After doing a lot of thinking about our current government, politics, and the overall SNAFU state of affairs, I've come to a very disturbing question. Whats to stop Bush from becoming a dictator? Or far that matter, any president?
Hear me out on this one. The Bush administration, and particularly Bush, has undermined the Constitution in so many ways its not even funny. The cabinet of officials he has surrounded himself with have garnished so much executive power for themselves that they could feasibly just take it for good. Why not? What do we have in place to stop it? The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, Congress, the Senate? Not likely. The power of the branches of government are dwindling under the pressure of the Bush administration, and those who still have some power are right in step with old Georgie Boy. When it comes right down to it, the Constitution and other important [coinciding] documents that were designed to prevent such a power take over are really just a piece of paper. Bush has already proven that. Heck, if he wanted to he could just set fire to the damn thing and be done with it. Loose ends could easily be tied up by his cronies in the Supreme Court, and everyone else could be controlled by acts he has already written into practice, such as the Patriot Act, Marshal Law, and the blatant disregard of the right to due process (fifth amendment). Bush has also sought out to destroy the Constitutional principle of keeping the powers separate. From "The constitution" by David Cole (an essay):
"The single constitutional principle most under attack, however, is the separation of powers. Time and time again, administration officials have sought to elevate the president above the law, arguing that, as commander in chief, he may choose to "engage the enemy" however he pleases, without regard to what the other branches of government have said. This notion first surfaced in an August 2002 Justice Department memo written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo for the White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez. Yoo argued that the president could not be precluded from ordering the torture of enemy combatants merely because the United States had ratified an international treaty prohibiting torture under all circumstances, or because Congress had made torture a federal crime. "The president enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces," Yoo wrote. "Congress can no more interfere with the president's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield." If the president decided to "engage the enemy" by ordering that the enemy be tortured, that was his prerogative, and literally nobody could stop him. [...]"
So I ask again, whats to stop him from taking complete power? Think about this, Hitler was able to rise to power, and have a massive following of people who did whatever he ordered them to do. Most, if not all of his ideas were completely insane, they were atrocities, yet the public went along willingly until it was too late to stop him. By the time folks tarted figuring it out, he had the military power and force to quell uprisings fairly quickly. In fact it took darn near teh entire world to bring him down. Even then, he had supporters in other countries too.
If a man can convince a nation that genocide is good, and torture is OK, or that torture wasn't really occurring, or that the people in the "work camps" weren't really experiencing torture (sound familiar?) why can't Bush, or one of his more eloquent cronies? He already had people believing there were WMD's as a justification for a war. He has people believing that enemy combatants being held without due process aren't really experiencing "torture". After all, they only pretended they were going to electrocute the prisoners...and parading them around in the nude, sexual abusive acts, and water boarding aren't really all that bad...right? Gee, I mean, it could be worse.....[/sarcasm].
When all is said and done, when push comes to shove, no matter if Bush takes over or has simply set the stage for someone even worse to take control of this nation, he has created a power vacuum that allows the opportunity for a dictator to take control.
What will we do then? How much does it take for a nation to wake up and smell the fascism? Will we be like Nazi Germany, and wait until its too late before we try and fight back?
If it comes down to that, we can call it "The American Revolution, episode II". And pray to whatever god you pray to that we can start fresh.
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