We have arrived. The bags are packed. The train nears the station.
Many of us are thinking along parallel tracks.
Jonathan Schell make the point in the current issue of The Nation in an article titled The Hidden State Steps Forward. It has been diaried here.
Chris Floyd gives his usual big picture view Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic
I've been pecking away at the feathers that line our American nest for months, and what I find is horrifying. More over the hedgerow.
The Constitutional crisis is not down the road -- it is all around us. We passed the "Welcome to Constitutional Crisis" sign back in December when the appointed-by-one-time-judicial-fiat President stated flatly that he was above the law. All the roads have been leading here since the space-time singularity of September 11th, 2001 gave this immature bully of a man a scorched political earth across which to march, leap, gambol, and jerk-off with neither impediment nor oversight. There have been signposts all along the way (as many Kossacks know, their beaks held high, sharply inhaling the political wind). We should compile a list of each and every one of them -- executive orders authorizing "extra-legal" murder (November 2001), executive orders indemnifying American oil corporations from any and all legal claims made against them for actions (including murder) during the rape of Iraq (May 2003), the appointment to the office of Attorney General of the United States a man who used the law to make vicious inhumane torture legal and allowable -- each of these, to historians, will stand as a road sign which Americans, engaged in their hurly-burly lives, over-proud and under-educated about the complimentary roles of citizens and states, blithely passed on their way to the Constitutional crisis now all around us.
This Constitutional crisis is the last checkpoint, the last turnstile, the final bump-in-the-road the fascist Bushists need to clear in their studied, planned, headlong stampede toward the tight corral of totalitarianism.
Breathe this last stale but oxygenated air, Kossacks, and fight like hell. Write a letter to the editor every day. Talk to everyone you know. Post your "IMPEACH" signs -- put two in your front yard: "IMPEACH" and "NO TYRANNY IN AMERICA". Breathe this last stale but oxygenated air, because they have already -- metaphorically speaking -- built the box cars and laid the steel rails and printed the bills of lading, and if this people-mover rolls right past the station signs marked CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS, the next stop for America is the warm powderlands of absolute power wielded by a gang of ticks gorging on distant blood and oil, while for the rest of us the station-stop is the ground zero of neo-totalitarian-corporate-fascism, the thermobaric airlessness, the blinding whiteness of an endless ride to an unknown destination in a locked room labeled on the outside, "freight".
They mean us harm. They must be stopped.