October 17, 2006: The Day America Died and King George was Crowned

"On October 17, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which does away with Habeas Corpus and makes it perfectly legal for the government to secretly arrest any American citizen, strip him of his citizenship, hold him indefinitely without charges, try him in front of a military tribunal, and execute him in secret." I don't know what to say. And apparently neither does the rest of the country because they don't even know it happened. I didn't even know this happened until well after the fact, not because I am ill informed but because it got so little coverage in the general media. What the fuck, America? Now they really are giving away our civil liberties, burning them with the bodies of our soldiers on the funeral pyre for all that was good about this country, offering them as tribute to our glorious ruler George W. Do people understand that the executive branch now holds all the cards? This is about to get 18 times worse than the McCarthy trials- at least Joseph McCarthy couldn't unlawfully imprison citizens without telling them what they were being imprisoned for. He drove people to suicide with the blacklist, but as wrong as it was at least they knew what they were being accused of. Without Habeas Corpus we are all at risk. This is not an overstatement- we are now without the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, a limit to how long we can be held without that trial if it is granted to us, and most essentially the right to know what we are being accused of. This is supposedly only in regards to enemy combatants, but who decides what makes an "enemy combatant"? This mystery tribunal? Are we in a comic book all of a sudden? Where is this administration cribbing from- Battlestar Galactica? What happened to reasonable people in this country? Why aren't people rioting in the streets? In Hungary a politician says that he lied about some economic statistics and people are setting fire to the governtment buildings- we can barely keep ourselves from changing the channel. Perhaps part of the problem is that most of our citizens didn't know what Habeas Corpus was in the first place. It's exceedingly easy to dupe an unsuspecting public- how can the miss what they didn't know they had? Being uneducated about our government and our history is now costing us our most basic freedoms, possibly our lives. We are better than this America. We are better. We can do better than these people and their duplicity. We have become lazy and silent and overfed and comfortable but the comfort is costing us something much more dear- our souls. No amount of comfort and personal security is worth sacrificing this American Experiment- this great exercise in the will of the people. We have become a joke, the democracy without demos, the people. Even as a representative democracy we have failed- we do not notify our representatives of our wishes and we do not hold them accountable for their poor choices. We must do better, or we will perish. The United States will remain, but it will be a vastly different place than our forefathers imagined. It will be a place familiar to the Ray Bradburys and George Orwells and Margaret Atwoods and Kurt Vonneguts of the world- a nightmare of control and oppression disguised as personal choice. It has happened before- the Romans had their bread and circuses, we have MickeyD's and American Idol. Think about that for a second, American Idol. Idol. As in idolatry, as in worship. We are worshipping celebrity and excess while our leaders are quietly and quickly dismantling the constitution. We have become our own Nero, fiddling while Rome burned. Please, protest this. I don't care how you do it- call a congressional leader, a senator, write a letter to the editor, for God's sake vote on November 7th, but do something. We have to do something, we cannot be complacent- complacent is complicit. Keith Olbermann is right, history will judge us, and it will not be kind. Where were you when our constituition became just a piece of paper- I pray to God you weren't watching Dancing with the Stars.