I haven't commented much about the Cheney/Bush torture policy, and now this business about the wiretaps. All of this is beyond what reasonable people can disagree about. It has come to a point where I find it all but impossible to even engage in conversation with people who would still support this administration. It's beyond rational argument at this point.
Human beings have a limitless capacity for self-justification. People can talk themselves into anything. And people do not rise to positions of power who have not honed their capacity for self-decception and the deception of others into a highly developed skill. They are expert seducers of the mind. And while such seducers need to be given a fair hearing, at some point the gavel has to come down. The time for argument is over.
There comes a time where a line is crossed, and you have to stand on one side or the other. For me this administration crossed the line some time ago. But now there is no excuse, given all that we know about this administration, for any one who thinks it has any moral legitimacy. I can deal with such people now as I would someone who has joined a cult. One can only hope sooner or later such a person will come to his senses. But rational argument is pointless.
I always thought that Iran/Contra was a far more serious case of the government's abuse of power than Watergate, and now we are finding out that this administration is setting all-time lows for power abuse. It seems as if every time we get a Republican government in the White House, it feels compelled to outdo previous GOP administrations in abusing our democracy.
It's shameful. It's so exceedingly shameful, we haven't
taken the full measure of it yet. In part it's because Republicans are socialized to feel shame only about sex. Greed and abuses of power? That's just healthy ambition. That's just looking after one's interests. And so the truth is that we're in some kind of
denial that things could be as bad as they are. We're living in a fun house hall of mirrors where the perverse is distorted to seem normal and the normal distorted to seem perverse.
The Republican Party at the national level has come to represent everything that is worst in the American character. It really has. From its slick, corporate country club elites like Bill Frist to its rapacious rednecks like Tom Delay, this party has presented the ugliest face of America to the world since the Nixon Administration. The Democrats are bad, but the Republicans are just plain scary awful.
Three more years. Think of it. God help us if we are attacked again. It will be bad enough to sustain the horrors that will accompany such an attack. But even worse will be the abuses perpetrated by the operatives within this administration who long to turn our country into a police state. They are checked for the time being. The U.S. Senate found enough backbone to say No to torture and to the Patriot Act. But they will regroup, and we have not seen the last of them by a long shot.