Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
Forget this "monarchy" nonsense. Americans do not, as a rule, have any inherent "fear" of a monarchy. The concept is too antiquated, too distant to reach them on a visceral level.
What Americans do fear, and rightly so, is the concept of dictatorship. There is a powerful, primal revulsion in the minds of Americans of a DICTATOR. It is the first word rhetoricians, politicians, marketing experts and press secretaries use to describe hated leaders of foreign countries.
George W. Bush doesn't want to be a king. He wants to be a dictator.
He's said it himself,
in as many words:
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." Describing what it's like to be governor of Texas.
(Governing Magazine 7/98)
-- From Paul Begala's "Is Our Children Learning?"
"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," Bush joked.
-- CNN.com, December 18, 2000
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it, " [Bush] said.
-- Business Week, July 30, 2001
He's already suspended habeus corpus at least once: Jose Padilla still rots in jail, 4 years after his arrest, no trial in sight.
He started a war; that's Congress's job. The fact that the members of Congress abdicated their responsibility and gave him the power to start a war doesn't change the reality that the Constitution's explicit, strict wording giving Congress -- NOT the Executive -- the power to declare war has been subverted.
And now he has declared himself above the law -- ANY law. Under the aegis of "National Security," the Bush Administration has managed to grab for the Executive extraordinary powers never intended by the founders of this country.
I watched a movie yesterday that reminded me of this situation. Ironically, it featured a monarchy -- but not the benign, virtually powerless sort of monarchy we've come to understand by watching Elizabeth II's "reign."
In this film, the king changes a law on a whim, effectively forbidding a certain segment of the citizenry to work in a certain field. He does so autocratically; there is no oversight or analysis or discussion, let alone debate, with Parliament. They are not even consulted; he simply calls for a clerk, dictates the new law and erases the old law. That is dictatorship. One man calls the shots for everyone in the country, and there are no courts that will accept a challenge to the law because there is no Constitution to refer to, there is no such thing as reversing a bad law. What the dictator says, goes.
The path on which this country is headed, blindly, trustingly, is the path to dictatorship. Oh, to be sure, we'll never hear the word in relation to a President -- not from our corporate media propaganda machine, at least. But if we do not stop and reverse the direction of this journey, our country will subtly, slowly, bit by incremental bit, transform itself over a long period until finally, it bears little resemblance to the Republic it once was. The Constitution will be a quaint bit of history, perhaps referred to as a noble, failed experiment. Under the guise of keeping us safe, the government will have empowered itself to dictate our private behaviours. Who knows what will be legal and what will be illegal -- it will all depend on the whim of those in power at any given point. We will probably retain our voting rights -- but we will have no say in who is on the ballot. That will be decided for us.
Funny, isn't it, how close we already ARE to this dictatorship? We have only the Constitution and the will of the people standing between us and a life where "freedom" really is just a word.
George W. Bush wants to be a dictator. And if he is not held accountable for the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, a flagrant violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, George W. Bush will BE a de facto dictator. And while he will soon be replaced in a Presidential election, he will have passed down to his successors the powers of a dictator. The Executive branch of the United States government will be a dictatorship, and the metaphorical Rubber Stamp Republicans we know today will become a literal Rubber Stamp Congress, mere figureheads in a fictional democratic system that belies the absolute absence of any sort of democracy at all.
If we allow the President to get away with yet another dismissal of the Constitution of the United States of America, he will get what he wants.
George W. Bush doesn't want to be the king -- he wants to be the dictator.