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Posted on 09/27/2001 10:51:09 AM PDT by dyed_in_the_wool

Bush and Company's Grab for a Blank Check

NEW YORK -- We've been treated to some astonishingly vile images over the last two weeks: office workers hurling themselves into a hundred-floor-high abyss. A gaping, smouldering hole in the financial center of our greatest city. George W. Bush passing himself off as a patriot, even as he disassembles the Constitution with the voracious glee of piranha skeletonizing a cow.

"There is no opposition party," Republican congressional leader Trent Lott chillingly announced as Democratic counterpart Tom Daschle watched in silent, cowed assent after Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress. And even if it's mainly the result of our pathetic desire to follow someone -- anyone -- in the aftermath of Sept. 11, there's little opposition out in the cities and towns across our vast continent: Bush's job-approval rating is hovering up there with puppies and sunny days.

It may have seemed meaningless at the time, but now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives -- so that we'd all forget how Bush stole a presidential election. And as it turns out, national amnesia was only the beginning.

"War" was declared against America Sept. 11, Bush told us, and we're declaring "war" right back. War against whom? Afghanistan (news - web sites)? Iraq? Canada? You declare war against a nation-state, not against terrorists living inside a country. You can ask a foreign government to extradite accused terrorists for trial, but you're not likely to get very far if you don't share good diplomatic relations. According to the Constitution, the president doesn't declare war -- Congress does.

Without so much as an invocation of the Constitution-bending War Powers Act -- which would allow the president to commit troops for a limited time -- here we are at "war." Troops are being mobilized and allies are being gathered to fight ... whomever. Whatever. Wherever. Wallowing in a level of cynicism unseen since Lyndon Johnson conned Congress into the Vietnam War based on a Tonkin Gulf incident that never happened, Bush has capitalized on a nation's grief, confusion and anger to extort a political blank check payable in young American blood.

Oh, right. First we have to "get" -- read, murder -- alleged terrorist mastermind and perennial bugaboo Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). "We rule out the possibility of his handover to America without substantial evidence," Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen said Sept. 24. This demand is nothing more than any country, not least the United States, would insist upon before extradition; the Bushies call this adherence to basic international law "a stalling tactic." But even if you don't believe that the Afghan government deserves this courtesy after all they've done (whatever that is), how about us? After all, we live -- or lived, before the Supreme Court subverted it last December -- in a democracy. Aren't we entitled to see some definitive proof tying bin Laden and/or the Taliban to the hijack attacks before we send our sons and daughters off to die in the Hindu Kush?

JFK showed us survelliance photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba. TV cameras followed troops into battle in Vietnam. But according to an anonymous defense official quoted by Reuters, "There is a new way of doing business here, and it's not in the sunshine." And the "war" itself will be waged far away from prying journalists. "It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations -- secret even in success," smirks Bush.

We're at war with whoever Bush decides is our enemy. Not only won't he tell us how or why they're our enemies, he won't tell us how or why we're attacking them or how or why our citizens are getting killed trying to do it. Welcome to 'cause-I-said-so-ocracy. "Operations like those mounted by special forces are played out in the shadows," Edward Turzanski, a LaSalle University national security analyst, told Reuters. "It is not even clear that operations in which troops might be killed will be disclosed, at least right away."

"It's important as this war progresses that the American people understand we make decisions based upon classified information, and we will not jeopardize the sources," Bush arrogantly announced Sept. 24. "We will not make the war more difficult to win by publicly disclosing classified information."

For a man who hired goons to physically threaten Florida election officials, Bush is asking an awful lot of us in his one-man war against the world. Let's get this straight: We're supposed to believe this guy's account of "classified" information -- even while he tells us that, from now on, he'll be lying to us for our own good?

If ever there was a classic naked-emperor moment, it was the morning after Bush's address to Congress. A competently delivered, committee-written hack job was breathlessly equated by liberals and conservatives alike to FDR's and Churchill's soaring oratorical highlights. Such is our craving for leadership that we're annointing a doltish daddy's-boy who still won't come clean about his DWI record with the mandate of heaven.

Pacificism is no way to run a superpower. If concrete proof can be presented that a group or individual directly participated in the massacre of thousands of New Yorkers and Washingtonians, those people deserve to be brought to justice or killed in the attempt to apprehend them. I, for one, would shed no tears for the inhumane scum who caused so much misery to so many. But the memories of our dead will be poorly served if we let right-wing extremists bring about the imperial presidency Bush is shoving down our throats. Blank-check democracy, if you stop to think about it, is no democracy at all.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is author of the new books "2024" and "Search and Destroy.")

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