The Left Welcomes 2006 With Paranoia By Mark Noonan

This bit by Jonathan Schell in The Nation has to be seen to be believed:

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush’s abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war (“war of choice,” in today’s euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

Schell immediately goes on to state that President Bush does not preside over the dictatorship Schell said President Bush presides over – it is “embryonic” in Schell’s phrasing.

Here we see what the left is on about – they really do view a moderately conservative Republican President acting scrupulously within the laws and carrying out middle-of-the-road economic, social and military policies as an embryonic dictatorship. Schell states that unless Congress impeaches President Bush, we will have the long-feared (on the left) dictatorship. Seeing as Congress cannot impeach for a crime which does not exist, it stands to reason that Schell’s formulation is certain to come about – meaning that to at least some on the left, we are living in a dictatorship.

This begs the question: if the left believes that President Bush is a dictator and the terrorists in Iraq are freedom fighters, who’s side shall the left be on? Would anyone want to be in the side of the dictator? Who wouldn’t want to be on the side of freedom fighters? If the freedom fighters are fighting the dictatorship you are opposed to, what would you do to assist the freedom fighters? Is there anything you wouldn’t do?

2006 really will be an interesting year.

This content was used with the permission of Blogs for Bush.

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