Alito is a long-time member of the reactionary Federalist Society and if you want to know how he will rule on the highest court in the land, look no further than this organization and its membership. “Initial funding for the Federalist Society came from the Institute for Educational Affairs, a group founded by Irving Kristol and William Simon,” notes Right Web. “The elder Kristol remained an important funding adviser, while his son William Kristol became closely involved with the Federalist Society, by writing for its publications and speaking frequently at its gatherings. Other early funding came from Pittsburgh mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, the Olin Foundation, Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation,” in other words, the Federalist Society is infested with the usual Straussian neocon and PNAC suspects. Bush administration insiders and former insiders who are members of the Federalist Society include Michael Chertoff, Spencer Abraham, Gale Norton, John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson, and John Bolton.

“The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis,” Paul Craig Roberts wrote earlier this month. “The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more ‘energy in the executive.’ Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government…. September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler’s hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush’s claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?”

I wouldn’t put it past them—in fact, if I was a betting man, I’d say this is precisely what will happen: another nine eleven, possibly one of a larger magnitude, will put the finishing touches on the murder of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. As a side bet, I’d wager this will happen sooner before later, maybe even as soon as this March, as the dollar plummets and the sirens or war (or shock and awe) wail over Iran. Bush (or rather the Straussian neocons since Bush is basically an empty shell, a cardboard cut-out, a cigar store Indian) will need another terror attack on the homeland to consolidate the power of the Straussians, who live in the ponderous philosophical shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt (the last two were hands-on Nazis). As Shadia B. Drury noted in her 1997 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, Strauss’ protégés include: Paul Wolfowitz, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork; William Kristol, William Bennett; Alan Keyes, Francis Fukuyama, John Ashcroft, and William Galston.

Jeffrey Steinberg writes:

The hallmark of Strauss’ approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by “philosophers,” who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish “populist” mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude. For Strauss and all of his protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students, and the “Straussians” now dominate most university political science and philosophy departments), the greatest object of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing better than a weak, pathetic replay of “liberal democratic” Weimar Germany.

Now, with the confirmation of Alito, these “philosophers” and “absolute rulers” will finish the task of trashing the “universal principles of natural law,” that is to say the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and especially Thomas Jefferson’s appeal to unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. Instead of John Locke, we will get Thomas Hobbes and his theory of bellum omnium contra omnes, or “war of all against all,” the preferred state of political exchange in the Straussian world.

Of course, the American people are blissfully unaware to all of this and will—with the advent of another nine eleven, possibly of greater and more horrible magnitude—be deceived into “clueless servitude” and likely suffer the fate of the German people as the Weimar republic was systematically destroyed and Hitler ascended to his throne.

Hitler, unlike Bush and the Straussian neocons, however, didn’t have nuclear weapons at his disposal.

That's especially puzzling because, since Sept. 11, 2001, the plan has focused on one variation or another of the same theme: Republicans are tough on our enemies, Democrats are not. If you don't want to get blown up, vote Republican.

Thus Rove's speech to the Republican National Committee last Friday, which conveniently said nothing about that pesky leak investigation. Rove noted that we face "a ruthless enemy" and "need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in."

"President Bush and the Republican Party do," Rove informed us. "Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."

Rove went on: "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

Oh, no, those Dems aren't unpatriotic, just security idiots.

Here's why the same approach keeps working.

First, note that phrase, "the same cannot be said for many Democrats." This is Rove's wedge through the Democratic Party. Rove has always counted on Bush's capacity to intimidate some Democrats into breaking with their party and saying something like: "Oh, no, I'm not like those weak Democrats over there. I'm a tough Democrat." The Republicans use such Democrats to bash the rest of the party.

Moreover, these early Rove speeches turn Democratic strategists into defeatists. The typical Democratic consultant says: "Hey, national security is a Republican issue. We shouldn't engage on that. We should change the subject." In the 2002 elections, the surefire Democratic winners were a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare (an issue Bush tried to steal), a patients' bill of rights, the economy and education. Those issues sure worked wonders, didn't they?

By not engaging the national-security debate, Democrats cede to Rove the power to frame it. Consider that clever line about Democrats having a pre-9/11 view of the world. The typical Democratic response would be defensive: "No, no, of course 9/11 changed the world." More specifically, there's a lot of private talk among Democrats that the party should let go of the issue of warrantless spying on Americans because the polls show that a majority values security and safety.

What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that 9/11 line. Does having a "post-9/11 worldview" mean allowing President Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants to, without having to answer to the courts, to Congress or the public?

Most Americans — including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans — reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren't willing to take on this issue, what's the point of being an opposition party?

Democrats want to fight this election on the issue of Republican corruption. But corruption is about the abuse of power. If smart political consultants can't figure out how to link the petty misuses of power with its larger abuses, they are not earning their big paychecks.

And, yes, the core questions must be asked: Are we really safer now than we were five years ago? Has the Iraq War, as organized and prosecuted by the administration, made us stronger or weaker? Do we feel more secure knowing the heck of a job our government did during Hurricane Katrina? Do we have any confidence that the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies will clean up their act if Washington remains under the sway of one-party government?

Imagine one Super Bowl team tipping the other to a large part of its offensive strategy. Smart coaches would plot and plan and scheme. You wonder what Democrats will do with the 10-month lead time Rove has kindly offered them.

E.J. Dionne's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com

Senators were to consider Alito as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on Wednesday with an eye toward getting him on the Supreme Court before
President Bush's State of the Union speech Jan. 31.

As of late Tuesday, the federal appeals court judge had enough vote commitments for confirmation — a simple majority in the 100-member Senate — with 50 Senate Republicans plus Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska publicly saying through their representatives, in interviews with The Associated Press or in news releases that they would vote for him.

One Republican, Sen. Craig Thomas (news, bio, voting record) of Wyoming, made his decision after meeting with Alito in his Senate office on Tuesday. "His judicial experience is second to none and I'm confident he will do an excellent job handling his constitutional responsibility," Thomas said.

Five Republicans, 23 Democrats and independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont were still publicly undecided or refused to say how they would vote on Alito's nomination. The nominee was meeting with two of the undecided Democrats, Sens. Patty Murray and Jay Rockefeller, on Wednesday in hopes of gaining their votes.

With Alito's ultimate confirmation assured, both Republicans and Democrats were preparing to use him as a campaign issue. Republicans said the Democratic filibuster of lower-court judges helped them defeat the re-election bid of former Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota two years ago.

Democrats, as they did during contentious Judiciary Committee hearings, could use the next few days on Alito's confirmation to continue the debate over the extent of presidential powers. Issues such as the Bush administration's treatment of terror suspects and its domestic spying program are likely to come before the Supreme Court.

As an appeals court judge, said Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., Alito "refuses to enforce core constitutional standards protecting individuals against low-level government officials in routine situations. There's no reason to believe he'll say no to a president who violates individual rights under the cloak of national security."

Democrats also worry that Alito, along with new Chief Justice John Roberts, would make the court more conservative and could even help overturn major decisions such as
Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that declared abortion a fundamental constitutional right.

"Roberts, who promised us humility, who promised us that he would be looking to chart a middle course, we see time and again that he's falling in league with Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, referring to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the court's most conservative members. "My fear is that we are adding a fourth vote to that coalition with Sam Alito's nomination. And that's why I'm going to vote no."

Twenty Democrats already have publicly opposed Alito's nomination. All of the eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against him Tuesday, leading to a 10-8 party-line vote for the 55-year-old judge from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The only way Democrats could stop Alito is through a filibuster, a maneuver they show little interest in trying. Thus Democrats are working to get a large opposition vote to score points against President Bush.

"I think it sends a message to the American people that this guy is not King George, he's President George," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.

Republicans say Alito is a perfect choice for the high court. They praise his parrying of Democratic attacks on his judicial record and personal credibility during his confirmation hearings this month.

"If anybody has demonstrated judicial temperament and poise and patience, it is Judge Alito, And he ought to be confirmed on that basis alone," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said.

Roberts won the votes of 22 Democrats last year, including three on the Judiciary Committee — ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont as well as Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl. Those three senators voted against Alito on Tuesday.

Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst

The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.

Impeachment hearings? Who's talking about impeachment hearings?

"A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment," an administration source said.

A coalition in Congress? Since we're in touch with the Members of Congress in the House who are most likely to impeach Bush, I think we'd know about such a coalition. But right now, there isn't a single Member willing to advocate impeachment. That's why we're launching The Henry Gonzalez Project - to find one Member who is as brave as former Rep. Henry Gonzalez.

Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February.

OK, they're not talking about the House - but about the Senate. Under the Constitution, impeachment begins in the House. So what's going on here?

They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.

Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush.

OK, now a motive for the article is emerging: Karl Rove is trying to scare Republican Senators away from asking hard questions about NSA wiretapping, because otherwise they will be unwitting dupes "helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush." Is that clear, Arlen?

"Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president," the source said. "If we work hard, there could be a tie."

OK, so the White House is concerned about losing a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A vote on what exactly?

The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant.

The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying.

Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome.

"Impeachment is a remedy," Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. "After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price."

This is all very confusing. It is unlikely that the Senate Judiciary Committee would "conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law." What would be the point of such a vote? The only possible reason would be to refer the issue to the Justice Department for a possible criminal indictment. But in what parallel universe would Attorney General Gonzales indict himself?

Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration's argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Hmm - that's two Republican votes on a committee that is 10-8 Republican, so the White House could lose a 10-8 vote. That assumes all the other Republicans support warrantless wiretapping: Hatch, Grassley, Kyl, DeWine, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn. Do all of these guys really love Tyranny and hate Freedom? Hatch, Kyl and DeWine are all up for election this year and may have tough races. Do they really want to run as the Tyrannical Three?

On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush,

Very sorry, but Gore won Florida when all the votes were counted. Karl Rove definitely wrote this article!

accused the president of "indifference" to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," Mr. Gore said.

"I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country."

Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration's domestic surveillance program.

The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the "Gang of Eight."

Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Well, that proves the purpose of this article is to scare Senators. I wonder who on Karl Rove's staff wrote this propaganda - and how much Rove paid Rev. Moon out of our tax dollars to publish it?

Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton.

They've been trying to pin this one on Clinton for a month - but that dog won't hunt. Even former Rep. (and current CIA head) Porter Goss said the Clinton's NSA did not eavesdrop on innocent Americans.

"The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security," an administration source said.

Oh really? Then why is Karl Rove still in the White House - with a security clearance???

"We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them,

Oh really? So why did Bush stay on vacation after he got the August 6 2001 memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"? And why did Bush let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora? And why did Bush invade Iraq, which posed no threat to the U.S., while letting North Korea and Iran escalate their nuclear programs?

our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress."

Hypocritical? Congress isn't spying on millions of innocent Americans - George Bush is!!!!!!!!

Update 1: Moonwatcher extraordinaire Joseph Cannon asks "'Why is Moon pushing the [impeachment] idea now?' After all, the Korean Khrist has long been close to Dubya's daddy."

Images never before seen by a mass population, from every conceivable angle, played and replayed over and over again thanks to the power of television caused a massive paradigm shift the likes of which has never been seen or studied. The gravitational pull towards fundamentalist Christian religion by millions of people is one such reality of the aftereffects of 9/11, as humans tend to seek comfort and answers through religion when the world seems most dangerous and troubled. It is religion, through its myths and fantasies, its gods and parables, that can accommodate the fragile minds inherent in the human condition, offering short-term comfort and security through faith in the invisible and belief in the unknown.

At a time when millions needed to find solace and answers to the evil witnessed on 9/11 Christian extremism opened its doors. When the world was spinning out of control, bursting America’s bubble of security, fundamentalist Christianity took full advantage, absorbing those wanting to understand why God had allowed such wickedness upon our shores. Psychologically fragile, weak-minded and made vulnerable by the events of 9/11, millions quickly believed the lies of false prophets and corrupt high priests, the excuses made by fear engendering televangelists, the reasoning as stated by greed mongering evangelists. God allowed 9/11 to happen, millions were told, because America had become a debauched society, threatened by homosexuality, allowing the mass murder of pin-size zygotes and abandoning the ways of the Bible. America had been allowed to fall away from its Christian ways, and so the always psychotic God had, once again, wrought violence, death and destruction upon the lands of those breaking covenants with the Almighty.

The reality of why 9/11 happened was never told those seeking answers; the truth behind the attacks was destroyed in favor of lies of convenience and opportunity, where high priests saw benefit in tragedy, like good snake-oil salesmen ready to take advantage of opportunity, seeing a chance to expand religious belief and personal power in a society turning more secular and progressive every year. Millions were told what they wanted to hear, not what would help shake their foundations. Of course the fictions of false prophets and the reality of truth have always been mutually exclusive, with truth an enemy of those seeking the control of thought.

It is these charlatans that thrive off of the misfortunes, stresses and tragedies of others, waiting, like sharks in open water, for the right moment to strike, knowing exactly when the human mind is at its most vulnerable, weak enough to succumb to the whispered shrieks of false comfort and fictitious security, its trauma making willing servants of millions to institutionalized control. To the false prophets and high priests, 9/11 became the catalyst needed to push the agenda and interests of the extreme Christian right, presenting this group with the wallets, energy and political power of millions of fragile psyches and frightened converts. As a result, the influence of fundamentalist Christianity has only risen exponentially since 9/11, creating a deep rift throughout the nation.

What should have been eroded over time through civilization’s natural evolution and progression, with the healthy and continued accumulation of America’s wealth, progress, education and an increased standard of living has instead remained strong, in fact gaining numbers and momentum, threatening to help erase centuries of progress and struggle. The prosperity afforded America since its inception, together with its rising secularism, along with the separation of church and state enforced since the nation’s founding, should have been enough to sentence fundamentalist theology to the fringes of society. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. This is the reality of 21st century America, a land modern and progressive yet fighting itself over a return to Middle Ages thought and understanding, with millions of citizens preferring the unenlightenment of Dark Ages rather than the liberation of modern thinking.

Endowed with the greatest level of comfort humankind has ever witnessed, possessing a standard of living never seen in the human condition, addicted to the gluttony of materialism, its citizens living in one of the freest societies ever experienced by any people, able to bask in the riches of the world’s best technologies, education, infrastructure and society in general, America and its citizens, logic would tell us, should be headed in the direction of secularism and knowledge, reaching human enlightenment by escaping the shackles of religion and the indigence of ignorance.

Instead, America finds itself unable to exorcise itself from religious fundamentalism, with millions of its citizens refusing to enter the realm of modernity, and reality, preferring instead to remain captive believers in the myths and fables of primitive peoples living thousands of years ago. To tens of millions of Americans, Christian fundamentalism, with the Bible seen as the literal interpretation of humanity, of the planet’s creation, and of how civilization is to be managed, remains their idea of truth and of reality, even in the face of incontrovertible scientific truth proving otherwise and even with the accumulated knowledge of an ever-progressing society.

In Human Misery Religion Finds a Nest


American Christian fundamentalism, it seems, refuses to bend to the rules of human progress, becoming the exception, not the rule, of what happens to people’s religious beliefs the more education they receive and the better off they become. The more comfortable a life is made the less religious a person tends to become. The more secure a person feels the less religious he will be, and the less miserable her life is the less she will lean on religion for meaning to a life seen harsh and cruel.

The more education one receives, free of the education masking religious brainwashing from birth, has a direct correlation on the level of religious faith one has. Knowledge is power, after all, and education is liberation of free thought, a chance to see the world as it is, not as we are told it should be. There is reason why those seeking control and power consider true education and knowledge the enemy, for free thought, both analytical and logical, with reasoning and open mindedness, invariably leads to questioning of authority, to dissent, protest and debate of myths, beliefs and propaganda, and to thinking outside the box that has for millennia shackled the human mind, rendering us unable to see truth, reality and the possibilities of our own free thoughts and capabilities.

In capturing minds at the earliest possible age, when innocence is tender and naiveté bountiful, those seeking the control of souls, minds and energies know that they are more likely to have loyal slaves for an entire life, for the earlier the brainwashing commences the harder it is for the human mind to later escape its parasitic beliefs. The conditioning must begin early on, therefore, before the mind reaches the age of reason, before free thought can light dark tunnels and black holes, before the myths and fables and gods of religion can be seen for the fantasy they are.

In lives full of suffering, indigence, bitterness, disease, malnutrition and lost ability, where destinies are predetermined and inescapable, where education is nonexistent and anemic, where families are large and immobile, where faith in humanity has been replaced by the dying faith in metaphysical hope, such as those of 3 billion humans living on two dollars a day, or five billion people living on less than ten dollars a day, many living at the margins of human habitation, religion, whether fundamentalist or otherwise, finds its most suitable hosts, jumping, like a virus, from soul to soul, gorging on false faith and in the hope that a better life awaits, if not in the today then certainly in the tomorrow, if not on Earth then in the promised afterlife.

In the minds of those billions not lucky enough to escape perpetual castes of servility, forced to live lives squandered and wasted, becoming the numbers and statistics of the failed human pyramid of hierarchy, unable to ever escape a destiny not of their own making, religion becomes the only mechanism to cope, to find solace in a life rotting away in the shantytowns and shacks in which so much of mankind survives in. It is a modes of escape from the harshness of modern day living. Surviving day to day, meal to meal, rich in honor and integrity but not in material possessions, unable to offer a future to their children, powerless to escape the lives they have been chained to since birth, their innocence destroyed at an early age, their education halted even earlier, billions are forced to believe in and place blind faith in the invisible and unseen, for the visible and seen have failed to bear fruit, becoming utter disappointments to billions of people.

Exploited by and subjugated to the wickedness of their fellow man, abandoned to the fortune of misery, billions find in religion answers to questions about why their life has been so full of injustice and inequality, why they have been made to suffer endlessly, while a tiny minority thrives in the splendors of wealth and luxury, basking in opportunity and fortuitous birth. God has a plan for them, they are told; theirs is the kingdom of God, but only if they follow God’s legions of high priests, and only if they allow religious institutions to have dominion and control over their daily lives. They are not to seek happiness on Earth, for it certainly awaits them in heaven; they must simply place blind faith in an entity that has never been proved to exist.

They are taught that in suffering and poverty they will find the keys to salvation, unaware that only through education and opportunity will they find escape and futures. They are told to succumb to exploiters and subjugators, to market colonialism and the tentacles of neoliberalism. They are told to multiply as much as possible, with birth control being forbidden, not understanding that the more children they have the less resources they and their children will possess, thereby condemning the entire family to perpetual indigence and socio-economic immobility. More children means less education, which invariably means less of an ability to question authority or become threats to the system, and more of a probability to become the slaves of the high priests. Women are told to stay home and become factories of procreation, becoming subservient slaves to their husband masters, for women are told they were created out of a single male rib, not even worthy of a leg or arm. Yet only in female emancipation from paternalistic cultures will both women and their families find betterment, freedom and an opportunity to escape perpetual caste societies.

Billions are told that the Christian god has a plan for them after their life on Earth, that one must remain a faithful servant of religion and of institutionalized dogma, thus of human institutions, allowing themselves to be controlled by the high priests and elite who make of religion the opiate of the masses. Billions are told that education is not of importance, that it can be abandoned after a few measly years. When it is provided, it becomes another way to indoctrinate heathens to religion, brainwashing and conditioning the still developing human brain to the control mechanisms of theology. Real education is liberation, and those that control know this, which is why they abhor it; knowledge is their kryptonite, the antibiotic to their epidemic. Is it any wonder why the nations with the lowest per capita investments in education also have some of the highest percentages of their population who are deeply religious?

Around the world, religious fundamentalist belief thrives in anemic, poor, angry, exploited and undereducated peoples, those residing inside nations commonly described as “third world,” abandoned by incompetent governments and adopted by neo-liberal chicanery, billions lacking the liberation that comes with knowledge, the free thought that arises through education and the standards of living associated with prosperity. They are the ones born not in the apex of human civilization, such as those northern nations rich and developed, but in those resembling the armpit of humanity, those raped of resources, capital and slave labor by the peoples of the north.

Religious fundamentalism is most easily engendered in the soup of poverty, hopelessness, ignorance and bitterness, where humans, their faith in humanity eviscerated by the suffering that is their lives, living in the trenches of what modern day living affords billions of souls, are made to believe in the unseen greatness of invisible gods. It is blind faith in the unseen that gives them hope to press onward even as their high priests only work to subjugate them deeper into misery. Is it any wonder why religion is most strong in the nations of the south, whose peoples live in endemic poverty and perpetual misery, unable to receive substantial education nor opportunity, and almost extinct in wealthy and secular Europe, where only grey hair can be seen in decaying churches?

Created in Our Own Image


From birth hundreds of millions of humans are conditioned to believe in the despotic god of the Bible, a sadistic, vengeance-filled, incompetent leader with deep psychological and anger management issues, a violent, destructive and blood-thirsty entity playing with the psyches of the same creations molded out its image. This god, it seems, has a fascination with human war, with murder and criminality and masochistic lives, granted that humans killing humans, oftentimes for pleasure, are an inherent part of the human condition. This god relishes poverty and suffering of billions, given the present state of humankind, allowing squalor in most nations and bestowing riches upon few. It is allowing us to destroy ourselves, and the Eden it supposedly created, forever remaining a clandestine, missing and unfound entity for thousands of years.

Indeed, it seems that it prefers the rich few over the poor many, the powerful over the weak, the sinful over the honorable, those that exploit over those that are exploited, choosing injustice over justice, inequality over equality, death over survival and ignorance over knowledge. This so-called god allows the miserable death and suffering of millions every year to HIV/AIDS, particularly black humans from Sub-Sahara Africa, creating entire generations of orphaned children. It allowed for the slaughter and suffering of its chosen people during World War II, the Inquisition and other such persecutions over time. It grants sustenance to murder and mayhem in Rwanda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions of human beings have died, slaughtered to feed the ravenous need that is our embedded appetite for human violence and war. The god of man allows for wars of religion, wars in its name, where humans fight humans based on whose religious beliefs are right and superior. It is these wars, so full of hatred and bloodletting, carrying the icons of the god of man, committed in the name of the Almighty, that have killed more humans than any other human made or naturally spawned cataclysm in the history of human existence.

This so-called god allows for the extinction of his creations and the destruction of his paradise by the same organism molded in its own image. If such a god existed, it would be called an utter failure, for the state of human affairs, since our Diaspora out of Africa, has been war, violence, destruction, suffering, exploitation and decimation of the planet and its creatures. Such a god would be impeached by its own creations, replaced with more competent gods, for it has done nothing to alleviate the perpetually decaying state of human affairs since it came into existence a few thousands years ago. Human leaders are dethroned for less serious incompetence. One need only read the Old Testament to bear witness to failure and wrath, incompetence and psychotic behavior, animalistic emotions and human passion.

Yet the god of man is a failure because it is a god concocted in man’s own image, not the other way around. It is molded in our self-image, which explains just how fallible our god really is. It espouses our animalistic behaviors and emotions because it is a creation of our most imaginative minds, fantasies of metaphysical prowess that cannot escape our own frail and fragile human psychology. The god of the Bible is a god captured by mammalian behaviors and emotions, unable to escape the human condition, no matter how hard its creators tried to concoct a being superior to us. Thus, the god of man is susceptible to the same emotions and passions as ourselves simply because it is of our own making, molded to hate as well as love, to be indifferent as well as caring, becoming enraged, seeking vengeance, destroying cities and murdering humans as it sees fit, becoming a creation unable to escape the human realm of understanding, a concoction existing and acting within the ignorance and unenlightenment of its primitive creators. It was molded as a way for us to find our place in the unknown world of yesteryear, helping to make us more secure that our fears of the unknown had purpose and that we were not alone in a world full of mystery and fright.

The god of the Bible is a mirror image of humanity itself, the best and worst of the human condition, a direct introspection of humankind. It is us and we are it.

Having gods, created by a tribe’s elder men – at a time when women had no voice—made to resemble the all-powerful male paternalistic figure, enabled followers to place reason behind that which was not understood. At a time when little was known or understood, gods were created to help man understand the complexities of nature and the vastness of the sky and earth. Through gods we became differentiated from the animal world, escaping a reality too humbling for the human ego to absorb. Through religion, gods, myth and fable a world too complex and large to fathom became easier to grasp, placing us, as usual, as the center of the known universe, the splendorous and wonderful creations of the gods, perfect entities placed in charge of Earth, masters of nature and all its creations. Man’s religion is as much our ego as our creativity.

The rise of religion, and of gods, allowed humans to believe and strive for an afterlife, for the insecure and fragile human mind cannot be made to contemplate in the reality of nothingness after death. The idea of death, and that life ends after one’s last breath, is a thoroughly taboo idea to us because of the amazing human fear of seizing to exist, of never again living, of not continuing life, of becoming the food for maggots and the fertilizer for plants, of finding darkness and not light. Through an afterlife humans could continue living, even after death, joining their god in his realm, a better place than Earth, a heaven where we can continue our life, even if only in spirit form. The idea of gods, and of a heaven, allows us to continue believing in the afterlife of human existence, making our frail and primitive minds secure that even after death we continue living. A god with a kingdom of heaven awaits us, after all.

Our egos not wanting to contemplate the reality of our evolution from the reptilian to the animal to the human worlds, nor our close relation with our primate cousins, along with the substantial behaviors, psychologies, social structures, needs, wants, passions and instincts we share with the animal world, we choose instead to believe in a primitive myth of created molded clay, borrowed rib and six day constructions of planets, a fantasy of escapism and denial, a story made up by the archaic creativity of primitive men gathering around a warm fire, knowledgeable only to the limits of their time and space, contemplating their place in the natural world, awe struck by the countless stars in the night sky and the sheer darkness enveloping them, trying to find meaning to life and purpose to existence, molding fantasies to the understandings and knowledge then known to them.

Theirs was a legend molded to the time, beliefs and place of its authors, never meant for a world of knowledge, certainties and proven analysis, where science extinguishes faith on a daily basis. Out of all creation stories, and there are hundreds known and undoubtedly thousands forever lost, all wonderful examples of the diversity of human creativity and thought, the western world adopted the one in Genesis, a metaphysical myth that helped primitive humans of thousands of years ago understand the world around them, meant for the ignorance of prehistory, not the wisdom of modernity. In its story lies not literal truth but myth and fable, tales of times long gone when the world was less known and more innocent, its complexities given meaning not by the accumulated knowledge of a thousand generations but by the experience of primitive tribes and clans whose stories were passed down orally under cover of darkness while warming to the radiance of warm fires.

Make no mistake about it, religion is a defense mechanism of the frail human ego, unable and unwilling to conceptualize the idea of who and what we truly are. It is our ego that refuses to accept the reality that we evolved, much the same way every mammal and organism on Earth has evolved, making us no different than the creatures we claim dominion over. It is our ego that wishes to ignore the possibility that there is no life after death, for human beings cannot accept death, finality and nothingness, a return to the circle of life from which all things derive. Death and finality are very difficult concepts for us to grasp, and accepting them would mean that our lives are made that much more insignificant than they already are.

Religion offers us meaning to our lives, a purpose that we are part of a much grandeur structure. It caresses our ego into the belief that we are cherished beings, special creatures molded by God himself, chosen to rule over Earth. The fear of being alone is conveniently made to disappear with the introduction of the metaphysical, for if a realm of gods and souls exists then we have purpose and are therefore not alone in the universe. Human religion allows us to comprehend, in human terms, and as far as we are capable of understanding with our primitive brains, the vast complexities of the natural world, of a universe that is larger than we can ever imagine, and it helps us better understand, by inventing fantasy and fable to explain human nature, why we are the way we are, yet failing, as always, thanks to our inflated egos, to confront the reality and truth of what the human condition truly is.

Unknown to tribal elders then but now understood by modernity is the truth of evolution, of natural selection and of the incredible mutations that have created the abundance of life on Earth as we see it today. Known now are the chemical reactions and the enzyme combinations and protein concoctions that led to the creation of homo sapiens, taking us onto a separate branch from our chimpanzee cousins, and the continued mutations, based on genetics and environment, that has led to the diversity of humanity that we see today, including those responsible for eye, skin and hair color as well as those affecting skull shape and body height.

Known to us now is our rise from East African jungles, our branching out to all corners of the planet, the 98 percent genetic similarities with our chimpanzee brethren and the evolution of our species from scavenger to cave dweller to dominator of agriculture to builder of enormous cities. The powerful truths of Darwin and Galileo and Copernicus can no longer be silenced or threatened with burning or excommunication. Books of knowledge and of enlightenment no longer face threats of bonfires. Humans seeking alternative religions or no religion at all no longer face being burned at the stake or eternal banishment. We live in the 21st century, not the Dark Ages, a product of centuries of progress and accumulated knowledge, a time when myth and fable no longer dominate and control, a time when fear of the unknown is evaporating like a thin fog, now replaced by knowledge, science and free thought.

The remnants of the Middle Ages, collections of times past and thankfully gone, are now left to gather dust in museums and libraries, hopefully never again to find refuge in human society. Gone are primitive torture devices, Church dominated literature and art, and medieval thought processes, where fear of the unknown was exploited in the accumulation of souls. Gone are indulgences, direct tickets to heaven sold by the Church for money, with their automatic forgiveness of sins granted those wealthy enough to have their bad deeds expunged. Gone are the fears engendered by the Roman Catholic Church that captured the minds, and souls, of millions; gone is its control over the masses and of society in its entirety that made conservative and regressive thought the hallmark of the Dark Ages.

Never-Ending Hypocrisy


American Christian fundamentalism has degenerated to an entity wishing a return to the Dark Ages, when religion actually controlled government, society and the minds of the masses. It is a movement dependent on the fears and ingrained hatreds of its followers, exploiting emotions and ignorance to further its ultra-conservative goals. Its leaders are false prophets and corrupt high priests preaching the teachings of Jesus but following the examples of Lucifer. They depend on the growing numbers of under educated citizens from which to replenish their ranks, becoming highly successful manipulators of fragile psychologies, using the insecurities and hatreds and hereditary prejudices of their followers to mold ordinary citizens into extremist followers of lies, distortions and manipulations.

Christian fundamentalism preaches about right to life and living in a culture of life but supports the wholesale death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Muslims and Arabs, preferring saving pin-size zygotes rather than actual human beings whose only crimes are living in Iraq and being Iraqi. Salivating at the thought of dead Muslims, these extremists support war crimes and crimes against humanity, turning a blind eye to torture and bombings and illegal kidnappings and rapes and murder, sanctifying the criminality of incompetent American leadership. They are ardent supporters of the debacle called the Iraq War, remaining mute to its atrocities even while having the audacity to preach the teachings of Jesus Christ, the most anti-war political activist to ever exist. It has often been said that these people are the biggest hypocrites on the face of the Earth.

Fundamentalists would have no problem eviscerating a women’s right to free choice and having complete control over her body, preferring the rights and freedoms of cell size structures over those of adult human beings. It seems making women once again subservient to paternalistic structures, where they can be readily controlled and subjugated, due to the threats presented on insecure males by the wiser half of humanity, is again on the agenda. Never satisfied with the emancipation of women, fundamentalists seek male control over their bodies and lives, wishing a return to days when women were dependent to and slaves of men, acting out their roles as baby factories and housewives, just as the Bible and their god command.

They have declared war upon homosexuals, thinking these people deranged deviants from Hell, acting in direct response to the literal interpretation of the thousands year old Bible (though conveniently forgetting the other many literal rules and interpretations that would undoubtedly condemn them as well), doing everything in their power to eliminate any rights gays might have. A tremendous fear of gay marriage do they possess, even though in most likelihood these activities will never affect their daily lives. Again, preaching the tolerance and acceptance of Jesus, they hypocritically hate and prejudge those different than themselves, becoming the most intolerant and bigoted people in the nation. Their ignorance is only superceded by their idiocy; their hypocrisy knows no bounds. Blind Christian fundamentalists remain to their hypocrisy and to the complete opposite actions they perform relative to the teachings of their Lord Jesus Christ.

Christian fundamentalists want to destroy the separation of church and state, allowing the reintroduction of the Dark Ages into modern times. They seek to destroy knowledge and education by introducing children to myth and fantasy wrapped around pseudo-science, renaming creationism “intelligent design,” a concept of religion at complete odds with reality and truth. They seek to condition children that the planet is only 6,500 years old, that man lived alongside dinosaurs, and that 6.5 billion humans are direct descendants from Adam and Eve, two creations popped out by God in their complete and evolved human form, failing to take into account the dynamics of evolution or the abundant evidence of our slow and gradual progression from mammal to ape to human.

Fundamentalists wish that four billion years of Earth’s history be erased from memory, replaced with a six-day creation story that has no basis in reality. They conveniently fail to report the entire findings of paleontologists and archeologists. They wish to teach children that woman was born from a single male rib, out of an entire body (what does that say about the superiority of man over woman, or the supposed inferiority of woman to men?), and that it was woman, in her deeply flawed and corrupted ways, that was the cause of eternal banishment from Eden (what does that say about the Church leaders’ trust in women’s psychology?)

Extremists wish to become the American Taliban, banning progress and all its freedom-engendering virtues. They are the book burners and music banners, the censors of enlightened programming and movies and the persecutors of knowledge. They wish to rob children of real enlightened education, wishing to teach the myths of primitive peoples upon modern minds. They wish to fight science, just like their predecessors have since time immemorial, because in science and knowledge they see a threat to their continued control of millions, for its findings continue to destroy their cherished myths and fables and tales of primitive thought. In science and knowledge they see the enemy that will birth their extinction. It is science that has exposed the illusions and fantasies of control, the impotent attempts at grasping at straws, at retaining power over human beings.

Their kind has tried to silence progress ever since science and knowledge began to question dogma. They fear it, loathe it and hate it, their fright apparent in the stench running out their pores, in the desperate attempts at suppressing human progress, in their attempts to stop enlightenment. With each myth or belief or act of faith eviscerated by our accumulated knowledge their power over us erodes further, their voices trembling and lies growing, their vague attempts at retaining their fantasies growing ever more desperate. In their literal interpretation of the Bible they fail to understand progress or the reality of the human condition, preferring to live in ignorance and unenlightened belief, choosing the faith of the never seen over the reality of the always present.

Wherever they live their hypocrisy is readily apparent, as always preaching Jesus while living Satan, hiding behind the cross while seeking Hell for others, becoming bigots and engines of hatred while hiding inside monolithic Houses of God, cheering tax cuts for the wealthy while wanting to destroy social services, wanting to erect walls to keep the poor, weak and hungry from seeking a better life. They support war while preaching peace, purposefully making themselves ignorant to death and mass murder committed in their name, all the while carrying the cross and Bible in their hands. They praise the Almighty yet raise their hands higher to the Almighty Dollar. They say they want a culture of life yet support the death penalty, but cannot allow the right of individual’s afflicting with terminal pain and suffering to die with dignity. Intolerant of other religions and other belief structures, of diverse peoples and those different than themselves, extremists can accept only their way of life, becoming the opposite of what their founder told us to do.

The threat posed by Fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or in America, is as strong as ever, yet progressive thought will not be defeated. The natural progression of human civilization is away from ignorance and fear of the unknown and towards knowledge of the world around us. History abounds with this reality. Modern times attest to this truth, for if it were not so we would still be trapped in the Middle Ages. Religion was created because we failed to understand this world of ours, and in this inability to understand where we lived and who we were a fear of the unknown arose. We needed answers and comfort, we needed to make secure our frail egos, and so religion served a valuable purpose to those people primitive and ancient. The modern world has allowed us to better understand our world as well as ourselves, and in time new ways of thinking will emerge, new spiritualities will be born, based not on the writings of tribal people living thousands of years ago but based on the time, space and knowledge of modern times.

It is only a matter of time, yet the backwards movements of humanity, exemplified best by the American Christian fundamentalists, cannot be allowed to become an insurmountable barrier to the inevitable evolution of human thought. The days of Dark Ages and of control through fear of the unknown are coming to an end, yet steadfast progress must remain, unafraid to confront the truths exposed almost daily, unafraid to battle the regressive and repressive groups among us, and unafraid to push forward the limits of human knowledge. It is better to live in truth than in fantasy, in free thought over that which is controlled, in reality over fiction. Faith in the seen and understood will always go further than faith in the never seen and unknown.

It is time to evolve religion before religion regresses us backwards yet again, as it has attempted to do for millennia, returning us to the days when tribal men sat around, afraid of darkness and the vast expanse of the universe, forcing themselves to conjure up stories to explain away their fears of the unknown, their women subservient to them, their children brainwashed from birth, their high priests and false prophets in complete control over the lives of the masses.

For 2,000 years the poisoning of the human well has taken place, becoming the strong friction and inertia slowing human progress and understanding and knowledge and spirituality down, betraying our true selves, forcing us to live in lies and fantasy, becoming the weight attached to our legs, the shackles maintaining us prisoners in the dungeons of backwardness, capturing and hypnotizing our minds, forcing us to see charades and mirages, hiding truth and reality, slowing us down just enough to hinder our immense ability and talents, robbing us of the enlightenment we are due and the renaissance that must inevitably come.

The time to cleanse the polluted waters of the well is upon us, helping build a fertile oasis from which humanity can prosper and be reborn.

In today's schools, Social Studies teachers (if there still are Social Studies teachers), instructing on the same three branches of government, would be more accurate by drawing a scalene triangle instead. Three disproportionate sides with three disproportionate angles, symbolizing disparate symmetry, imbalance and inequality. Such is the Constitutionally challenged government of George W. Bush, characterized by a megalomaniacal Executive, a codependent Legislature, and a crony-based Judiciary.

Upon closer analysis, codependency doesn't come anywhere close to describing the self-destructive behavior of the Legislative Branch.

It's far simpler to describe the behavior of the Executive Branch. A depraved hunger for power. The current Administration makes no bones about its quest for absolute rule.

The cronyism of the Judiciary is also simple to explain. One should presume Presidents will only choose cronies. A polar opposite is certainly not a choice. Of course, in a legitimate government not dominated by one party rule, a crony may ultimately be denied. But that's not probable today.

But who can explain a self-flagellating Legislature? Who can comprehend a body that bitch-slaps itself? Who understands why the Legislative Branch grants greater control to the Executive Branch, when by law, it shares equal authority? What is the logic of an organization that relinquishes its own command, laying it at the feet of the Executive like some sacrosanct offering, knowing full well that its submission tilts the balance of power the Constitution has enshrined?

Even more confounding is why the Congress puts its faith in a man, in this case George W. Bush, who presumes absolute power, knowing
absolutism destroys the very underpinning of our Democracy. The Republican majority of the Senate and the House have done exactly that, to the detriment of the nation, and the world. And sadly, they've been followed begrudgingly, sometimes compliantly, by some shameful Democratic wimps; most notably, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.

There is a hypothesis that helps define the odd behavior of Congress. It helps to explain why the Republican Legislature surrenders so readily to George W. Bush. It is the theory of the 'stern father' as described by Berkeley Linguistics Professor, George Lakoff, who contends that neocons and Conservatives embrace the concept of a strict patriarchal role.

As Lakoff writes in his book, "Don't Think of an Elephant": "as far as I have been able to discern, neocons believe in the unbridled use of power (including state power) to extend the reign of strict father values and ideas into every domain, domestic and international...... On the whole the right wing is attempting to impose a strict father ideology on America and, ultimately, the rest of the world."

Lakoff goes on to say, "Strict father morality defines what a good society is. The good society is threatened by liberal and progressive ideas and programs. That threat must be fought at all costs. The very fabric of society is at stake."

Perhaps this need for a strict father helps explain why the United States Senate is complicit in loading the Supreme Court with Executive Branch devotees who will usurp the power of their own Legislative Branch. Perhaps the whole 'whose your daddy?' concept goes right to the heart of how the adult men and women in the Senate and House cravenly relinquish authority to Mr. Bush whenever he gives them a squint and a swagger. Maybe visions of belt buckles and tool sheds dance in their wee little heads.

Lakoff's hypothesis does make sense when one considers the principal accepted characteristic of a stern father: absolute authority, uncontested and rightfully ordained.

For the past eight years George Bush has wagged his autocratic finger at Congress members, publicly proclaiming his expectations of them. He frequently begins with, "I expect the Congress to........" and concludes with his decree. Rarely have his commandments been refuted or ignored. Such blatant capitulation would embarrass Progressives, being the free thinkers they are, but it plants smiles on the faces of Conservatives. They're good sons and daughters. Well behaved. Able to follow directions, absent inquiry, curiosity, or the flaw of independent thought. The
unfortunate result of their paternal pandering is the increasing imbalance between the Executive and Legislative branches, which grows stronger and more pernicious every day.

And now, in a tour de force act of compliance, the Senate will enable the further subversion of the Judicial Branch as well. Its already welcomed Chief Justice crony John Roberts. Now it's intent on welcoming crony Associate Justice Samuel Alito, whose pronounced endorsement of a Unitary Executive reveals he believes in 'a strict father', too.

As stated often in his Senate confirmation hearing, Italian American Samuel Alito, Jr. worshipped his own father. He learned his moral authority from his father and says he retains that moral authority today. I share a personal knowledge of Italian fathers. If Samuel Alito, Sr. was a typical Italian father, he embodied the strict paternal role. A role that Samuel Alito, Jr. clearly embraces. If chosen to serve on the Supreme Court, Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. will likely never challenge Presidential authority.

In the government of George W. Bush, his Presidency is intended to symbolize the 'stern father'. The more Mr. Bush embodies that role, the more deferential the other branches will be. What's most interesting about George W. Bush is that his own stern father was really his mother. Hats off to the architect who taught Mr. Bush how to play the 'stern father' role. He may be a horrible President, but the guy can act up a storm.

Placing Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court will further tilt the balance of power, fortify the Executive branch, and seal the scalene triangle as the government symbol for many decades to come. One wonders how the stern father dynamic will play when a woman President is finally elected. It can't come a moment too soon.

Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. She can be reached at pimbalina@mac.com.

From time to time people will arise with the vision and the passion to inspire other people, and the bravery to take a stand for justice even if they have to do it alone. Sometimes tyranny maintains its power only by a kind of mental intimidation, a threat that would collapse entirely if it were just challenged. And whether those people are celebrated or not, all who take a stand against tyranny, in any way they can, deserve to be recognized as heros.

So it was with Rosa Parks. She was a simple seamstress who did not set out to be a hero. While she worked as a volunteer secretary for the NAACP, she did not see herself as a national leader. But on that day in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, she decided she would no longer suffer the humiliation and surrender her bus seat because of her race. In her own words, "The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed I suppose."

That one simple act of resistance precipitated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, perhaps the key pioneering event in the creation of the whole civil rights movement.

Today we have a Congress controlled by a numerical majority who operate as bullies. They hold votes open for hours at a time while they browbeat and threaten even their own party members. They disrespect and disregard long established rules of procedure and decorum. They exclude the participation of those representing at least half of the American people from any kind of meaningful decision making. And if ever opposed, they threaten they will not hesitate to further abuse their power by moving to abolish the right to filibuster.

Do they not fear the American people? Thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of our citizens are calling and emailing and faxing their senators right now to demand that Samuel Alito not be allowed to run our Supreme Court into some right wing ditch. And if you are asking, "Who will lead the filibuster that will stop this?". If you are asking yourself, "Who will stand up against the intimidation and the fear and expose those bullies for the fringe minority that they truly are?". The answer is . . . YOU are doing it right now.

With every personal message you send, you are telling our senators that it is time for we the people to take a stand. With every phone call you make, you are telling them it's time to take our country back. With every fax, YOU are a hero for democracy. The majority of the American people no longer believe in done deals. The other side has already lost, and the proof of it is that they are reduced to making empty verbal threats. They'll clean our clock one Republican senator was quoted yesterday as saying.

But privately the other side is telling its own few supporters that something dreadful has happened, that we actually think we can win, and that we will succeed unless they redouble their own lobbying efforts. And it's not working for them. On the Ed Shultz show yesterday, and Ed does not screen his calls, EVERY person who called in was demanding that there be a filibuster if necessary to save our Supreme Court from Samuel Alito.

There is only one way to deal with a bully. You must stand up to them. And we must keep standing up to them. We must keep calling our senators to tell them that the American people support them for taking a courageous stand. They must stand alone on the floor of the Senate, but we must continue rallying to their side. If the other side declares war on the filibuster we must call and call again to express our outrage. Each of us in our own way must find the courage to stand individually and declare, "The time has just come when I've been pushed as far as I can stand to be pushed."

As more and more of us raise our voices together we are seeing the dawning of a new political day. And on this day, no longer will we have to live under the tyranny of intimidation and fear. Indeed, we have nothing to fear but defeatism itself. It's up to us alone.

In each of these disputes, prominent Democrats — joined by a few Republicans — accuse Bush of improperly expanding presidential power and dangerously constricting the rights of Americans. Bush and his allies have fired back by escalating charges that Democrats would weaken America's security by imposing unreasonable restraints on the president.

These exchanges establish contrasts familiar from debates over law enforcement and national security throughout the 1970s and '80s, with most Republicans arguing for tough measures and many Democrats focusing on the defense of constitutional protections.

That emerging alignment worries some Democratic strategists, who believe it may allow Bush to portray Republicans as stronger than Democrats in fighting terrorism, as he did in the 2002 and 2004 campaigns.

"If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don't see how that helps us," said one senior Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified while discussing party strategy.

Other Democrats say that because it is often unpopular to defend civil liberties during wartime, doing so would allow the party to demonstrate strength and conviction.

"There's a Washington consensus that this is politically bad news," said Eli Pariser, executive director of the political action committee associated with MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group. "My read is that more than any given position, people want to see that their leaders are principled and that they stand up for what they believe in, and it seems to me [these fights] signal precisely that."

The differences between the two parties will be on display today, when the Senate begins debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. In unanimously opposing Alito on Tuesday, several Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee echoed comments by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who said the federal appellate judge's "record and testimony strongly suggest that he would … defer to the executive branch in case after case at the expense of individual rights."

Similarly, Senate Democrats charged Bush last month with eroding civil liberties as they helped block reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And Bush's two Democratic opponents in his presidential races — Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004 — recently have called for a special counsel to investigate whether Bush broke the law in authorizing the NSA to monitor domestic phone calls and e-mails from those suspected of having links to Al Qaeda.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, said the Democratic emphasis on civil liberties marked a shift not only from party attitudes after the Sept. 11 attacks, but also from efforts by President Clinton to expand government's law enforcement power after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Rosen said that in the last several weeks, Bush has invited greater Democratic opposition by defending the surveillance program so unapologetically, even after independent analysts such as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service had questioned its legality.

"The boldness of the administration's response has escalated the fight and made it more difficult for fair-minded Democrats to step back from the brink," said Rosen, author of "The Naked Crowd," a book on security and civil liberties.

The White House has signaled that it was comfortable with, and even eager for, this debate.

In an aggressive series of speeches this week, Bush and other administration officials have portrayed the controversial surveillance program as not only legal but essential to national security.

Also, Democratic Senate aides say the White House has taken a hard line against negotiating changes in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. A short-term extension of the law expires next week, and if no agreement is reached, that deadline could provoke another confrontation between Bush and congressional Democrats.

In a speech to the Republican National Committee last week, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor, made it clear that he would encourage Republican candidates to use these disputes — along with Democratic criticism of the Iraq war — in the election to portray Democrats as weak on national security.

"At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview."

Political analysts interpreted the speech as evidence that the White House wanted to replicate its 2002 strategy, when Bush used a dispute over union rules for the Department of Homeland Security to picture Democrats as soft on security concerns.

But some Democrats see key differences from 2002. Bush's current approval rating is about 20 percentage points lower than it was then. That means he enters the argument with fewer voters leaning in his direction.

Public attitudes about the balance between civil liberties and security also have shifted since 2002, according to nationwide polls. More Americans now express concern that the government will restrict civil liberties too much in the fight against terrorism, and fewer say the average American needs to relinquish civil liberties to protect the country.

Although results vary depending on the wording of poll questions, most Americans generally say they place a higher priority on pursuing terrorists than protecting civil liberties.

On the NSA surveillance program, opinion seems closely divided and fluid. Three national surveys in early to mid-January found that slightly more Americans supported than opposed the program; a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey conducted Friday through Sunday found that a slight majority opposed it.

The White House faces another difficulty in forging its arguments into a partisan weapon for 2006: Some Republican lawmakers, and many prominent conservative activists, have joined Democrats in opposing Bush in the recent disputes.

For instance, four Republican senators backed the filibuster that blocked renewal of the Patriot Act. Other leading Republicans, including Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and John McCain of Arizona, have questioned Bush's claim of legal authority to launch the NSA program.

Some key Democrats also insist that public anxiety about the continuing violence in Iraq will make it tougher for Republicans to use security arguments this year.

"When we talk about national security, we are going to go right to what happened to the men and women in uniform," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Yet even with these new factors, most Republicans remain confident that disputes over national security and civil liberty issues will strengthen their hand this fall, just as they did in 2002 and 2004.

"I think the Democrats are picking a fight that really plays to Republican strengths, and I think that's why the president is fighting back so strongly," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Three reasons the Democrats should filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Samuel Alito should not be on the Supreme Court. The Democrats have every right and reason to filibuster his appointment. To prove the point, here are three reasons why.

1. There is too much at stake. When I say "too much at stake," that covers a variety of legal and constitutional issues. Everything surrounding privacy rights from personal medical decisions and reproductive freedom, to wiretapping, to data mining, to the definition of an illegal search and seizure is on the line. A topic prominently discussed at the hearings and one that should be on the minds of all Americans is the extent of presidential power.

The recent discovery that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless domestic wiretapping and is claiming that it is within his "constitutional authority" and indeed telling the American people we should just "trust" him is not only jarring, but brings to mind a flesh-crawling phrase: "police state." Now more than ever, the American people need an independent judiciary that will not wilt in submission to executive pressure. Judge Alito seems all too willing to protect the president from the necessary constitutional checks on power in a time of war. It was Benjamin Franklin who said those who are willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither liberty nor security.

2. Democrats have political capital. In light of the president's illegal wiretapping authorization, ethics scandals that are plaguing nearly the entire Republican leadership, low approval ratings of the president, and little light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, the Democrats have a prodigious window of opportunity to prove themselves. With the 2006 elections around the corner and the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot with every step they take, it is far past time for the Democrats to take a stand. After years of acquiescence and moving their politics to the center of the spectrum, people hardly know who the Democrats are anymore. Now they finally have collected the political capital to prove themselves as the party that stands up for the American people, and if they do not spend it now doing anything they can to prevent a dangerous nominee from reaching the highest court, they may end up broke at election time.

3. The Sandra factor. Let's discuss the elephant in the room, shall we? Samuel Alito is not a woman. Not only is he not a woman, he is the most typical Supreme Court nominee Bush could find: a white, Catholic, Ivy League-educated man. Ironically, my column about why Bush needs to appoint another woman to the Supreme Court after the Harriett Miers debacle came out on the same day Bush named Alito as his next nominee. I am going to repeat myself: "There is a plethora of brilliant and talented, qualified women all over this country; women who may appease conservatives in their constitutional philosophy but who have witnessed and understand the necessity of the continuing expansion of constitutional rights to women."

Samuel Alito is so far right, so caught up in the narrow, nonreal world perspective of serving as an appellate court judge for 15 years that he seems to be unaware of many of the harsh realities social minorities in this country face. His record on women's rights and minority rights is dismal at best. This is, after all, a man that has said, "the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion." This is a man who upheld the unreasonable strip search of a 10-year-old girl. This is a man who, as the Boston Globe discussed, "advised against including a ban on capital punishment for minors in an agreement by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child." Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times reminded readers that his records as a judge show "a troubling tendency to tolerate serious errors in capital proceedings," and that "whatever one may think of the death penalty, Alito's record should give pause to all Americans committed to basic fairness and due process of law." Sandra Day O'Connor was certainly not a liberal, but with Alito replacing her swing vote on the Court and unique perspective on issues as a woman, there is much to be considered. His appointment would, after all, cut the number of women on the Supreme Court in half, and that is a very disconcerting thought.

It is true that a filibuster may not stop the Senate from approving Alito's nomination. A filibuster, though, serves many purposes. This is the Democrats' chance to take a stand, to be furious, to educate the public and to prove the president does not have a blank check to wrap the Supreme Court around his finger.

Abby Bar-Lev welcomes comments at abarlev@mndaily.com

Independents are divided about whether it was proper, surveys indicate.

"They're not as rigid or convinced either direction like partisans," said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. "They're certainly more in play."

The past two elections have given Bush and his political advisers reason to believe that portraying Republicans as the party best prepared to protect Americans against terrorism can be a winning strategy in this year's midterm vote. Whether the message will work again could depend on how centrist and independent voters view the spying program.

A recent Gallup survey found that independents lean strongly against the NSA program, with one-third approving and two-thirds opposing, Newport said. But they are split nearly evenly over whether the Bush administration has gone too far in restricting civil liberties in order to fight terrorism.

The president has embarked on a public relations blitz, which continues with this afternoon's visit to the NSA's top-secret Fort Meade campus. His comments there will be beamed to NSA staffers around the globe, and Bush plans to speak with reporters at the agency after the speech.

Bush and top administration officials are campaigning hard to remind the public about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Polls consistently have shown that protecting the country against terrorism is the public's top priority and the area in which Bush's performance gets its highest grades from voters.

The "open wounds that so many of us carry" from Sept. 11, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in a speech yesterday, are the "backdrop" to the eavesdropping debate. The administration says the NSA operation tracks communications between suspected al-Qaida members or related terrorists overseas and people in the United States.

"The general attitude, I think, is if the choice is between fighting terrorism and protecting people's rights, fighting terrorism wins every time," said John E. Mueller, an Ohio State University political scientist who has tracked the attitudes on national security. Bush and his political advisers have "basically seen ... that terrorism works very well for them as a theme, and anytime they can say, 'We have to do this to protect you' and wave that red flag, people fall in line."

A slight majority of independents say the government has not gone far enough to protect the country against terrorism, according to research by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Carroll J. Doherty, an analyst there.

"Right now the public is seeing this through a partisan prism, but that could change depending on what revelations are to come and what people hear," Doherty said. "If they feel that average Americans are being spied on routinely, we may see a shift."

Opinions could change, depending on how Bush presents the surveillance operation and what the public learns about it. In the meantime, Bush's full-throated defense of the program is stoking enthusiasm among his conservative base, which has largely returned to the president's side after turning away from him during his failed attempt to promote Harriet L. Miers to the Supreme Court.

Some Republican strategists say the NSA surveillance debate is giving the party's congressional candidates an avenue to solidify their support among key voter groups -- such as suburban women and white Southern men -- who might be put off by other parts of Bush's agenda.

"The hope is you turn it to some kind of advantage among your security moms and those that are doubtful," said Greg Crist, who consults with House Republicans.

"That's going to help offset problems on Medicare and seniors," he added, referring to widespread discontent over the launch of a new prescription drug plan.

"The administration is doing a good job neutralizing the debate on this, but then also arming [Republicans] with two or three retorts to the entire argument that can turn it into something positive," Crist said.

Bush's position on the program has shifted considerably since last month, when he said that disclosure of the surveillance program's existence had harmed national security. Now, the White House is eagerly speaking out about the program, through speeches by Bush and appearances by administration officials on numerous TV programs.

"We're going to continue to talk to the American people and educate them about what we're doing to save lives," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters.

The public relations push has played up a theme that unites most Americans -- concern about terrorism -- while seeking to play down divisive aspects such as whether Bush skirted laws to carry it out.

In recent days, Bush has dubbed the program a "terrorist surveillance program," while other administration officials have compared it with passenger searches in airports, a widely accepted practice.

By describing the NSA operation in such terms, analysts say, Bush is practically daring Democrats to call for an end to it. The tactic mirrors past efforts by Bush to portray Democrats as weak on security, a theme his political guru Karl Rove signaled would be front and center in this year's elections.

Gonzales noted yesterday that "through all of the noise on this topic, very few have asked that the terrorist surveillance program actually be stopped."

"The last thing in the world that Democrats are going to do, despite their problems with the program, is to stop it," said Marshall Wittmann of the center-left Progressive Policy Institute. "It would be politically disastrous [for Democrats] to stand in the way between the administration and an effort to aggressively hunt down terrorists."

The most immediate way the NSA surveillance debate is helping Bush, Wittmann said, is by "blurring the Democrats' corruption issue," taking the spotlight away from Jack Abramoff and his Republican connections, a weak spot for Bush's party.

Pollsters say it can be difficult to get a clear sense of the public's views on the NSA program, given people's limited knowledge of how it works and narrow understanding of the laws involved.

"What the public does want is for there to be a real capacity to investigate a threat when there are real suspects," said Clay Ramsay, the research director for the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes. "What the public does not want is for the presidency to get greater authority to abridge constitutional rights."

As long as voters view the program primarily as Bush is presenting it -- as a tool for protecting them -- they are much more likely to support it, Ramsay said.

Starting in 2002, Bush turned the National Security Agency loose to monitor the international phone calls and e-mail of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the United States without warrants. Since the press revealed the snooping, Bush has insisted that both the U.S. Constitution and a congressional authorization for the use of force give him authority to bypass the courts in his role as commander-in-chief.

Opposition to that specious assertion and to the eavesdropping is not just the usual partisan carping. True, many Democrats are skeptical about the legality of the NSA operation. But so are some powerful Republicans.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he doesn't think Bush had the authority for the operation and should seek congressional approval to alter the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court in 1978 to grant warrants for just such intelligence gathering. The committee will hold hearings on the eavesdropping operation in February.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a possible presidential contender, is also skeptical about the operation's legality. And he took strong exception to top Bush political adviser Karl Rove's claim that Republicans have a post-9/11 world view while many Democrats cling to a pre-9/11 world view. At this critical moment in our history, the nation needs to have a serious conversation about freedom and security, not one driven by fear and partisan gamesmanship.

We strongly suspect that election fraud was rampant during the 2004 Presidential election. There were more reported votes than registered voters in many precincts; poll workers who personally submitted official poll tapes who recognize that the ones used for official counts are fraudulent; mathematical analysis that show the odds of certain election events being honest are vanishingly small; and more than 37,000 other suspicious incidents reported at the time of this writing. All this after years of outcry about paperless and unverifiable voting machines . . . which were forced upon us all. Please go to the “Evidence & Links” page for a discussion of these issues and direction to further resources.

If we are right, there are people who know what happened, how it was done, and who did it. People who through testimony or documentation, by themselves or in concert with others, can make the case that election fraud on a grand scale was committed . . . and prove it.

We want to encourage those people to do something positive for their country.

Nothing motivates like money, so we're asking for pledges toward a bounty that will be paid to the person or persons who provide the evidence that successfully demonstrates that election fraud took place at the State or Federal level with convictions in open court.

The most likely persons to have the evidence required are also likely to be feloniously involved themselves, so they must consider two possibilities: either they come forward as quickly as possible and make a deal which includes their own immunity, or this bounty may encourage one of their colleagues to do so . . . and they will have nothing to bargain with.

If only ten million concerned citizens pledge an average of $100 apiece, the reward for those who come forward with proof will exceed $1 billion! Supporters of George W Bush should be among the first who wish to pledge. What better way to dispel the spiraling doubts about our 2004 election and prove to the world that it was honest?

Except for those who wish to donate modest amounts to help sustain this effort, we are asking for no money. We only ask for your pledge to provide your share of a bounty that will be paid out when the evidence is clear and after convictions have been obtained.

Whether your desire is to expose the fraud you think may have corrupted our democracy, or whether you wish to help positively demonstrate that this election was fundamentally honest and did not distort the outcome, please join us in raising the cash that will cast a bright ray of cleansing sunshine on our democracy and the 2004 election in America. Please go to the "Pledge" link above and do your part to support this effort.

Some alarm has been expressed at learning that the recent test in Florida that disproved the Diebold claim that its machines could not be “hacked” was carried out on an optical scanner (Diebold’s Accu-Vote OS 1.94w). New Yorkers for Verified Voting again has been asked to justify its support for the paper ballot-optical scan system (PBOS). NYVV has never denied that optical scanners are computers and that they are subject to accidental or deliberate miscoding and “hacking.” NYVV has argued that the hand-marked paper-ballots that are the foundation of the PBOS system provide security to elections because the scanners can be checked by hand-counting the paper.

Let’s be very clear that the PBOS system is far superior to direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs) in spite of our knowledge that scanners can be hacked. Keep in mind that scanners only count votes; therefore they provide many fewer opportunities for miscoding and/or hacking than do DREs, which must be programmed for recording, verifying, and counting votes as well as for accessibility. Note that the programming of the scanners for the one task of counting can be transparently tested by running a test deck of ballots that have been publicly hand-counted as many times as are necessary to convince the observers that the scanner is correctly programmed. After an election, the original hand-marked paper ballots are the official record and are available for manual recounts whenever law or circumstance requires it.

An observer1 of the famous “Harri Hursti hack” in Florida has pointed out that that test revealed “only one vulnerability in an almost unlimited number of potential flaws” that computer scientists recognize to be characteristic of electronic voting systems (both optical scanners and DREs). Revelation of this flaw was important because it exposed a vulnerability that must have been purposefully programmed into the system. Most significantly, the observer’s report goes on to correctly argue that “the Hursti hack shows, above all, the importance of having paper ballots.” The Hursti hack demonstrates that “there must be an independent paper trail that can be manually audited to confirm (or discredit) machine results.”

The PBOS system provides such a direct paper record of the voter’s intent. Voter-assistive devices allow the disabled also to mark paper ballots. While some would prefer a system of hand-counted paper ballots over optical-scan counting, we need to remember that politics is the art of the possible and to seek to discover “what can and cannot be accomplished politically at a given place and moment in time” (Bo Lipari). Most of the election commissioners who have been given the power to choose our voting system in New York have deep reservations about managing elections based on paper ballots. Advocacy of the PBOS system is politically wise inasmuch as it answers the public’s interest in rapid preliminary counts at the same time as it promises the commissioners that they will need to count paper only for the 3% required audits and whenever problems arise.

NYVV joins the Government Accountability Office in urging improved standards and testing of all electronic voting equipment, including optical scanners.2 Adequate testing should be able to close some of the doors to hacking. Careful procedures and audits of hand-marked paper ballots will take us the rest of the way to voter confidence in the paper ballot-optical scan system.

When I first read the book immediately after its publication, I confess that I was a bit disappointed. What I had hoped to find was a compendium of evidence, from front to back. To be sure, Miller gives us plenty of evidence, meticulously documented. But evidence tells us that the election was stolen. Miller goes beyond that to explain how and why it was stolen, and how the culprits have managed, so far, to get away with it.

So on second reading, I find that it was my expectation and not Miller's book that was flawed. We have evidence aplenty, to be found in John Conyers' report, and the new book by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, in addition to the Black Box Voting website among numerous others. Soon to be added is Prof. Steven Freeman's book on the statistical evidence of election fraud. What we don't gain from these sources is an understanding and appreciation of the context in which this crime was committed. This we learn from reading Miller's book.

If, in fact, the last two presidential elections have been stolen, and if in addition there is a preponderance of evidence to support this claim, then this is the most significant political news in the 230 year history of our republic.

So what is the response of the allegedly "opposing" party to the issue of election fraud? Virtual silence. And of the news media? More silence. Case in point: the media response to Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again. As he reports: "There have been no national reviews of Fooled Again. No network or cable TV show would have the author on to talk about the book. NPR has refused to have him on... Only one daily newspaper – the Florida Sun-Sentinel – has published a review."

Force the question of election fraud and demand an answer, and the most likely response will be a string of ad hominem insults – "sore losers," "paranoid," "conspiracy theorists" - attacks on the messenger and a dismissal of the message. We've heard them, many times over.

Persist, and you might get as a reply, not evidence that the elections were honest and valid (there is very little of that), but rather some rhetorical questions as to the attitudes and motives of the alleged perpetrators and to the practical difficulties of their successfully accomplishing a stolen national election. Questions such as these:

* How could the GOP campaign managers believe that they could get away with a stolen election?

* Why would they dare risk failure, and the subsequent criminal indictments and dissolution of their party?

* What could possibly motivate them to subvert the foundations of our democracy?

The answer to the first two questions is essentially the same: they believed and they dared because they controlled the media and thus the message. Miller's sub-text throughout his book is that the great electoral hijack has been accomplished with the cooperation, one might even say the connivance, of the mainstream media, without which the crime could never have succeeded.

Immediately following the election, the critics were shouted down with such headlines as these: "Election paranoia surfaces; Conspiracy theorists call results rigged" (Baltimore Sun), "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud is dismissed" (Boston Globe), "Latest Conspiracy Theory – Kerry Won – Hits the Ether" (Washington Post), and in the "flagship" newspaper, the New York Times: "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." (Miller, 38.)

Even more damaging than the slanted "reports" in the media, was the silence. The Conyers investigations? Ignored. The scholarly statistical analyses of exit poll discrepancies? Ignored. Evidence that Bush cheated in the debates with a listening device? Dismissed. The recent GAO report on e-voting vulnerabilities, and the Florida demonstration hacking of computer vote compilation? Ignored. And most appalling of all: the media blackout last week of Al Gore's eloquent speech, warning of the threat to our Constitution and our liberties posed by the Bush regime.

And all this merely scratches the surface of media malpractice. For more, read the book.

The motivation to steal the election, says Miller, combined religious (or quasi-religious) dogma and self-righteousness and a perception of the opposing Democratic party, not as the loyal opposition, but as the enemy - deserving not defeat, but annihilation. ("You are either with us or against us," says Bush). Together, this adds up to what Miller calls "The Requisite Fanaticism." He writes:

It is not "conservatism" that impelled the theft of the election, nor was it merely greed or the desire for power per se... The movement now in power is not entirely explicable in such familiar terms... The project here is ultimately pathological and essentially anti-political, albeit Machiavellian on a scale, and to a degree, that would have staggered Machiavelli. The aim is not to master politics, but to annihilate it. Bush, Rove, DeLay, Ralph Reed, et al. believe in "politics" in the same way that they and their corporate beneficiaries believe in "competition." In both cases, the intention is not to play the game but to end it – because the game requires some tolerance of the Other, and tolerance is precisely what these bitter-enders most despise... (Miller 81-2.)

Reiterating a theme that is prominent in his writing, Miller points out that the psychological pathology most conspicuously at work in the right's demolition of politics is projection: the attribution in "the enemy" of one's own moral depravity:

The Bushevik, so full of hate, hates politics, and would get rid of it; and yet he is himself expert at dirty politics: an expertise that he regards as purely imitative and defensive. Because his enemies, he thinks, are all "political" – dishonest, ruthless, cynical, unprincipled – he is thereby "forced" to be "political" as well, in order to "fight fire with fire." As we have seen, this paranoid conviction of the Other's perfidy suffuses and impels the propaganda campaigns of the right, and it was especially important in Bush/Cheney's drive to steal the last election. Indeed it was their firm conviction that they had to steal the race, in order to frustrate the Democrats' attempt to do it first. (Miller, 82.)

This is just a brief sampling of Miller's astute political and psychological analysis of the "why" and the "how" of the stolen elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004. That analysis, which takes up about a third of the book (Chapters 3 and 4), adds an invaluable dimension to our understanding of the political disaster that has befallen our Republic, and that analysis suggests guidelines in the struggle to avoid the theft of the upcoming elections of 2006 and 2008.

I have written at length about what might be done if we are to restore the ballot box to the voters. These crucial steps come immediately to mind, as I read Miller's Fooled Again.

Briefly, we need a media, we need an opposition party, we need an aroused public, and we need a miracle. But take heart: history tells us that political crises have a way of producing miracles.

The mainstream media (MSM) must be discredited and an alternative media established in its place. The internet offers a voice to an opposition that is excluded from the mainstream, and a few independent publications and broadcasts remain, however feeble in comparison to the MSM. If a sizeable portion of the public deserts the mainstream, and directly informs the publishers and broadcasters why they are doing so, the media, and particularly their sponsors and advertisers, will take notice. Recently, some of the media have become more critical of the Bush regime and the GOP Congress, but it is, by and large, too little and too late.

So either the commercial media must resume the role of watchdog of government power, as intended by Jefferson and Madison, or it must be made irrelevant. The Russian dissidents late in the Soviet era have given us an example: if you have no media, create one, even if it is suppressed by the government. It was called "Samizdat" – a painstaking process of typing several carbon copies of forbidden manuscripts on condition that the recipients would do likewise. Similarly, the Iranian dissidents during the reign of the Shah copied and distributed audio tapes of revolutionary speeches. In the computer age, there are huge advantages: Internet publication and, f the Internet is taken from us, CDs and minidiscs. For now, the Internet is our Samizdat.

The Democratic party is the only potentially effective opposition party in sight. But at the moment, it is a toothless tiger. We must tell that party that it must either lead the struggle to restore electoral integrity or step aside. When the Clintons, Cantwells, Liebermans and Feinsteins run for re-election, they must be opposed in the primaries by authentic progressives. Even if those progressives lose, but with a creditable showing, the "establishment" Democrats will nonetheless get the message. Next time you get a solicitation notice from the DNC or the Senate or Congressional Campaign Committees, tell them "no dice" unless they deal with the election fraud issue. Then tell them that instead of a contribution, you are purchasing Miller's book and donating it to the local library.

As for the public, remember that more than half the public is awake, aware, and opposed to the Bush regime. Of these, a small but significant minority is convinced that election fraud is a serious problem. But that dissenting public lacks a voice, cohesion and leadership. This is a recipe for potentially sudden change: like fuel and oxygen, lacking the third necessity – heat of ignition. A message, from a Tom Paine or a Jefferson, or leadership from a Washington, a Gandhi, a Mandela or a Sakharov, can ignite the fire that will consume this evil regime. Or not. That depends on whether concerned citizens sit by and wait for others to act, or instead take some initiative and join the struggle – writing to Congress, talking to any and all associates that will listen and perhaps a few that won't, contributing to alternative media, copying and distributing dissenting essays, and generally raising hell.

And finally, miracles: they are, by nature, unpredictable. Some possibilities: A few corporate and financial elites will finally come to realize that where Bush is leading, they don't want to follow, and they will join the opposition. (There are a few intimations of this already). Similarly, perhaps a few journalists, and even some Republicans, will finally if belatedly decide that they would prefer not to live in a dictatorship. Bushenomics is bound to lead to an economic collapse that is certain to wake up the public. And even now, some state Attorney General or some District Attorney may be preparing an indictment for election fraud against an e-vote company executive that could break this conspiracy wide open.

But don't wait for miracles to happen – make them happen.

If we are to take back our country, we must first take back our vote. Mark Crispin Miller's book will tell you what has happened, how and why it has happened, and what must be done about it.

Will we, the people, take up the challenge? On that question rests the fate of our republic, of our liberties, and of "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a Progressive, which can be seen in-progress here. Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

Regarding Jessie Fawson's column ("Both parties are prone to corruption, and the GOP has done great things," Jan. 23), I'm glad to see she was able to swallow the Republican talking points so well that she can spit them right back out; I'm surprised she left out, "It's all Clinton's fault!"

The Abramoff scandal is a Republican scandal-lock, stock and proverbial barrel. Some of his clients might have given money to Democrats, but old Jack himself was a tried and true Republican, former president of the Young Republicans, BFF with Karl Rove. He never gave one thin dime to any Democrat. To say otherwise is, quite simply, a lie.

What else? Bush's approval ratings are once again seeking their natural level-30 percent of Americans think he's sent by God and would support him even if he sacrificed a baby to Moloch on Fox News.

The biggest laugh came from Fawson's statement: "...our actions in Iraq prove beneficial to the Iraqi people."

Whom do our actions benefit? Families killed by stray bombs? People who live with four hours of electricity a day? Women who had more freedom under Saddam than any other Muslim country and will now be forced to live under Sharia law by the new theocratic government that we fostered?

Wait! Here's who benefited: al-Qaida, which now gets to train terrorists in an urban environment, thanks to Dubya.

Next, "the recession is ending." If you're Paris Hilton or Bill Gates, why, the economy is just peachy!

But if you're one of the tens of thousands of unemployed because your job was outsourced, or a senior trying to decide between food and medicine or a student who now can't get a loan, things don't look quite so rosy. ?
Yes, there are bad apples in the Democratic Party. But the Republicans under Bush and his minions have created a staggeringly corrupt-not to mention breathtakingly incompetent!-"government" that could bring down the whole structure of the American way of life. Heckuva job, Bushie!

Republicans, from the governor to his spokesman to the chairman of the state GOP, said posting the article — and alerting the media to its existence — was an exercise in race-baiting and character assassination.

"Here's the bottom line: The Democratic leadership of Vermont are adopting a new policy of character assassination against their political opponents," said James Barnett, chairman of the Vermont Republican Party.

"We're talking about a truncated quote that is the polar opposite of anything the governor believes now or I suspect he believed then," Barnett said. "This was from a time when he was 19 years old, and it is being disseminated by a legislative leader of the Democratic Party."

The article, written by Ted Hobson and called "Nixon's Man on Campus," said in part: "In relation to Vermonters, Douglas' conservative outlook might pass unnoticed, but on a college campus Douglas is somewhat of a political loner, defending Nixon's Supreme Court nominees … his segregation policies ('I'm not sure there is segregation'), Vietnamization ('a very admirable plan') and even the Cambodian invasion ('I personally would have liked a little more')."

Douglas, through his press secretary, said he did not recall Hobson interviewing him for the article, but unequivocally said he never held the belief that segregation didn't exist.

"The governor doesn't recall this article, but he's been very clear that he did not believe that then and he doesn't believe that now. He doesn't remember sitting down for the article," said Jason Gibbs, Douglas' press secretary. "This is a disappointing display of the politics of personal destruction, and there's no place for this kind of trash in Vermont."

Hobson, now a litigation attorney in Burlington who wrote a letter of support when Douglas made his first run for governor, laughed as he recalled the article.

He said Middlebury College was in the throes of changing from a conservative to a more liberal place, and that while he genuinely liked Douglas then, the two of them probably were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

That said, Hobson said he fondly recalls Douglas' dry wit, and it was entirely possible that Douglas was playing around with him during the interview for comic effect.

"I assume those quotes are accurate, and I certainly never bore Jim any animus at all, but you have to wonder if he was saying those things a little tongue-in-cheek," Hobson said. "He's always had that sense of humor. … At times, he had me rolling on the floor."

Gibbs said the governor doesn't dispute that he may have been hamming it up with Hobson.

"Mr. Hobson may certainly be correct, and his tongue may very well have been planted firmly in his cheek," Gibbs said.

The article was first posted on the VermontersFirst.org Web site, which is run by Democratic consultant Adam Quinn and has close ties to Rep. Floyd Nease, D-Johnson, the majority whip of the House.

Quinn alerted major media outlets to the posting last week in an e-mail message.

"Well, it says some fairly outlandish things about our very own Gov. Douglas," said the posting, which was unsigned. "We are pretty sure the paper is legitimate and no reason to question the accuracy of the quotes. It is interesting to see that Douglas hasn't changed much."

Barnett and other Republicans called on Nease, a frequent contributor to VermontFirst.org and a site organizer, and the state Democratic Party to disavow the posting.

"At the very least the leadership of the Democratic Party would ask this guy to step down from his legislative leadership post, and frankly if he wants to spend all of his time doing dirty tricks and character assassination instead of the work of a legislator, he should step down," Barnett said.

Quinn, in a brief interview, said it was he — not Nease — who posted the article and was responsible for its dissemination. He said he did not talk to Hobson before posting it, but said it was important information for Vermont voters.

"This article brings up more questions than answers," Quinn said. "But I think claiming the article was being used as race-baiting just doesn't fly."

Nease said he was not responsible for the posting.

"Everything I post on the blog I put my name under," he said. "I didn't post it. I didn't approve it. And I don't have power of approval, nor do they have approval over what I post. As for the assertion that I should resign, it's ridiculous. I know that Jim (Barnett) is doing what Karl Rove taught him to do, to attack people in this way."

The episode is reminiscent of the flap caused during the 2004 gubernatorial election in which Barnett and Republicans released old newspaper clippings showing Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle marching in a parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the communist overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Clavelle was Douglas' Democratic opponent two years ago.

Democrats called that episode "red-baiting," and officials from Clavelle to then-party chairman Scudder Parker said Barnett should have been fired. Douglas even distanced himself from Barnett's actions at the time.

Democrats are saying this episode isn't the same. Ian Carleton, the state Democratic Party's current chairman, said Quinn acted without any direction from the state party.

Parker, who is now running against Douglas, took pains to draw distinctions.

"If the story is about how this is some kind of equal exchange, well, the field isn't equal," Parker said. "That was the leaders of the party and the Douglas administration itself."

He said his campaign wasn't behind the letter, and "this is not the way I want to conduct my campaign."

Gibbs wasn't buying the distinction.

"The governor spoke out loudly and clearly in that case," he said. "Those same individuals should be held to their same standards."

Contact Darren Allen at darren.allen@rutlandherald.com.

The question for journalists is how to report this. President Bush says it’s a great idea and he’s proud of the secret spy program?

Attorney General Gonzales explains breaking the law is no problem? Dick Cheney says accept spying, or Osama bin Laden will get you?

Or might we actually have gotten far enough to point out that the series of high-profile security events is in fact part of a propaganda campaign by our own government? Should we report it as though it were in fact a campaign tactic, a straight political ploy: The Republicans say spying is good for you, but the Democrats say it is not — equal time to both sides?

Then there’s the problem of reporting within the context of this administration’s other propaganda efforts. “We do not torture,” and, “We are not running a gulag of secret detention centers,” are two of the more recent examples, superceding the golden oldies — like the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Furthermore, the Rove offensive is not to admit that we are indeed running a gulag of secret detention camps, but to attack those who point it out and put them under investigation for revealing government secrets and helping the enemy. Even without the intimidation, how do you report something claimed by George W. Bush as though you hadn’t recently heard him say he would support John McCain’s amendment barring torture — and then turn around and claim that he has the right to violate that law?

I genuinely appreciate the response by real conservatives on this issue — the libertarians, the true heirs of Barry Goldwater, the all-government-is-bad grumps. It’s called principle. But I am confounded by the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party backing Bush on this. To me it seems so simple: Would you think this was a good idea if Hillary Clinton were president? Would you be defending the clear and unnecessary violation of the law? Do you have complete confidence that she would never misuse this “inherent power” for any partisan reason?

The warrantless wiretaps reportedly covered thousands of calls, and the information obtained was widely circulated among federal agencies. I know one guy who is now on the federal no-fly list. His sin? Co-authoring an unflattering book about Karl Rove. What a menace to national security he is.

One of the odder features of our time is that much of our political debate is cast in “moral” terms, with such helpful authorities as Pat Robertson holding forth on whom we should assassinate next. A more useful contribution from this direction comes from Jimmy Carter in his new book, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.”

I am a great admirer of Carter’s and glad to hear his soft Southern Christian voice once more. But it occurs to me that in his quiet way, many of his arguments are as pragmatic as they are moral.

As one with considerable faith in the common sense of Americans, it occurs to me we may yet rescue ourselves from this bootless skunk match over morality by using plain sense, instead. Many of Carter’s points center on the fact that our war on terrorism is not working. Iraq is not working (hard to even count the ways). Major terrorist attacks themselves more than tripled from 2003, to 655 attacks in 2004. Our support in the Middle East sinks lower and lower. The region is not becoming more democratic.

What would happen if we had not a political, but a pragmatic debate about all of this: We have made a horrible mess of this entire war on terrorism, now how do we fix it? What do we do? I realize it’s a bit simplistic of me after all this time, but I really think one of the best things we could do for ourselves is deal honestly with the facts. Because we have made a mess of this does not mean we are a pitiful, helpless giant — the United States still has more sheer military power than anyone else on earth. But using it is not necessarily the best way to get the results we want.

Because we are stuck with this administration for another three years, I think it important to begin to get past the defensiveness. And part of that calls on American journalism to get over reporting the Bush administration as though it were a credible source. We need to face facts.

The definition itself, though, reveals the insanity of the condition a little more lucidly when one understands the idea of ‘corporation’, a word drawn from the latin ‘corpore’, meaning ‘body’. ‘Corpore’, in latin, referred to an actual, physically verifiable, biological unit, and perhaps a non-biological one, but certainly to a tangible form in nature. Simple, yes? Well, no. Somewhere along the way, in the land that mothered us - and got bit for her pains - some lawyerly weasel decided that a ‘corpore’ could also be entirely fictional...yet...still be a “body”! This was done in service to business and intended to provide a way to shed liability, which it did quite nicely, once the insane concept was forced down the throats of the British.

Here in America, Jefferson and any number of lawyers and others decried the practice, so the idea of creating invisible “bodies” was verboten. How, then, did it come to be the business standard in America? Through law, right? Right? Ahhh, so glad you asked.

Actually, a corporation has always been competely illegal in America, as Prof. Morton J. Horowitz clearly and irrefutably showed in his landmark The Transformation of American Law, 1870 - 1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, in the chapter “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory”. That section inspects the Santa Clara V. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394 [1886]) case, in which, completely irrelevant to the question before the court, the sentiment was rendered that “[t]he court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

As the good professor points out, there was no precedent in law to support any part of that statement, nor was counsel for either side allowed to comment on it. It was, speaking of that which the conservative (read: business) element in the society decries: an outrageously egregious example of legislation from the bench. Mostly, nowadays, this stand-out bizarre occurrence is assiduously avoided, but one will occasionally catch a gaggle of esquired monkeys battling over how many angels can fit on the head of the period closing it. How appropriate. A point of law that would never have withstood populist inspection, probably not even broad legal community scrutiny, became standing law through the witting sabotage of a set of justices colluding to birth it. After all, the opinion reads “we are all”, not “some of us” or even “a 5-to-4 decision”.

So, should you wish to take the opposite stance, you mean to tell me that a group of uberlawyers, what has been called “nine scorpions in a bottle”, well past law school, into a long career of diverse cases, did not know to quote law when stating that the law says “such and such”? All those averring in the affirmative, please address me through the e-address below; I have a bridge I think you’re going to like.

In case you didn't catch it, that sentiment, for it was not an opinion, in Santa Clara was an act of fascism. The business community, represented by the railroads here, persuaded justices to fiat something strange that never became law. It also managed to keep them shut afterwards somehow. Prof. Horowitz goes so far as to say this was not even unusual but represented a disturbing growing trend in American jurisprudence: (I’ll say it, so he won’t have to have words shoved in his mouth that he might not want to elucidate so plainly) law and its minions as servants of business. Nice. Yet, there it was, and I’m willing to bet that some have tried to bring a question on it to the Court and the Court has chosen not to entertain it, as is it’s ill-gotten right. Maybe not, but what are the odds? Hence, some weasel, or some outfit of weasels, slipped a little bomb into the public register, and the interested parties thereafter went nuts. Sound like something we’re looking at right now?

Governo-corporate toad-eater Samuel Alito has invented a theory of, now get this, “unitary executive”, a more meaningless phrase as could never be concocted, and is trying to pull another Santa Clara on the public. The irony is that if he is admitted to the Supreme Court, he’ll be his own facilitator and abettor!. Neat trick, Sammy. This will not to be, as you may infer, a one-time farrago, as Santa Clara was, but now stands as a signal of subservience to the ruling class, a bid to join the nobles as a useful courtier.

Look at Alito. Another Il Duce? Hardly. He’s a poster boy for the Christian Far Right, an Ivory Soap Miltowner with a Pepsodent smile, a faceless body in the multitude, the better to escape suspicion as much as is humanly possible. Ever wonder why so many commercials feature kindly mothers, soft-spoken well-intentioned grandfathers, and burblingly cute little kids trying to sell you on some damn commodity you’re going to regret buying? It’s for the same reason we’re now seeing geeks dominate the political scene. They’re playing on your psychological paradigms. You’re already a bit too wary of roughnecks like Uncle Joe Stalin and and Benny Mussolini, so you’re getting, instead, gents you’d never suspect otherwise.

“Unitary executive” is indeed another “corporation” Santa Clara ploy, but with a far deadlier effect. It’s well camouflaged, carefully kept from inspection, and intended to be a flashpoint “fact” that will herald the sort of legislatve nightmare Prof. Horowitz would never have imagined. It will be, as the idiotic phrase itself clearly intimates, the ingress by which dictatorship finally gains a firm and irremovable foot in the threshold of the country.

So, don’t look to wild-eyed Gadaffis, bearded Husseins, or flaming-faced bin Ladens for fascism in America; those are CIA creations and that’s not how it will come. Look for the well-scrubbed, kissy-faced, prayerful hands class president for our own proud mutation of the hoary tradition. We do nothing quite like anyone else and this will be no exception. The new facilitator will beam and quote scripture as he reveals his horns and tail. The Repuglicans will rejoiceth in his presence, yea, even while the Dimocrats bow and scrape, begging for a crust of the royal bread...and thus fascism will have decended upon America, not roaring and fierce, not raking the air with bloody claws, not squalling and preening, but softly, quietly, unnoticed, on cat’s feet.

Mark S. Tucker, a critic, has written for numerous magazines and presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line, as well as this forum. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.

The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy — those concerned with individual rights and freedoms — as anti-American. That was 69 years ago.

One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism — a coming which he anticipated and cheered — Dennis declared that defenders of “18th-century Americanism” were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.

Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry HERE)

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people.

Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.

In an essay coyly titled “Fascism Anyone?,” Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 “identifying characteristics of fascism.” (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.) See how familiar they sound.

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause

The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism

The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media

Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined

Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected

The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed

Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts

Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections

Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide.

It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.

But, again, this is not America’s first encounter with fascism.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.

“The really dangerous American fascist,” Wallace wrote, “… is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

By these standards, a few of today’s weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs — not to mention the largest prison system in the world.


The Perfect Storm

Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of “Perfect Storm,” a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.

1. The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don’t believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan to name only a few.

This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.

2. A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity which he has been preaching since the early 1980s is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration.

Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare — and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The Yurica Report. Search under this name, or for “Despoiling America” by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)

3. The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of workers’ unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franlkin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, they picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie “The Corporation,” they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America’s middle class after WWII.

Another ill wind in this Perfect Storm is more important than its crudity might suggest: it was President Clinton’s sleazy sex with a young but eager intern in the White House. This incident, and Clinton’s equally sleazy lying about it, focused the certainties of conservatives on the fact that “liberals” had neither moral compass nor moral concern, and therefore represented a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of America. While the effects of this may be hard to quantify, I think they were profound.

These “storm” components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn’t even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.


What’s coming

When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what’s coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:

# The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.

# Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.

# Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.

# More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work.

# Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.

# The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)

# More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.

# More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.

# Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.

# Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.

# Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.

# Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.

# Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.

# Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

# In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.

Can these schemes work? I don’t think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don’t know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.

Hope

In the meantime, is there any hope, or do we just band together like lemmings and dive off a cliff? Yes, there is always hope, though at times it is more hidden, as it is now.

As some critics are now saying, and as I have been preaching and writing for almost twenty years, America’s liberals need to grow beyond political liberalism, with its often self-absorbed focus on individual rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities to the larger society. Liberals will have to construct a more complete vision with moral and religious grounding. That does not mean confessional Christianity. It means the legitimate heir to Christianity. Such a legitimate heir need not be a religion, though it must have clear moral power, and be able to attract the minds and hearts of a voting majority of Americans.

And the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that will be appointing judges, writing laws and bending the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the foreseeable future. The conservatives deserve a lot of admiration. They have spent the last thirty years studying American politics, forming their vision and learning how to gain control in the political system. And it worked; they have won. Even if liberals can develop a bigger vision, they still have all that time-consuming work to do. It won’t be fast. It isn’t even clear that liberals will be willing to do it; they may instead prefer to go down with the ship they’re used to.

One man who has been tireless in his investigations and critiques of America’s slide into fascism is Michael C. Ruppert, whose postings usually read as though he is wound way too tight. But he offers four pieces of advice about what we can do now, and they seem reality-based enough to pass on to you. This is America; they’re all about money:

# First, he says you should get out of debt.

# Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.

# Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.

# And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon — as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us.

That’s advice written this week. Another bit of advice comes from sixty years ago, from Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace said, “Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”

Still another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of “colonization” is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are — ironically — in a state of taxation without representation. That’s where this country started, and it’s where we are now.

I don’t know the next step. I’m not a political activist; I’m only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.

Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.

But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it — step, by step, by step.

If you're a "West Wing" fan, you know that it's not just the Democrats who come off looking good on the show. Bartlett and his staff are Democrats, of course. They seem reminiscent of what the Clinton White House might have been had it lived up to its highest values.

But Republicans generally came off pretty well, too. Remember when John Goodman became acting president for a few episodes? He had a Barry Goldwater toughness and reversed most of Bartlett's feel-good policies - but he did so fairly and out of conviction. The viewer could at least consider the merits of the policies he espoused.

Likewise, Alan Alda, the current GOP presidential candidate on the show, is presented as a man of conviction with serious proposals that, at least, merit consideration from the viewer.

We'd like to think that's the way the real Washington operates and that all the things we read about in the headlines are mere aberrations. I used to think that was true.

However, I'm increasingly convinced that Lord Acton was right, that power corrupts and the more power you amass, the more corrupt you become. The real difference between the Republican scandals of today and the Democratic scandals of yesterday is that Republicans have all the power today. Sooner or later, we'll kick them out and then Democrats will have the power and will use it badly.

I know that sounds cynical. It is cynical. But it's part of the genius of our political system.

"The West Wing" was an antidote to that cynicism. It posited a fairy-tale world in which the corruption of power was, in the end, thwarted by decent politicians who put country ahead of self, at least most of the time. The show never pretended the politicians were always right - but it did contend they were usually decent.

I'm going to miss that insight, even though I doubt that it reflected reality.