The past is dead, the future is unimaginable
I would say I’m stunned at how rapidly we’ve arrived at a point like this, but even thinking those words, I hear the voices of millions before me echoing hollowly the same dumb astonishment when their beautiful, prosperous, enlightened countries at one time or another descended into the same unthinking darkness.
Maybe it wasn’t so rapid, either. Maybe we should have been listening to Noam Chomsky all along.
Another defining power of tyrants is to suspend or nullify elections whose outcomes they don’t like. But really, when you have the first power, you don’t need the second one. Under the law now being debated, nothing, nothing would stop President Bush if he decided to, say, imprison the next Democratic presidential candidate — or any journalist willing to convey that candidate’s message to the voting public.
If he’s not willing to go quite that far, as a backup it always helps to have the largest maker of the nation’s ballot machines in your back pocket.
September 29th, 2006 at 6:08 am
[...] The House and the Senate approved the detainee bill. Bush is expected to sign it into law this weekend. At that point, and until it is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (which is by no means assured, given the partisanship of that body and the technicality that the only ones with the legal “standing” to challenge the new law will be those who have already been isolated from the legal system), America will be a dictatorship, with a head of government empowered to define the “enemy” as he sees fit and make any such person disappear forever with no legal remedy at all. [...]