Bob Geiger said"[E]very American who voted for Bush should take time this July Fourth to perform a truly patriotic act and be profoundly ashamed."
I have to agree completely. Thanks to the efforts of Bush and his enablers, I don't feel pride this 4th of July. I feel sadness, frustration, and disgust.
In the last 24 hours, I've spent a lot of time thinking about why I'm so furious that Bush commuted Libby's sentence, and I think I've distilled it down to something fairly simple:
I grew up believing that all Americans were equal under the law. In fact, that's what divided America from the rest of the world, I thought, and that's what made America great: we didn't have to fear being taken from our houses in the middle of the night, arrested for expressing unpopular opinions, and no matter what, everyone was entitled to a fair trial by jury of his peers.
The Libby commutation crystallizes so much of what's wrong with the Bush Junta, and how severely they have hurt America: Bush has massively abused his presidential power to elevate himself, Cheney, and a select group of people to some sort of super-legal status.
This isn't what I was lead to believe America was about, and this action, coming on top of the historically unprecedented claims of executive privilege, constant stream of lies to the American people and our representatives in Congress, and Bush and Cheney's insanely unamerican belief that the President and a select few that he chooses are above the law is the last straw for me.
The fact that the only hope we have to do anything about this rests on the spineless cowards in the Democratic majority (I'm a left-leaning Libertarian Democrat, FWIW) who seem to think that they were put into the majority in the last election so they could talk about maybe one day holding some hearings with a little bit of non-sworn off the record bullshit that laughingly passes as "testimony" fills me with rage.
I believe, now, that the only way we the people are going to get our country back is to do what we did during the civil rights movement: take to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, and bring the country to a halt with non-violent, passive resistance on a scale that hasn't been seen since Ghandi forced the British out of India.
In other words, we are totally fucked.
Happy Birthday, America. You used to be cool.