The Lawlessness of Unintended Consequences
The right’s depraved indifference to the fiscal health of Social Security and its criminal recklessness in the passing of Terri Schiavo were self-inflicted one-two punches that have put the GOP on the ropes.
The first concrete evidence of this was last week’s Gallup poll showing that President Bush’s approval rating had fallen a precipitous seven points in as many days. He took his biggest hit from churchgoers, conservatives and men.
What’s more, revealed the poll, the percentage of those willing to identify themselves as Republicans slipped from 35 to 32, while Democratic identification more than inched upward, 32 to 37.
In explaining this developing sea change, political number-cruncher Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report said, “You have to wonder if people didn’t feel that the president and Congress couldn’t be spending their time working on Social Security and other problems.”
Of course their numbers slipped precisely because the president and Congress were “working on Social Security and other problems,” but we understand the gist of Mr. Cook’s pondering: The good-ol’ boys were out to lunch when it came to discerning the authentic, everyday anxieties harbored by the at-large public, and the disillusioned public let the first pollster to call know it.
That much is undoubtedly true. What may be just as true is that a growing majority has simply had enough – that it is undergoing some sort of dittohead-dot-com explosion as politically transformational as the dot-com-bubble burst was economically.
It could be, perhaps, that the right’s twin attributes of intellectual dystrophy and ethical bankruptcy, whose pronounced symptomatology of bullying, obfuscating and propagandizing has littered America’s landscape for years, had been taking their toll on the public all along. It could be that the Social Security scam and Schiavo fiasco were merely revelatory shock therapies to a public increasingly plagued by political-Zeitgeist exhaustion.
I think a reasonably informed argument can be made on this – the past – and it’s a comforting one: The swaggering right finally overreached once too often.
What is less comforting, however, is the near-mathematical certainty that the right won’t take its licks lying down. Unlike most bullies, who overcompensate for their sense of powerlessness through mere bluster, and, accordingly, fold on the first display of resistance, the right is genuinely bold, fearless and powerful.
It has reason to be. It holds the power. And the informed history of the right’s exercise of power indicates a response to immense corrective pressures not through compromise or temperance, but like a cornered animal.
That’s the worry that tempers my delight at radical conservatism’s predicament. We don’t know precisely how it will respond or that response’s precise level of severity, but that a puerile, in-your-face and wholly out-of-bounds counterattack will indeed come is a pretty safe bet.
After all, the right hasn’t been shy about wielding extraconstitutional power whenever it suits. The Founding Fathers, for example, expressly forbad bills of attainder – a constitutional prohibition giddily ignored (for what they believed was political gain) by both Congress and Mr. Bush in the Schiavo case.
And there was, well before the anticonstitutional enshrinement of torturing criminal suspects, the supreme unconstitutionality of 2000 that put Mr. Bush in power to begin with – an instance of perverted jurisprudence which Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has summarized on behalf of a wide-ranging intellectual community as “‘lawless,’ ‘illegitimate,’ ‘unprincipled,’ ‘partisan,’ ‘fraudulent,’ ‘disingenuous,’ and motivated by improper considerations.”
That the right is willing to abuse, ignore, or twist the law for its own happy entrenchment is empirically clear. What is yet unclear is not if, but how, the right will go about storming its critics and re-shoring its base.
This opinion, I’m afraid, is more than some Hofstadteresque paranoid style of American politics or an advanced case of political heebie-jeebies and battle fatigue. There are simply too many signposts of history that point otherwise. So strap on your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
posted by P.M. Carpenter @ 9:47 AM
19 Comments:
With the far-right holding the levers of our electronic voting system in their grubby hands, there is no reason to hope that they will soon lose power. Any additional outrage is possible, indeed, likely. Constitution --Schmonstitution. They don't have to abide by a document they probably consider "quaint" like Atty. Gen. Gonzalez labelled the Geneva Conventions.
I'm with anonymous. I wish you were right but this is wishful thinking. It is unlikely the US will have a real election any time soon.
Not until the election laws are changed and Bush et al are sitting in prison for election rigging will we be safe again. Election machines must be destroyed if reform can't be accomplished. First voter in the booth has to disable the machines...super glue or something
It sickens the soul to think these liars and traitors will win ANYTHING else other than a trip to a maximum security prison. They have ravaged the Constitution and the American dream. They have raped the spirit of cooperation and shared determination that prevailed among nations following the 9/11 tragedy. And they wield their power like drunken sailors (my apology to the Navy).
What have we become?
...the strong take from the weak;
the smart take from the stong;
and Evil takes from everybody...
These bastards aren't going down quietly.
I think part of their downfall is the lack of a political "enemy" to really pick on these days. Before the election they turned their attention to Sadam. During the election they turned all their attention to bashing Kerry and Edwards. Now that the election is behind and Sadam is captured, they will need to find a new enemey to distract us with. My guess is we'll hear more about Osama again in the news, unless they can find a new Democratic enemy to demonize. Who will be the next Emmaenuel Goldstein?
Many have said that until we have elections that are fair,use machines that have a paper trail and are not "hackable", we will not have a true democracy. We will continue to have the lawlessness of that permiates the present Republican administration.
How many of you are willing to withhold you taxes until the Congress does what it must to insure fair and honest elections? Until we become proactive in fighting what we know to be dishonest, we will not change anything.
Elections are important, but they are far from the only or even the most important means through which demoractic resistance is expressed.
The antiwar movement, for example, is far more powerful and widespread than that against the Vietnam War was at this stage. It is poised to act the first time there is a major debacle in Iraq -- not the day to day deterioration we see now, but something on the order of the Tet Offensive, or, perhaps more likely, some outrageous result coming from the government we have installed there.
In addition, activism from the last election and around the blogosphere are building a very strong force for change, which, if it can learn to work with labor, African-American communities, and grassroots organizations that have been doing this for a long time, can put up a very convincing grassroots resistance of various kinds.
Frankly, we will not have fair elections until we have won other struggles, and until it is absolutely clear that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld gang have been soundly rejected by the people of the U.S. Most likely, this will not come from any one event, but from the same kind of massive loss of confidence that brought down Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. In some ways, this is harder now, since the media machinery is much more fully integrated into the governing party, but in other ways, it is easier, since Nixon and Johnson were political geniuses, whereas this crew is just unbelievably wealthy and powerful, but strategically not that exceptional.
Larry Yates
Does your vote still count?
http://www.safevoting.org
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Agonist+Diebold+Luis&btnG=Search
http://www.boloji.com/computing/005.htm
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting
http://www.billionairesforbush.com/video/votingmachine.mov
http://www.wired.com/news/evote
http://www.truemajorityaction.org/unamerican2
http://www.liveatthespace.com/edo/flash/bbr
http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html
http://www.ericblumrich.com/wmf/diebold.mp3
http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/adworks.htm
http://www.gwbush04.com/touchscreenvotingdemo.html
http://www.takeyourcountryback.com/BUSHFAMILYFORTUNES
I'm constantly reminded of the
"Imperial Walkers" in the Star Wars movie. It's important to aim at the soft underbelly of the "Empire" if we are to trip the enemy. Just as Hitler was taken down, so will this wrong turn, this total corrupt mess, be corrected in time.
We should all send drinks to this White House.
"fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a
merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussollini
You're dreaming, folks. Regardless of how they feel about his current performance, the same bohunks that put Dan Quayle / George Bush 2 in the White House last November would do it again today, only faster. We're not talking about people who rely on intelligent reasoning.
Serious change is out of the question until the morning Joe and Jane Sixpack find the cooler empty and blast a screaming five-alarm fit at the stark realization that God's blessings no longer include enough discretionary income to purchase Pabst Blue Ribbon, new bullets, truck parts or the NASCAR channel, no matter how many squawling, bawling, tongue-talking prayer vigils they attend at their Assembly of God Arena Chapel, and in spite of their Christian obedience in schooling all six of their children at home using the best resources the Creation Research Institute and Messiah College have to offer.
not too likely we will get to
see ourselves come out of the scum and villainy that
engineered Abu Ghraib (yerup spelled by George)
we now have a press corps more run by the Guckert bunghole buddies than
anyone remotely interested in truth.
seems the press is also suppressing the not so good news in Iraq these days hoping
that if they quit reporting the dying over there, it'll just go
away. It won't go away.
next year, when gasoline is 3.25 a gallon, and more jobs are lost, and the
infrastructure continues to crumble, then you can ask your 'neocon' leadership how the pissing away of
5 billion a month is going to fix the self-destructing economy and the joblessness.
I predict a worldwide economic recession the likes that will make the '29 depression look like a
walk in the f'ing park. Brazil stopped it last time, but with
Wolfopiss at the WorldBlank, it won't stop the next time...it'll be a domino effect
that goes round the planet.
it could be worse, Cheney could win in '08 if he ran without his puppet.
a concerned american (note I left out the 'k' in the middle
Serious change is out of the question until the morning Joe and Jane Sixpack find the cooler empty and blast a screaming five-alarm fit at the stark realization that God's blessings no longer include enough discretionary income to purchase Pabst Blue Ribbon, new bullets, truck parts or the NASCAR channel, no matter how many squawling, bawling, tongue-talking prayer vigils they attend at their Assembly of God Arena Chapel, and in spite of their Christian obedience in schooling all six of their children at home using the best resources the Creation Research Institute and Messiah College have to offer.
Boy klubo, you need to step away from the television. I don't think you've left out any cliche's.
Until you and others that "represent" the left realize you're just a tool for the man, our country won't move forward an inch.
If you rely on the charicatures presented in the media to define your enemy, you'll never approach a point in your life where you can have an honest dialog with your countrymen.
Yeah, Anonymous, there's an idea. Let's have a dialog with the side that doesn't believe in dialog. Let's open up a dialog with the "shoot first, then go on vacation" people. Let's crack open a big old brewsky and kick back with the people that brought you Weapons of Mass Destruction and Abu Ghraib.
Anonymous, the tragedy of your reply to my comment is that you're every bit right about the TV cliches, and every last TV cliche I wrote is reality, now, in America. Thing is, we used to have to rely on sitcoms to present these cliches. Nowadays we can see them on FOX, CNN, MSNBC and all the other news networks. The US government is one big redneck cliche.
But really, go ahead and start a dialog with these guys, if you're one of them, and God bless you. Maybe you believe that God sent George to take out Saddam, too. Maybe you believe that there really are weapons of mass destruction somewhere. Maybe you're secretly glad, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, that we put the "towel heads" in their place. Maybe you also give the Republicans credit for Arafat dying and the assassination in Lebanon that led to the current riots, the so-called Arab wave of Democracy.
Go ahead and have your dialog, and don't forget to bring the chaw.
We need a respected brave American who will start calling these low life repubiclins out. Like the lawyer who stood up to Senator McCarthy when he was holding hearings in the fifties. Someone like maybe Walter Cronkite for older Americans who remember him and maybe a young one. Not sure who that may be. They are stealing our future , hurry Walter.
Do you know how nerve cells work in the brain, and other parts of the human body? The nerve cell "fires" and communicates to the next cell in the line. (I will spare you talk about ions and membranes). After the nerve cell fires, it takes a certain amount of time for the nerve cell to prepare to fire again...a "resting period". When the cell has returned to the state where it can fire again, it takes a certain level of stimulus to achieve the conditions to fire again...to reach it's "action potential". It is physically impossible to remain in a state of stimulation constantly. This is the problem for the Republicans. They are staying in power through anger, hate, and fear. People cannot maintain these state constantly. To further complicate their problem, there is the problem that the more you stimulate the system, the more it takes to get the same response. Why am I saying all this crap? Because the Republican strategy is a short term plan. It is biologically unsound. Sooner or later, we get tired of being afraid...and the plan stops working. They need to come up with a really, really scary threat, or find a new plan, because we are getting used to their fear stimulation.
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My first stair building experience sort of took the mystery out of it all. I didn't have to do much figuring because it was a deck replacement job. All I did was save the old stringers from the demo of the old deck. In doing so it all started to make sense to me. How the stairs were attached, the width of the treads, and how high each step was became less of a secret to me.
Anyone with the courage to take on this job needs only patience, basic math, a framing square and the ability to stand back and look at the big picture.
The first thing I look at is how high it is to the top of the landing or deck the stairs will be rising to. A comfortable step is in the 7 to 8 inch range. With this in mind I divide the height to the landing by seven. If the height to the landing is 70" then it will take 10 rises to get to the top of the landing. I used 70" to simplify this example. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will be 7" and some odd fraction. For instance if the height was 73 1/2", the rise would be 7 1/2".
Deck Stairs http://fix-stairs.com/Stair-Balusters.html
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