The End

So this is it. I feel like Charleton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, finally spotting the half-buried Statue of Liberty. "They did it. They actually did it, the stupid bastards!"

Nobody's nuked anybody yet, but something more significant has been lost: American democracy. I say 'more significant' because it has, previously, been a cornerstone of our beliefs that liberty trumps life. We were a country founded on the principle of "give me liberty or give me death." New Hampshire, that northern bastion of consevatism, bedecks its license plates with the slogan: "live free or die."

Which begs the question: when do they start passing out the kool-aid in Portsmouth?

The cornerstone of a free society is the principle that the individual has inherent powers over the government. The right to be presumed innocent and the right to resist the power of the government over the individual is the most fundamental right there is. It is what we mean when we say "liberty."

And in the past five years, the extreme right of American political belief has worked to eliminate those rights. Working through the executive branch of government, they've transformed the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States into a torturing police-state force.

But for all their un-American totalitarian efforts to become a big Pinochet, they never had a seal of approval from the other branches of government.

Sure, the ubber-stamp congress went along silently with all the anti-democratic moves. The kangaroo courts set up at Gitmo were never investigated. Indeed, reports of torture and murder at different military and CIA facilities around the world have gone shockingly uninvestigated. The sacred role of oversight has been entirely ignored by this congress, even in the face of immoral and illegal acts by the executive.

But that all changed with the Hamden case. The Supreme Court, by the slim margin of one vote, upheld the Geneva Convention (who ever thought that would have to happen in the US?) and struck down the Kafkaesque 'tribunals.'

So the Fascists went to congress. It's not enough, now, to simply acquiesce by turning a blind eye. Now congress must pass laws allowing torture and illegal imprisonment and an elimination of due process.

And, yesterday, they did it. For the first and only time in American history, the president has the power to arrest you and hold you indefinitely and never try you and never show you any evidence. Americans. In America.

Is there a terrorist in the world that is more frightening than that? The United State House and Senate have both passed laws eliminating habeas corpus. We are all now free at the discretion of the executive branch. We have no recourse to courts or to laws. We are now a lawless country under the dictatorship of the president.

It's clear to me now as never before how Rome moved from Republic to Empire. I'm watching the same thing happen to my beloved United States.

What a sad day.