The Day America Died

Actually, our country died on December 12, 2000, when a partison Supreme Court, instead of addressing the widespread disenfranchisement of voters, instead decided to give the presidency to George W. Bush.

But the final nail in the coffin of America was hammered in yesterday, when the Senate decided to give a president who has said on at least three separate occaisons that he could like to be a dictator and whose spokesman once said, "If you're not with us, you're against us" and "People shloud watch what they say, watch what they do" absolute and unilaterla authority to decide who is an enemy of the state.

And BOTH of my Senators went along with it.

I decided after the 2004 election that I would never again give one craven Democrat my vote. And if that means I'm like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding the gun to my own head, so be it. I had already decided that I would not vote for Paul Aronsohn for Congress in November, because he is the WORST kind of craven, finger-in-the-wind Democrat, and since that house seat is Republican already, it's not a loss. I was, however, planning to be a good soldier and vote for Bob Menendez despite his support for a flag-burning amendment because that Senate seat is Democratic, it's a tight race, and I do not want to lose that seat.

Mr. Menendez will now not get my vote, because he, along with Frank Lautenberg, voted yesterday for torture, for an end to habeas corpus, to allow President Bush to name anyone he doesn't like as an enemy combatant and put that person into a gulag forever -- to "disappear" people just the way Augusto Pinochet did.

Why on earth should I vote for people who go along with this?

Predictably, the people who still want desperately to believe that the entrenched Washington Democrats represent a viable alternative, are insisting that the courts will sort it out -- people like this diarist at Daily Kos:

every day that we obsess over this meaningless kabuki bullshit farce, we lose another day that we can spend talking about shit that doesn't go right over the heads of the American people at best, or make us look like terrorist enablers at worst.

Shit like Iraq. Afghanistan. What Bush did to stop 9/11. Cronyism. Corruption. Healthcare. The economy the rest of us live in.

So please, PLEASE CALM DOWN!!! America isn't dead. The Constitution isn't dead. Nothing has changed.

There's a REASON they're doing this so close to the election. There's no big torture emergency out there: they just want a good distraction, and Bush wants to try some lame attempt at covering his ass in case there's a stiff-spined Democratic congress at his heels in 2007.

So get over it. Let the Republicans have their meaningless political theater. It changes absolutely nothing, and it will be struck down by the first, second and third courts that get their hands on it.

And then send some REAL Americans--the ones with (D)s after their names--to Congress. Because that's what REALLY matters here.

Yup, real Americans with (D) after their names -- like Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez, right? Twelve Democrats caved in and voted to give George W. Bush dictatorial authority over all of us -- and two of them were Senators from New Jersey. Even Joe Lieberman's moral scold Mini-Me, Barack Obama, managed to break from his mentor (who predictably voted Yea) to vote against this travesty.

But not Frank Lautenberg and not Bob Menendez.

Why do these people insist on believing that the Bush Administration works in good faith on ANYTHING? Even the American people are starting to wise up -- but not Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez. It's more important to not "appear" to be "soft on terrorists" than to actually take the time and the effort to frame the case why voting to turn George W. Bush into a dictator doesn't keep anyone safe -- in fact, it puts us in even more danger. Even Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who is no stranger to the Craven Political Whore tactic, said:

“The only reason to worry about the politics of it is if you don’t understand it and don’t have the guts to stand up and defend your vote,”

The terrorists did, in fact win on September 11. They frightened us into forgetting about history and believing that the greatest experiment in democracy in modern history could not be allowed to continue, that having the kind of dictatorial leader with whom history is littered, the kind whose societies ALWAYS crash and burn, was preferable to the liberty for which generations of Americans have died.

With this vote yesterday, the United States Senate -- including two New Jersey Senators with (D) after their names -- spit on the graves of every last one of them.