Dubya the Godfather
by Jeff Davis
One day soon a thick-necked White House spokesman wearing a dark suit with a black shirt and white tie may call a press conference to announce: “Youse guys out dere in de Congress and de media better start treatin’s de Boss wid some respect, udderwise he just might have youse whacked, see?”
The United States Justice Department has now issued an opinion that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of “terrorist suspects” inside the United States. Who defines a “terrorist”? Why, those wonderful folks at the Justice Department, of course, in addition to Dubya himself, and whoever happens to be whispering into the president’s ear at the moment, and whatever voices George W. Bush thinks he hears in his head.
Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, went into a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend the regime’s completely illegal and unconstitutional electronic surveillance program, which they apparently have no intention whatsoever of giving up, even after its exposure. (Why should they? Who’s going to do anything about them? Congress is castrated and the “Amurrican people” have greeted the news that Bush has been spying on us for years without warrants with a gigantic yawn.) During the question and answer session, California’s Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury if the administration felt that the president had the power to order the execution without trial of a hypothetical al-Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.
The power of life and death, eh? Er, isn’t there a little something called the Constitution? And before that, wasn’t there a little something about eight hundred years ago called the Magna Carta, which specifically stated that the king is NOT above the law and neither he nor the local baron could just order us peasants strung up or boiled in oil if and when the spirit moved them to do so? Oh, never mind.
Once again, everyone just assumes that this new “executive prerogative” will be used only against dark-skinned foreign Muslim people. But can we really not see that once we allow the precedent of granting the president power to kill at will, then the last wall of protection in the Constitution has fallen, the demons are let loose from Pandora’s box for good, and no one will ever be able to put them back again? What is the ultimate in tyranny if not the power of a dictator to kill simply by signing a piece of paper or giving a thumbs-down like some degenerate Roman Caesar in the Coliseum? Even assuming that Dubya himself will not use his new-found power to liquidate against White American dissidents, can we assume the same about his likely successors? Who is going to follow Bush into the Oval Office? Some raving neo-con who’s even worse than he is? Hillary Clinton? Do we really trust Hillary with the power of arbitrary execution?
There is one feint glimmer of hope. A Zogby poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored impeaching Bush over the illegal surveillance. At a recent anti-war conference, Ramsey Clark said that Bush really should be impeached for a more serious offense such as lying us into war. Expressing your opinion to a pollster however is not good enough. Americans need to do something such as pressuring their Congressmen to impeach Bush while we still have a Constitution and some of the Bill of Rights remaining. If Congress still refuses to do anything, then maybe it’s time to start thinking about forming a Third Party that won’t stab us in the back at every opportunity.