebuke in the form of censure.
According to the "Project for a New American Century" vision, the façade of government is necessary and the mere appearance of government is all that matters to those acting the part and those watching the theatrics. On one side of the illusory political aisle stand those who will not act on their Congressional oversight obligations because if they disobey their leader, the brain stem known as Rove will smite them down.
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