July 05, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

KING GEORGE AND GEORGE W. BUSH

I suspect George W. Bush and Dick Cheney don't want the American people to read the Declaration of Independence too closely. Flags, fireworks, parades, and barbecues were all fine for the Fourth of July, but the real reason for the holiday is embedded in the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson talked about King George III of Britain, and King George bears some striking similarities to George W. Bush. Even though he was not even legitimately elected, Bush has continued to defy the will of the American people and the will of the world. The commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence was just the latest in a long line of abuses. Bob Geiger comments at bobgeiger.blogspot.com:

No matter how we the people want to be governed or how we decide we want our country to look, Bush sticks stubbornly to what he wants, to what he mandates and what he decides in his delusional world of absolute power and authority over all he surveys.

It's a bitter irony that what we celebrate today is deliverance from just such an absolute power and authority in the form of King George III, about whom the Founding Fathers railed in the majority of the Declaration of Independence and from whom they declared our freedom. We broke away from the colonial rule of a tyrant and, in the preamble to this sacred document, we stated that our leaders are ultimately governed by those for which government is created and that those elected president get "their just powers from the consent of the governed."

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 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.

We declared our break from a monarch, an absolute ruler, in 1776 when the 13 colonies risked it all to repudiate that form of government and to say that the leader of what would become the new United States of America should listen to the will of the people and not the other way around.

THE PUNDIT CLASS IS UPSET

We're not supposed to have any opinions of our own, you and I. We're supposed to listen to those august pundits perched high in their ivory towersfor what to believe. It's the people like George Will, Thomas Friedman, Cokie Roberts, and other defenders of the establishment who we are supposed to follow. Then there's David Broder, Pundit of Pundits, who's upset that we, the great unwashed, are exhibiting a "virulent populism." How dare we. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

That's right, as his fellow pundits in Washington frantically buy milk, flashlights, dehydrated food and duct tape from their besieged wood-paneled offices, this inspirational man has found the courage - no, the Leadership - to say enough is enough. Like Thomas Paine himself, St. David Broder has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to declare that "a particularly virulent strain of populism" has emerged. And, says St. David, the consequences threaten America, and perhaps the entire Planet because this populism "has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion." He makes this powerful assertion with compelling fury - fearlessly ignoring the fact that Congress still refuses to create a universal health care system, expand environmental regulations, rescind the Bush tax cuts or end the war in Iraq - all things national opinion polls show the public is demanding.

St. David instead "proves" his manifesto by specifically attacking Congress's recent moves to respond to the 2006 election mandate and try to change America's lobbyist-written and pundit backed trade policies that have thrown millions of workers out of their jobs, driven wages down, torn apart health care and pension benefits - all while inflating profit margins on Wall Street and K Street. That the Secret Trade Deal of 2007 was delayed and that fast-track will be terminated with the strong support of millions of Americans but over the objections of the Washington pundit class - this, above all else, he says, is the most frightening form of "mob rule."