Fighting the Blue Funk (for God and Country)

Sorry no posts in a while, my friends.

Sometimes I have difficulty finding the will to blog (never mind the time) as the national political news is so often bleak and hope for the future so tenuous. The idea that young people in the US military are dying overseas, having taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, while their commander in chief back home treats that very document with utter contempt, as if it were “just a piece of paper,” is frankly enough to send me into a powerful deep blue funk.

What’s more galling is the large number of Americans who are willing to carry the President’s water for him, so to speak, to sling accusations at John Murtha, let’s say, and who are all too willing to allow the very institutions which have created this great country to be subverted and destroyed.

These people will tell you they hate and fear terrorists, but that is not the truth; their leaders have created thousands upon thousands of new terrorists all over the world, and they seem to like it just fine.

Given that each new revelation of official misconduct (dare I say “crime”?) only serves to anger them – but not at a president who spies on citizens in direct defiance of the law, nor at right-wing congressional leaders who cynically bargain away their constituents’ health and security for twenty pieces of silver, or a nice golfing trip - but at the same old bugaboos on the ever-disappearing Left: Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jane Fonda. John Murtha; the only conclusion a sane man can reach is this:

They don’t hate terrorists. They like terrorists because terrorists give them a place to attach their paranoia and fear. Who DO they hate then?

Liberals. While the blood and money flow out of our nation in rivers, they could care less. They are still fighting the War of the Blue Dress, as if they can bring the thousands of dead back to life by re-impeaching Bill Clinton.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sick.

Of course, one must fight the blue funk tooth and nail, as I’m doing now, because the enemies of freedom (real freedom, not Bush-brand Freedom ™) never rest and are counting on our collective ennui to continue to run roughshod over our freedoms of thought and action and the concepts of human rights, accountability, and democracy.

Al Gore gave an excellent speech the other day, not carried in the major media, and I found it both chilling – literally, as I was trembling all over after reading it - and rousing. Then again, what it roused me to do was to take a long hot bath and a glass of whiskey to calm down. So maybe it was a little TOO powerful.

The implications for the future are dire and we are most definitely in a state of constitutional crisis. The president has asserted his right to go above the law in times of war. But this war, you may remember, will never end and, in the president’s own admission, can never be “won.” So what is he actually claiming?

Quite simply, he is trying to re-make America in his own authoritarian image, and is claiming to be above the law, permanently, for ever and ever. That U.S. citizens no longer have rights, or recourse to the law, forever.

He and his close advisors are the very embodiment of audacity, calmly telling the courts, especially the Supreme Court, that they no longer have jurisdiction over cases involving suspected terrorists, and that cases from Guantanamo, Abu Graib, or any of the far worse secret prisons our tax dollars are now supporting, may no longer be heard. Telling Congress that they will not provide information on a whole host of secret programs that you and I are paying for. I hope that the Judiciary in particular sees beyond partisan politics and realizes that the president is a dangerous man, and that he is attempting to neuter them for all time. He is about to install Samuel Alito, a man who seems ready to geld himself and the Supreme Court in one fell swoop, so you be the judge.

One FISA judge apparently saw the future clearly, this writing on the wall, and has resigned.

The rest of us can’t be so resigned.

Fight for your country.

Fight the power.

Fight the blue funk.