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Posted on 11/28/2005 7:13:44 PM PST by StoneWallJack
For some time I have been suggesting here that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in GOP hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad.
The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine--call it the budding one-party global empire--would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand...
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As happened in the Vietnam era, the war came home. The Administration's disrespect for law led to law-breaking. Somehow, the law-enforcement system in and around the Justice Department has retained enough independence to serve as a check on abuses of executive power. Indictments have been brought, and others are likely to follow. The mechanisms whereby the foreign debacle has led to the domestic setbacks for the Administration are complex, but the broad outlines are already clear: The failed empire, in the shape of its failed war, has driven down the President's support to the point at which others, cowed until now, feel free to attack him.
The institutions of government and the economy, drawn like iron filings into the magnetic field of power, failed at first to check the Administration. But the public, represented by opinion polls, has stepped in, and the institutions are following. Not since the Soviet Union fell fourteen years ago have we witnessed a greater reversal of fortune...
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
The author's bio is something to behold!
It begs the question of "how the Schell does one become The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent and the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute?"
Bad analogies and wacko reasoning must be part of the criteria for both positions...
You've got to love this. I mean, really, who HASN'T been attacking Bush??? Name the liberals who have been so scared, really! I've been hearing them bitch and moan for five years now as if everything Bush does is the worst thing ever done.
I don't see these people getting audited by the IRS, like in the Clinton years, or investigated by the FBI, like under Johnson. The worst they have to fear is maybe (gasp) the loss of some federal money, and I think we can all agree that Bush hasn't been nearly willing enough to pull that trigger.
Oh, they're so brave! Oh, they're so long-suffering! Those liberals, how admirable!!!
Oh, like when liberal Democrats did for over 60 decades? Sore losers all.
Shhhh! Don't wake them. Livin' in the sixties is all they've got left.
Not since Jonathan Schell totally failed to forsee the fall of the Soviet Union--he spent the 80s demanding that the West surrender to the Soviets to avoid an otherwise inevitable nuclear war--has any commentator been so totally wrong as this clown is here.
At this rate, the Napoleon XIV Record is going to get worn out.
It would have helped Schell's childish argument if the public didn't view the Democrats with even more hostility than they view the Administration.
"...and I have also been suggesting that George Bush is a Sith Lord, but even my friends tell me to leave that one out."
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You obviously remember Schell's book "The Fate Of The Earth" which was given big play in the rags. Of course Schell was regarded as a great and wise seer who naturally had all the facts. Even my arch-conservative bro felt that nuclear war was inevitable. However I felt from the mid-seventies on that the Soviet Union was in bad shape economically and ripe for failure.
The Dems controlled the government for 40 years, but that was OK? And of course, we've conveniently forgotten that.
I've forgotten. Who are we at war with now? Is it Oceania? It seems to change from month to month.
/obtuse "1984" reference mode
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