Respect My Authoritae!
As time passes I find myself growing more and more concerned, not with the job Bush is doing (which in and of itself is poor) but with the fact that he seems to think his job includes doing a lot of things that are relegated to other branches of government. He doesn't seem to grasp that the position of president is not all-powerful, nor is it intended to be.
The signing statements are worrysome. Who wouldn't be worried when the president regularly makes notes on the bottom of freshly passed laws regarding which parts of the law he intends to ignore? What gets me is that no one says 'Boo' about it in the Congress. They just stay meek and quiet.
So Bush treats congress the way a dictator treats his parliament — as advisors whom he can ignore at his discretion, but what of the judiciary? Need we even ask? He labels any judge that disagrees with him as an "activist".
But that really sums up the danger he represents right there. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who disagrees with him is immediately denegrated. Whether they are a "liberal" or "activist" Bush makes it clear that if anyone not in 100% agreement with his policies is aiding the terrorists through their misguided ideology.
And nothing is done.
We can, of course, chalk much of this reluctance up to the Republican-held Congress. They're loathe to openly criticize their champion. Unless it has to do with the Dubai Ports deal. There our Congress proudly stood tall in defiance and said, "Mr. President, we will not do your bidding!"
Of course, while everyone was focusing on how noble Congress was for acting independantly they quietly renewed the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act. Frankly, the Dubai ports deal was not a serious security risk but like most matters of Congress the book is judged by its cover for the sake of all the voters who get their news from the news. And as anyone who watches the news knows, if it sounds remotely threatening you'll see the 10 second trailers all day long telling you to tune in at 11 to find out why your kids might be in danger.
It goes without saying that the the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act was named as such to achieve sort of a reverse effect — it sounds good, so it must be. After being passed it came under much criticism for certain allowances within its framework, and to be fair the portions of the act in question were by far in the minority, but still the fact remains that it was renewed almost without mention while the country was up in arms about the ports being run by a company based out of the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally, despite the fact that the company's role would not involve security and despite the fact that the existing security is only slightly better than none at all.
I am inclined to believe that Congress was keen on passing the act in the interests of bowing to Bush's interests and they were more than happy to seize the opportunity of the ports deal to flood the news with something else while they did it. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The lack of news coverage actually reminded me of just a few weeks after we invaded Iraq when, after waking up and turning on CNN first thing every morning to learn what I could of this war we were involved in, one day I turned on CNN and I was sadded to hear some woman in California had been murdered. To make it worse, she had been pregnant. To make things even worse, the Lacey Peterson case dominated the news from there-on-out, completely eclipsing the coverage of Iraq.
Of course what happened there was terrible, but there were hundreds of people being killed in Iraq. It didn't matter, though. The American Media assumes our country has the attention span of a goldfish, and through their constant coddling they've managed to lower American's expectations of themselves and their peers to the point where they have managed to steadily lower the country's intelligence.
Newsweek unashamedly published three of their four editions with a cover story titled "Losing Afghanistan" a little more than a week ago. The fourth edition (the U.S. edition) instead had a cover story on photographer Annie Leibovitz titled "My Life in Pictures". Thanks, Newsweek, for helping de-educate this great nation of ours.
President Bush has criticized Vladmir Putin for eliminating democracy at the lower levels of his government. Bush sees this as a slow move back towards authoritarianism in Russia, and I agree there is cause for concern. There is also cause for concern in this country, as the pot calling the kettle black a.k.a. George W. Bush treads heavily over the checks and balances built into our constitution. Of course there is no concern because everyone is too overloaded with Bush-administration-instilled fear of terrorists and watching CourtTV.
This country needs to wake up, stop listening to the party line and start ignoring the sensationalism on the news, because there is a real threat and it needs your attention.
And do your due diligence — Vote in November but don't just vote party lines. Do a little research online. You found this website, I'm sure you can find the website for the candidates in your area. Find out who they are and make an informed decision.
Let's take this country back. Make good choices now and show the party leadership (of both parties) that we won't be satisfied with their book-cover judging, skin-deep rhetoric any more. Show them in November, and hopefully by 2008 we'll have two good candidates to choose between instead of two more poor ones.
God bless, and if you're not into that sort of thing, may the force be with you.
- one
