Paying attention Monday

I’m not sure if you all know this or not but our constitution is under fire these days. Although if you’re busy watching the mainstream media, you’d never know it. You’d think things are going swimmingly in Iraq, what’s that? Invade Iran? Us? Puhlease, and waterboarding isn’t torture and anyway, we don’t torture so just rest your pretty heads now and don’t worry about anything.

Alas, the real story is pretty nasty. I do my homework and read about it – do you? I listen to Randi Rhodes who pretty much DEMANDS that you know what’s going on. (Woe unto the ignorant dolts who call her and want to verbally spar. Goodness.) It’s getting scary out there, folks.

In my effort to help you, my darling five readers, understand in plain language what is taking place under this administration, I am introducing a little thing called “Paying Attention Monday“. So you can, in fact, say you are paying attention. If you like how things are going, good for you. Go sit in the corner until all your rights have been taken away. It won’t be long. (1984, anyone?)

The rest of you – pay attention.

This snippet comes from a much longer post by Naomi Wolf on FiredogLake. If you’ve heard Naomi talk about her book “The End of America”, you would be aghast at what really is going on in this country. I bought the book after hearing her on Stephanie Miller and it’s a well researched, well written warning to all of us who are just waking up to how our country is being stolen.

Here’s some of what she wrote at FDL:

Why should Congress impeach and prosecute this instant, not waiting till February? Why should this impeachment and prosecution be solidly bipartisan? After February it is the leaders on both sides of the aisle — and the people writing these essays — who are at most risk of being turned back at the border. People who can’t leave in a police state are effectively silenced. And history shows that Republicans are at the exact same risk as Democrats of being violently silenced once liberties are lost. I am reading about IBM’s close, profitable involvement with Nazi Germany — much akin to Prescott Bush’s well-documented close and profitable involvement with Nazi Germany through German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen. Right up to the top of the solidly Nazi hierarchy of the IBM affiliate, corporate executives were terrified of taking a wrong step in the eyes of the Party: `There are concentration camps’, they would whisper to their US backers. The teenage son of one solid Nazi ally was taken hostage when he resisted Party orders. So alignment with the regime in a police state offers no ultimate protection.

Let us think like business consultants analyzing the decisions of a business that claims it is going to close its door in just a year. What kinds of decisions is it making? Here is a quiz, if you still doubt that we need to shift our thinking and recognize what appears to be ‘a paper coup.’:

– Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

– These walls would crumble if the next legitimate president independently ends the war. How about defending and expanding the basis for FISA violations at this late stage — after all, these folks will be gone in a year?

– How about the decision to fight so hard for a US attorney who will defend the view that the President is above the law?

– Why would that matter so much in an administration folding its tents?

– Why the rush to establish Guantanamo as a permanent part of the landscape and even seek money at one point to double its size — if the next President, a truly independent Republican or Democrat, might just close it down?

– Why the push to expand a war that makes no military or popular sense, rush through military tribunals that the next President might just disband, and, by the way, drum up a fresh new World War III?

– Do the neo-cons advising Giuliani look like a fresh page for an independent, transparent election or an ideological continuity of government in themselves?

– Do these look like the short-term tactics of a fading administration — or the institutional strategic bases for some kind of new long-term beginning?

– Why work so hard to make sure that the man who defended the infamous “enemy combatant” concept will be the new Attorney General?

Good questions, all of them. Not to get all tin-foil-hatty on you but people, shit doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It all adds up to a very horrific picture. Think I’m being too over-the-top? Start reading and see where you end up. I bet you’ll be sitting next to me on the “Oh Good Lord” bench.

Thoughts, comments and even blatant disagreement welcome. Just as long as you are paying bloody attention.