1 Boring Old Man

if you read anything else this year,
read this Common Dreams Editorial…

Since the elections, I’ve been feeling like winding down my blogging days pretty soon. I’ve been writing almost daily about the same monotonous things for a year on this blog, and another blog for 6 months before that – the Fitzgerald Investigation of the C.I.A. leak, the prewar intelligence, the Niger Forgeries, the A.E.I., the P.N.A.C., Focus on the Family and the Religious Right, Cheney, Halliburton, the War on Iraq, John Bolton, a lot of topics but they’re all about the same thing – the takeover of the U.S. government by a coalition of the Religious Right, the Neoconservative Right, and American Industrial Companies that has moved as close to destroying America from the inside as any Islamic Terrorist could ever do from the outside. It’s coming out in the open now, and I don’t feel so terribly alone with it anymore.

But no such manufactured reality is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the “global war on terror.”

It took six years for a tardy and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because the trusting American people believed the “war on terror” was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.

The recent electoral turnaround was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today, the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose, went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism has been so successful.

We need to strip away the created reality of the “war on terror” to see the true nature of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.

The story told here has to be considered “circumstantial.” None of it results from testimony under oath, none of it has been admitted as legal evidence in a jurisprudential undertaking, and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven remains axiomatic. And we might well reiterate the humane and civil plea, heard frequently after 9/11: what we need is justice, not vengeance.

We should not proceed directly to impeachment. At the very least, however, the story of George Bush’s premeditated wars raises questions of presidential dereliction as grave as any in our history.

We need to know the truth and all the truth. The time has come, as well as the opportunity, for formal, Congressional investigations, based on subpoenas, sworn testimony, and direct evidence about 9/11 and about the created reality of the “war on terror.”

The new Congress has no greater Constitutional duty than to find this truth and display it, if our nightmarish politics is to end. If such inquiries clearly exonerate the Bush Administration, the nation can breathe deeply and go on. If they do not, then but only then should impeachment be undertaken.

To fail in this responsibility is to condone the surreal political discourse the Bush Administration has imposed. That could render it the permanent condition of American governance.