Editor's Note: This article's headline originally was "Aggressive presidency ignores liberty, history."
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Most people are good natured and want the best for themselves and others. There are also those few that want to be leaders – more powerful than the rest, richer than the rest, and better than the rest.
Of those few, most climb to the top without intentionally shoving anyone out of the way except by out-competing in some non-harmful way. The others, those who will push, shove, step on, and hurt anyone in their way are the real minorities. It’s the rest of us, those in the majority, who are stepped on or swerve out of the way in time.
Recently, more and more people feel they’ve been stepped-on by our administration as it has increased its power. Some are beginning to feel they’ve been inserted back in the feudalistic times of the Middle Ages. Petrarch, one of the great educators, warned nearly seven hundred years ago that little ill could be said of those who had studied their history yet were plunged into “darkness and delusion.” Those who study and understand the past seldom opt for war unless attacked or their own freedoms are being jeopardized. Why do we now create unrest in other civilizations when our own is in terrible debt and our poor are starving and cold?
Oceans rise, slowly engulfing island and low-lying nations. We continue to drive Hummers, jets, tankers, and fighter planes in the names of freedom and the fight against terrorism. It’s strange that during the Crusades they referred to these same teams as Christians and Muslims. It’s the same religious persecution that’s plagued the world for centuries and that we escaped from back in 1776.
But we forget a lot in 230 years.
Our government, which had been a relatively smooth blanket over the nation for centuries, has slowly built itself up into a power pyramid resembling the governments of the earlier second millennium.
In feudalistic times, very few rulers had the power of kings or emperors. Several more had some noble-like power, and many more a militaristic level of power. The rest were peasants, the white slave.
Today, our government is moving more in that direction, and if we’re not careful, scholars are going to flee to other countries, like Russian scientists defecting during the Cold War, or Byzantine scholars fleeing to Renaissance Italy during the invasion of the Turks.
How does a government establish such powers? It turns out that scholars have found a formula – a recipe, if you will – which strengthens high-ranking officials, wealthy elites, and national armed forces, while simultaneously weakening the collective and individual power of those I keep referring to as the rest. One example of such a formula was proposed by Laurence W. Britt in his 2003 paper, “The 14 characteristics of Fascism”. Few would argue that the US has not been following this exact formula.
Our forefathers risked everything to establish a rule of law, from the nobles who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta to the brave men who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought the king’s armies. We owe it to them and to ourselves to strengthen our backbones and take back the rule of law from the rule of man.
It is incredulous that a president who turned a huge projected deficit into a record surplus gets impeached for having an extra-marital affair. Today, high officials in the majority party are breaking international laws as well as most of those set out in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Rather than get impeached or overthrown, someone from a lower rank in the pyramid is blamed. Those who take the fall or are forced to step down. Today, however, many of them are speaking out.
So, why are Bush and Cheney not held responsible for all of the crimes they’ve committed? It seems that we learn each week of another law they’ve broken and another lie they’ve told. Yet our government is not crying out for impeachment – not as loudly or as quickly as they did against Clinton. I am very disappointed. How can we let our leaders be above the law?
Eight hundred years ago, the Magna Carta was signed, forcing – for the first time – kings to obey certain laws. This idea, that even the highest officials must follow the law, has been one of the guiding principles of our government. Today that principle is being ignored.
In the name of God, George W. Bush wages his holy crusade against Muslim nations, at the cost of many American lives and dollars, and at the cost of our crumbling democracy. He rules like a tyrant, and frequently displays his lack of intelligence and caring to the American people.
Today we know that he had intelligence of the terrorist attacks prior to Sept. 11 and he chose to go on vacation rather than take action. We also know that the president lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. We also know that the president knew about that the levees failed in New Orleans on the day that Katrina struck, but lied to us and blamed the director of FEMA rather than taking action.
The hurricane center at LSU distributed a map titled “No Margin of Error”, accurately predicting where levees would fail and what areas of New Orleans would flood. I received a copy of that map (along with at least every geology graduate student at Florida State University) two days before the hurricane struck.
It is ignorant to believe that no one would have shown that map to the president. Even in feudal governments, the kings protected the peasants. Our king needs to be thrown out of office and arrested.
Finally, the administration claims that illegal and warrantless eavesdropping is necessary to thwart terrorist acts. Yet with more than 200 accounts of warrantless spying on American citizens, terrorist attacks around the world are at an all-time high.
The secret FISA court was created explicitly for the purposes that the president is citing to justify the surveillance. But he decided, without the permission of Congress to circumvent the law, ignore the FISA court and continue spying on us without warrants.
President Bush must be ordered to cease and desist the illegal program, and charged with at least 200 counts of violation of the FISA-enabling law. As each count is accompanied be a minimum $1,000 fine and a minimum 5 years sentence, I believe that the president owes us $2 million and 1,000 years in prison.
Let’s start his sentence today!
, a TheSequitur.com contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate studying geography at Florida State University. His blog is at ToddAlbert.com.
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