Friday, November 21, 2008

Carl Jung, George Bush, and 'White Heat' ---the Psychopathic 'Will to Power' and World War

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

No one has yet made a psychopathic killer criminal movie quite like 'White Heat', a 1949 classic starring James Cagney. The unlikely parallel was George W. Bush whom many feared would reprise Cagney's searing, most memorable performance. For as long as Bush occupied the Oval Office, anyone could imagine George Bush as Cody Jarrett, figuratively climbing on board a nuke, declaring himself to be on top of the world before blowing it all up!

Monsters from the ID

As Bush occupied the Oval Office, monsters from his id made themselves at home. Typically thin-skinned, Bush became unhinged amid the chance that he might plunge the world into a world war the external projection of his internal struggle against demons of his own creation, the spawn of his twisted id.
In the movies, this dynamic was embodied in Cagney's portrayal of Cody Jarrett, whom reviewers called an 'incendiary, disturbed gang leader '. Jarrett, like Bush, became an archetype, a Wotan, literally, the 'monster from the id', Bush's id, the collective worst impulses of mankind made flesh.

As in the movie, 'White Heat', primitive forces threatened to drive Bush in a Hegelian dialectic to an inexorable and iconic apocalypse. In 'White Heat' the process resulted in one of moviedom's most memorable and most disturbing scenes. It has been described as apocalyptic, a word that describes Bush's 'adventure', his war of naked aggression against Iraq, a war in which some 1.6 million people have died by his hand.
White Heat is, of course, the movie that gave us "Top of the world, Ma!", as iconic a Hollywood misquote as "Play it again, Sam" and "We don't need no steenking badges." That cry caps the climactic gunfight showdown between Cody and an army of T-men atop a natural-gas refinery, and the famous fireball explosion that follows may be Cody himself finally spontaneously combusting, not just the timely immolation of all those volatile fluids beneath him. By that point in the story, Cody is pure uncorked id. Whether doing away with witnesses at his gang's train robbery in the opening scenes, or taking cool pride in the casual comeuppance he gives his ambitious lieutenant Big Ed (Steve Cochran) — who has been helping himself to something on the side with Cody's sexy, vulgar wife and mob moll, Verna (Virginia Mayo) — Cody is a force of nature, as efficient and cold-blooded as a forest fire. Not even the government men, who track Cody with sophisticated postwar technology, can stop him. Instead, it's the human element that brings about Cody's Greek tragedy downfall. He risks a trusting friendship with Vic Pardo, a worshipful crook he meets in prison. Pardo, though, is actually Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien), a "copper" who infiltrates gangs by posing as a criminal. When Cody catches on to "Pardo's" betrayal, he almost weeps, a staggering moment of pathos that inflates Cagney's character to three dimensions, guaranteeing that we'll remember him long after the movie has ended.
But it's Ma herself who really makes Cody Jarrett more than just another homicidal thug. Played with chilling mother-love by Margaret Wycherly, Cody's devoted mom is as amoral as any killer on the screen. When middle-aged Cody sits on Ma's lap for love and comfort before one of his crippling headaches, we witness a dynamic that's just steps away from Hitchcock's Psycho eleven years later. In a prison chow hall, Cody snaps when he hears that Ma has died, and Cagney draws out Cody's berserk grief into an animal wail that doesn't stop as he barrels crazed through prison guards who drop before him like straw men. When the big moment comes, Cody's exclamation to the heavens before his apocalyptic finale is as inevitable as Oedipus's own fate, but with a kablooey that 1949 audiences may have felt was not just dramatic, but outright atomic. The gangster genre would never be the same old same old again.
...
When the big moment comes, Cody's exclamation to the heavens before his apocalyptic finale is as inevitable as Oedipus's own fate, but with a kablooey that 1949 audiences may have felt was not just dramatic, but outright atomic. The gangster genre would never be the same old same old again.
--Mark Bourne, White Heat
Wotan Awakened

In 1936, Jung tried to describe what was happening in Germany —as many now try to understand what is happening in America. In his essay, "Wotan", Jung described developments in terms of the mythology of the god Odin, a.k.a. the Germanic god Wotan. Jung wrote: "We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement."
We were even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organized world. And what came after the war was a veritable witches’ Sabbath. Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.
--Carl Gustav Jung, Wotan
It is not 'Gods' who came to life in America but, rather, demons loosed upon an unsuspecting world. Gods or demons, they are but manifestations of the human personality.
Bush shares his 'demons' with a demographic represented in Germany by the Nazi party, in America by the Ku Klux Klan, the radical right, the GOP.
The banks are not to blame. There is a generalized contraction of credit in the non-bank financial system where structured finance has blown up and taken half of Wall Street with it. It's the end of an era. Here's how economist Henry C. K. Liu sums it up in his "Open Letter to World Leaders attending the November 15 White House Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy":
"Neoliberal economists in the last three decades have denied the possibility of a replay of the worldwide destructiveness of the Great Depression that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble created by unfettered US financial markets of the 'Roaring Twenties'. They fooled themselves into thinking that false prosperity built on debt could be sustainable with monetary indulgence. Now history is repeating itself, this time with a new, more lethal virus that has infested deregulated global financial markets with 'innovative' debt securitization, structured finance and maverick banking operations flooded with excess liquidity released by accommodative central banks. A massive structure of phantom wealth was built on the quicksand of debt manipulation. This debt bubble finally imploded in July 2007 and is now threatening to bring down the entire global financial system to cause an economic meltdown unless enlightened political leadership adopts coordinated corrective measures on a global scale."
Rome is burning. It's time to stop tinkering with a failed system and move on to "Plan B" before it's too late. 
--Mike Whitney, This Is Not A Normal Recession: Moving on to Plan B
The GOP threatens to uncork the evil genie, to summon up the Norse 'god' Wotan, to lift the restraints upon every person's very worst motives, impulses and desires. There are good reasons for the restraints imposed by the 'superego'. Without them, people like Cody Jarrett, George W. Bush, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and Augusto Pinochet would kill us all in a global conflagration. It is easy enough to imagine Bush, still seeking his father's approval, perhaps competing with him for Bar's attention, climbing upon the pinnacle of his industry's icon --the oil refinery. It is easy enough to imagine Bush screaming from atop a refinery tower: "Top of the world, Ma! Top of the world".

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist at the war crimes trial of Nazis at Nuremberg concluded that 'evil' was the 'utter lack of empathy'. I might add: empathy with another is possible only if one has come to terms with one's own "shadow", one's own "source of creativity", one's own humanity. One who cannot see humanity in either self or others is a Nazi in spirit, a person lacking 'empathy', a person lacking the ability to see him/herself in another place, time, or body. Those who may be described as Gilbert described 'Nazis' are what Jung would call 'inauthentic'; they live lives hidden behind masks.
Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.
--Friedrich Nietzsche
Bush Rejected by Peers

A rejection by peers is mythical. Many so-called primitive tribes make a ritual of ostracizing a member who has breached the most sacred shibboleths.  Jung and Joseph Campbell would have had much to say about the fact that some world leaders simply refused to shake Bush's hand. Some even looked away. Bush himself ducked and overtly dodged Angela Merkel.

Bush was shunned by peers. In some Eastern cultures, the loss of their respect might have required a ritual suicide. More recently, Japanese and British commanders were expected to shoot themselves.


Monday, November 17, 2008

'Corporate Prisons': the GOP's Formula for More Crime, Declining Education, and Slave Labor

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Like many crooked GOP schemes, the fascist corporatization of state prisons makes a slick end run around the Bill of Rights, sets up crony corporations with a guaranteed gravy train at tax payer expense, and ---to sweeten the deal --it provides them with slave labor.

It is no accident that under Gov George W. Bush, Texas beat out Mississippi for 'dead last' in education. As education declines, crime increases. Increasing crime fuels the corporate prison gravy train. Justice has nothing to do with it. It's about warehousing and enslaving people for profit. There is nothing in the middle ages half so slick, so cunning, so evil!

Unless the nation wakes up to what happened in Texas, the nation will enter not just an economic depression but a new dark age, perhaps an end to civilization as we know it. In many ways we already share with the middle ages, a careless disregard for every life. In Texas, the crime rate increased as the prison systems --under Bush Jr --went corporate! As a result, one in 100 Texas residents are in prison, many of them 'corporate' lock ups in which prisoners have no rights. As Texas took the GOP/fascist prison route, education tanked --a recipe for future unemployment, poverty and increased crime.

I see a pattern. Declining education is a recipe for guaranteed unemployment, poverty, and crime. It also represents a guaranteed, risk free income to the evil corporations who run the state's corporate gulag often with no-bid contracts! As long as the quality of public education declines, two groups will benefit: the corporate owned prisons and expensive private schools affordable only to the very, very rich and/or privileged. The GOP runs states like Bush ran the war of aggression against Iraq. State prisons are just another money making opportunity, as Iraq was for the likes of Dick Cheney's Halliburton and professional thugs like Blackwater.

My assertions are backed up by a recent Pew study of trends [PDF] that had been embraced by Bush's Texas, primarily the rapid outsourcing of prison construction and management throughout the US. As in Texas, crime rates over the period under study increased. Guilt or innocence is of no concern to corporate robber barons. It is an Orwellian nightmare of waste, graft, and fascism in which no one is held to account.

As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even the industrialized application of the death penalty cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may be seeking a "final solution".
...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:

  • There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
  • According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.
  • The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
  • Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
  • If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
  • The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
  • The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.

    --An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and Hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system.

Black people represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.
  • While one out of every 20 Texas adults is under some form of criminal justice control, one out of 3 young black men (29% of the black male population between 21 and 29) are in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day.
  • One out of every four adult black men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice supervision.
  • Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at a rate seven times greater than whites. While there are 555 whites behind bars for every 100,000 in the Texas population, there are an astonishing 3862 African Americans behind bars for every 100,000 in the state. This is nearly 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks of 2366 per 100,000.
  • If Texas' black incarceration rate was applied to the United States, the number of blacks behind bars on a national level would increase by half a million. There are currently an estimated 824,900 African Americans in prison and jail in the US The new figure, 1,346,370, would increase the number of African Americans incarcerated in the US by 63%.
Do you see the pattern? I allege that Bush deliberately SABOTAGED education IN Texas with budget cuts and other GOP idiocy SO THAT his corporate buddies could make a killing in the prison business!

The corporatization of the nation's prisons is called 'the Prison Industrial Complex. As we have seen, crime increases as education declines. Corporate prisons are, therefore, among the fastest growing industries in America. One should not be surprised to find among the corporate prison owners GOP robber barons in search of big bucks, a gravy train pay back for their loyal support of the GOP.

The Prison-Industrial complex consists of prison construction, staffing, operation. There is something in it for everyone lacking a conscience. Because profitability is directly related to the number of inmates, there is, then, no motive to improve education. Education costs money and corporations haven't yet found a away to exploit it. There are no good reasons for the explosive growth of a new industry --that of warehousing folk.
Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.

Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country's 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. "There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future," said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.'s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.

California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

--Larger Inmate Population Is Boon to Private Prisons

Sticking folk in a dank cell makes lot of people a good living at the expense of a much better, literate, productive, egalitarian society. There is also the danger that an educated population would see through the various GOP scams and pull the plug on the cons, the outright subversions of law, decency, and all those intangibles that make life worth living. We are basically dealing with venal robber barons who don't give a fuck!
After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.

"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."

Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.

It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector.

...

--JOHN MILLER, Suicide Exposes Squalid Conditions in Privately-Run Texas Prison; Company Operates in 15 States

Another Act of Treason: George W. Bush 'Outed' Valerie Plame

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan has revealed that it was George W. Bush himself who authorized Dick Cheney to 'out' Valerie Plame. When he is no longer President, Bush will not be able to 'pardon' himself for the many 'counts' of high treason that will be charged him. Bush must therefore move to pardon himself while he is still in the White House but doing so will prove his guilt! Innocent folk don't 'pardon' themselves of serious crimes.

Nixon left the White House aboard a helicopter. To make a fast getaway, Bush will need a jet. When he is no longer President, Bush will not be able to 'pardon' himself for the many 'counts' of high treason that will be charged him. I accuse Bush of war crimes, high treason, graft, and various capital crimes as stated succinctly in US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441. Amid the lies he told about 911, the lies he told to wage aggressive war, it is now learned that it was Bush --personally --who 'outed' CIA operative Valerie Plame.

The 'Plame Affair' was also called 'Treasongate'. The 'outing' of an undercover 'operative' exposes that operative to reprisals by an 'enemy'. That's why Bush's act is an act of treason against the people of the United States.
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
--Article III, US Constitution
The word treason covers the more egregious acts of betrayal or disloyalty to a sovereign or nation. That describes perfectly Bush's actions with regard to Plame. Under the US Constitution and, in Britain by common law, sovereignty resides with the people themselves. Bush flouted that principle with stolen elections in 2000 and, again, in 2004. His administration systematically subverted and attempted to dismantle the US Constitution, called, by Bush, a 'goddamned piece of paper'.

Accomplices who must stand trial with Bush and Cheney will include Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Pentagon brass, and numerous co-conspirators in the 'big business' community, in other words, the big contractors who stood to get big contracts when Bush began his wars of naked aggression. Just as Krupp, Thyssen, and I.G. Farben conspired with Hitler and agreed to finance him, some of America's notable 'corporate sponsors' lined up behind Bush for the booty.
Treason, as referenced above, consists in waging war upon the people of the United States. Bushco wages war upon the people of the US in many ways. The 'outing' of Plame is one of them. Bush's campaign of deliberate lies to 'justify' his attack and invasion of Iraq is another. The war itself violates almost every convention to which the US is bound by treaty or agreement.

Bush, an idiot, was at least smart enough to 'unnerstan' that unless Saddam had WMD, a war against him violated US criminal codes, international treaties, the principles of Nuremberg, and the Geneva Convention! Bush was at least smart enough to know that without the 'threat' posed by WMD, a war of naked aggression would earn him the death penalty. He charged his 'legal team' with coming up with ways to make legal --after the fact --the crimes he had already committed. He tried to re-write the laws.

Bush told other lies and none more egregious or harmful than those he told about 911. To protect those lies, Bush quashed every effort to investigate fully the events of 911. He opposed the creation of the 911 Commission and when it was formed, he obstructed it! The result is a whitewash discounted by the Republican and Democratic co-chairs. They don't believe it! Why should you?

Bush, his co-conspirators and accomplices, floated an absurd coincidence theory that on the very day, the very moment that Dick Cheney was supervising an exercise [pdf] in which terrorists would attack the Pentagon and WTC, a rag tag gang of 'terrorists' would do precisely that! The odds alone indict our 'fearless Fuhrer'.

Our 'government', a government unlawfully seized by George W. Bush, thus declared war upon the people of the United States! As Che would have put it: the peace is already considered to be broken. Thomas Jefferson would have already declared 'our' independence of a cabal that had already destroyed the 'legitimate' government of the United States. Jefferson, in fact, declared our 'independence' of a similarly tyrannical 'George'.

The so-called 911 'Truth Movement' began with David Ray Griffin's still un-refuted paper entitled: The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True. Popular Mechanics and MSM propagandists tried to marginalize this paper but they could not refute it! PM presumes to defend an 'official theory' but there is no such 'theory' left to defend. The 911 Commission report is, in fact, the official story and even the co-chairs repudiate their own report.

Griffin is un-assailed. Last time I checked, steel still will not melt or weaken at temperatures less than 2795ºF. Bush could not rewrite the laws of physics. The 'raging infernos' inside the buildings of the WTC were no where near hot enough to have brought down the towers.

The science upon which Griffin based his paper is simply beyond the meager intellectual capacity of idiots like Bill 0'Reilly to comprehend, let alone refute. If steel will not melt at kerosene fire temperatures, then the official theory of 911 is a monumental fraud! Photos of people walking around, waving distress flags, in the hole in the North Tower where some 10,000 gallons of jet fuel was said to have been burning is absolute and irrefutable proof that the fires were never hot enough nor did they last long enough to have brought down the towers. Bushies might wish we would forget WTC 7 about which Larry Silverstein himself said "it was pulled". No airliner struck WTC7. Small, unimpressive fires were much less inflammatory than the rhetoric describing them. It's fall was described in advance by the BBC. What did the BBC know and when did they know it? The only explanation consistent with known facts it that it had been prepared in advance and was pulled just as owner Larry Silverstein said it was. This bears repeating: if WTC7 was pulled, then the official conspiracy theory is nonsense. It was pulled and the official conspiracy theory is nonsense!
Meanwhile, Flight 77 flight data, released upon an FOIA request by the NTSB, indicates that Flight 77 was at altitude of 273 feet at the time of 'impact' at the Pentagon. Therefore, Flight 77 could not possibly have crashed into the Pentagon. Flight 77 --an essential foundation of the 'official conspiracy theory' --could not possibly be true.

In either case, Bush can cite no evidence in support of his absurd lie, his absurd and ludicrous 'official' conspiracy theory in which four flights were hijacked by 19 incompetent pilots. Besides, many of the 'said' hijackers are still alive. The 'official conspiracy theory' cannot account for this fact. The FBI, meanwhile, is on record as having said that there is no evidence linking Bin Laden with the events of 911. Yet --the myths and lies persist among some segments of the population! There is always a high price to be paid for indulging psychotic delusions.

If anything said by Bush at any time about anything has ever been true, then why did Bush oppose the creation of the 911 commission? What was he afraid of?

Why did the Bush administration oppose the creation of a 911 Commission? Why did Bush interfere consistently with the 911 commission when it was, at last, created despite his objections?

Why was 911 forensic evidence destroyed?

Why did Bush sell off WTC steel?

Why did Bush lie about his own activities on 911?

Why did Bush claim to have seen the first plane strike the first tower when there was no live coverage of the event? If he saw it, how could he have seen it? How was that possible? The 'official conspiracy theory' cannot explain it. It was a miracle. Perhaps Bush was psychic!

Why was Dick Cheney supervising a 'scenario' that gamed precisely what, in fact, really happened? How could he have done that?

What are the odds that this incredible and absolutely amazing event would occur for real and on the very day that it was "gamed"? Perhaps Cheney was likewise psychic or had supernatural powers!

Dick Cheney was in a perfect position to have supervised the act of high treason and mass murder that we now call 911. Put Dick Cheney under oath. Demand that he explain his famous "stand down" order given to Norman Mineta! Indict Dick Cheney upon the probable cause that, on Bush's behalf, he supervised the crime of 911.
How coincidental was it that the British Government, like Dick Cheney earlier, gamed the subway bombings on the very day that they happened in fact? The British government was obviously psychic. There is no other explanation. If there is an innocent explanation for that, I would like to hear it from the horse's mouth --Tony Blair himself. If Tony cannot offer up an innocent explanation, then he should join George W. Bush in the dock, charged with mass murder and terrorism. Initially, Bush successfully suppressed dissent at home but failed miserably his self-assigned task of fighting real 'terrorists' abroad. Armed with the Orwellian 'Patriot Act', Bush needed only 'deem' you a 'terrorist' to incarcerate you in a hell-hole in violation of every principle put forward by real statesmen like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. What Thomas Jefferson said of King George III, he would have said of Bush without a re-write. He would have supported efforts to remove Bush. He would have supported efforts to detain Bush, to charge him, try him, and carry out the requisite executions. In Jefferson's day, traitors were hanged, possible shot.
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness"

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
Che Guevara said essentially the same thing in his classic treatise on guerrilla warfare.
"When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken."

--Che Guevara, Chapter I: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare
Che may have been prescient. Certainly --the "forces of oppression" had maintained themselves in power "against established law". Bush had personally ordered the illegal and treasonous dismantling of established Constitutional law, which he dismissed with a smirk: "The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper"! Bush broke the law, subverted the law, ordered the law changed to suit him, and had re-written the law --on the fly --with signing statements, nothing more nor less than decrees. He has ordered his attorneys to render opinions telling him what he wanted to hear. What he wanted to hear was an 'opinion' propping up his delusion that the crimes he had already committed could be made legal after the fact.

His most egregious offense were those in which he flouted the supreme law of the land --the Constitution. Bush's attack on the Constitution had been foreseen by the founders and by the man who occupied Monticello. David Hume wrote:
"When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."
--David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government
Bush resorted to unprecedented measures to shut up his opposition. He was aided by the 'mass media' which had become little more than a right wing echo chamber. The Progressive Movement must demand of the new administration that the laws regulating the huge media monopolies be reviewed. It is time for a new "Communications Act", perhaps one as good as the one Ronald Reagan scrapped because the media was a threat to the liars who backed his own crooked, right wing regime. 

The biggest threats to 'our way of life' are the governments that are presumably elected to preserve them. Bush is the best example of this. Bush's very first official lie was the one he told as he took the oath of office! He placed his hand on a black book and, with a smirk, he swore to protect, defend and uphold the Constitution. It is the voice of the people that are put down in the Constitution and so proclaimed in the preamble:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Enemies of the Constitution are, therefore, enemies of the people. Bush's occupancy of the White House was an 'occupation' as odious as that of any foreign invader or hostile power. His legacy is that he worked to subvert the principles of our founding, our heritage, what it means to be 'American'. He betrayed our nation with the crimes of subversion, mass murder, aggressive war, and high treason. He waged war upon the sovereign people of the United States! It is now up to us to make certain that the historical record will show that though Bush waged war upon us, he lost!