But i can't help myself. I've just read this on a website and think this is the clearest explanation of exactly what's gone wrong with America, a place i still plan to live when the time's right (well, Manhattan, which is hardly Mormon territory). If i was an actual American, i don't know how i would cope with the catalogue of failures this letter highlites.
I KNOW this isn't my normal area, but am i bovvered? I just started reading it and was amazed at the clarity. I'm not amazingly politically minded, but this was easy to read and at the very least, seems to be coming in handy at dinner parties. Yes, i've gotten so old i'm now attending them again, though i grant you the gay ones don't seem to touch on subjects like these. Mind you, i know enough about Madonna for those ones. Anyway, read this:
January 31, 2006
An open letter to:
€ Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
€ Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)
€ Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
€ Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV)
€ Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
€ Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE)
€ Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND)
€ Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
€ Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
€ Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD)
€ Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI)
€ Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
€ Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT)
€ Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
€ Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
€ Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
€ Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR)
€ Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-WV)
€ Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO)
Dear Senators:
Half a lifetime ago, on my eighteenth birthday, I proudly registered to vote as a member of the Democratic Party. Today, at 36, I am re-registering as an independent and renouncing my affiliation as a Democrat.
And you are the reason.
I've seen many things in the past five years; things that shocked me, horrified me, angered me, depressed me. I saw President Bush raid the treasury and steal four hundred billion dollars a year to hand out as tax breaks to his plutocratic supporters, running up more debt in five years than all of his predecessors combined, letting nothing--not terrorist attack, not two wars, not natural disaster, nothing--interfere with his looting. I saw Bush sit through the worst attack on the US since Pearl Harbor, reading to children, knowing that the attack was underway but doing nothing to respond to it. I saw him declare that Osama bin Laden was wanted dead or alive. I saw him state, six months later, "I don't think about him much...I truly am not that concerned about him."
I saw Congress debating whether or not the USA PATRIOT Act should be passed, whether it intruded too far on the civil liberties of Americans. I saw Congress unite in almost unanimous support for it once anthrax-filled envelopes began turning up in the offices of Democratic senators. I saw investigative leads in the attack dry up when evidence pointed to the Army biological weapons laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, as the most likely source of the anthrax.
I saw Republicans take the absolute unity the nation felt after 9/11 and pervert it into the greatest divisiveness our country has seen since the Civil War--turning friends, neighbors, and even family members against each other. I saw Republicans attack Democrats as cowards, fellow travelers of bin Laden, fifth columnists, traitors to their own country.
I saw heads of corporations enrich themselves with billions of stolen dollars--robbing retirees of their pensions, lying to investors to pump up stock prices, sending the electrical grid of the entire west coast into chaos--urinating on the heads of their employees, shareholders, and ordinary citizens like a vodka-filled ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David. I saw the GOP blatantly violate Congressional rules, holding votes open for hours beyond the deadline in order to strong-arm any Republicans who might vote against the party leadership's position, shutting off microphones while Democrats attempted to speak, and sneaking significant unapproved revisions bills while in conference committee.
I saw the administration suppress government scientific research at odds with their policy goals, demand rewriting of documents to undermine scientific claims, and replacing respected scientists with industry insiders. I saw information on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV removed from the CDC website and replaced with abstinence information. I saw Christian conservatives oppose a vaccine that is 100% effective against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, because it might undercut their pro-abstinence message. I saw the morning-after pill withheld from over-the counter sales through the efforts of a man with a history of repeatedly anally raping his wife.
I saw members of the Bush administration lie and deceive Congress and the American people into a war that was unwarranted and unwinnable. I saw them fabricate connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that did not exist, and drill these fabrications relentlessly into citizens' brains until the majority of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11. I saw them terrifying people with the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds annihilating American cities, generated by weapons that Saddam Hussein did not have. I saw Colin Powell betray a lifetime of honorable service by presenting sketches of imaginary mobile bioweapon factories to the UN Security Council. I saw the administration and its allies in the media
attacking anyone who dared question their lies, trumping up a bogus child molestation charge against former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and exposing the identity of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative and her brassplate company as a CIA smokescreen, undermining decades of CIA non-proliferation work and jeopardizing not only Plame's life but that of everyone who could be connected to her. I saw senior Bush administration officials lying to investigators about who was responsible for the Plame leak, and Bush himself lying about the consequences that the leaker would face.
I saw Bush send thousands of Americans and tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to gruesome deaths while spouting platitudes about freedom, democracy, and peace. I saw him say implicitly that the only way to honor the deaths of those thousands of Americans is to continue down a path that will ensure the deaths of thousands more. I saw American troops cut to pieces by improvised explosives. I saw them docked pay and forced to pay for their own food while hospitalized from combat injuries. I saw them scrounging through scrap heaps for pieces of metal and broken bulletproof glass to use as improvised vehicle armor. I saw them receiving inadequate body armor. I saw families spending thousands of dollars for the best body armor available when the military failed to provide it. I saw the military tell soldiers they would forfeit their death benefits if they were killed wearing body armor that was not standard issue.
I saw administration lawyers proclaim the Geneva Conventions to be a quaint anachronism and redefine torture to mean nothing less than suffering "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." I saw the administration forging an alliance with Uzbekistan, whose government is accused of boiling political prisoners alive. I saw the CIA secretly shipping prisoners to countries that commit torture. I saw innocent prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, murdered by US troops, none of whom received a prison sentence longer than three months. I saw photographs of hooded Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib hooked up to electrodes, of naked prisoners smeared with feces, stacked in piles, menaced by German shepards. I saw an Army interrogator receive a reprimand for killing an Iraqi general by smothering him in a sleeping bag while sitting on his chest. I saw the CIA setting up secret miniature gulags in former Soviet prisons. I saw reports of white phosphorus being used like napalm against civilians in Fallujah, and of American troops arresting family members of suspected insurgents and holding them hostage. I saw nothing happen to anyone in command who was responsible for the decisions leading to these atrocities.
I saw corruption spread like a cancer through the Republican party, as Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Michael Scanlon, David Safavian, Conrad Burns, and others were implicated in the Jack Abramoff scandal; as Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion; as DeLay was indicted for money laundering; as Bill Frist (whose family corporation was once fined a billion dollars in the largest case of Medicare fraud in history) was accused of conflict of interest and violating the terms of his blind trust; as Republican leaders were accused of allowing stock market day traders to work out of their offices, profiting from the ultimate in insider information. I saw Bush obstruct the Abramoff investigation by giving the chief prosecutor a federal judgeship. I saw Republicans respond to ethics complaints by considering John Boehner for House majority leader, a man who had previously handed out checks from tobacco lobbyists to colleagues on the House floor.
I saw President Bush strumming a guitar while an entire American city drowned in the fetid, pestilential waters of Hurricane Katrina. I saw the first major RNC policy push in the wake of Katrina--to make the elimination of the estate tax permanent. I saw Bush say "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees" when a FEMA exercise the previous year clearly foresaw that possibility. I saw him use the post-Katrina chaos to sneak through a Justice Department recess appointment for Alice Fisher, who had been implicated in policy decisions leading to detainee abuses. I saw bodies floating in the streets while FEMA head/former horse racing official Michael Brown sent word that his dinner was not to be disturbed, fretted about how he looked on TV, and blamed everyone but himself for the disastrous federal response. I saw decomposing corpses rotting on rooftops four months after government officials were told where to find them. I saw oil companies push gas prices up to three, four, five, six dollars a gallon, allegedly to offset increased costs due to disruptions to refineries and pipelines--then report two consecutive quarters of unprecedented eleven-digit profits.
I saw Bush appoint talentless cronies to positions they were utterly unqualified for, even after Hurricane Katrina, thus virtually guaranteeing that any major problem they were responsible for addressing would by design turn into yet another unmitigated disaster. I saw him demand "up-or-down votes" for all his appointees, demand that he get every appointment he wanted, demand secrecy from Congressional inquiry so that his bad advisors could feel free to give him all the bad advice they could.
I saw the Bush administration use every means at their disposal to acquire and abuse new powers. I saw him declare that the President had the right to indefinitely imprison anyone he wished, citizen or foreigner, and to deny them access to legal representation or any contact with the outside world. I saw him authorize no-fly lists to ban air travel by suspected terrorists, peace activist nuns, four-year-old children, and men named David Nelson--with no published information on how the list is determined and no way to get off it. I saw him appoint convicted Iran-contra perjurer John Poindexter (a man so corrupt he couldn't tell Congress the truth even with a grant of immunity) to develop a massive database on American citizens. I saw the military conduct surveillance of Quaker peace groups and college anti-war groups and classify them as a "credible threat." I saw the illegal warrantless surveillance of at least 80,000 of Americans by the NSA in a program that predates 9/11. I saw the President sign the McCain anti-torture bill into law with a statement that he felt free to ignore it. I saw him suggest that his title as commander in chief of the military gives him authority to spy on civilians; that in authorizing him to take action to defend the country, Congress implicitly repealed any law that might stand in his way; and that the FISA court is merely a tool for him to use, or not, at his discretion, rather than a constraint on his authority. I saw him fight the war against terrorists by attacking American citizens and the rights and liberties that are our inalienable birthright.
And I saw the Democrats in Congress do nothing.
Worse, I saw you often sabotage each other. Joe Lieberman regularly scolds other Democrats for their anti-war statements, reinforcing the Republican talking point that Democrats are weak on national security issues an unable to lead in a post-9/11 world. Zell Miller took his attacks on his fellow Democrats all the way to the 2004 Republican national convention. Presidential hopeful Joe Biden threw his support behind a bankruptcy bill that provided minimal protection for military families, opposed a 30% usury cap, and failed to treat medical crises differently from irresponsible spending. Harry Reid put out a factual press release listing 33 Republicans implicated in corruption scandals, then apologized for it a day later. You unthinkingly repeat the lies in Republican talking points without questioning them. You fail to support each other, you fail to respond coherently to outrageous actions by the administration, you fail to stick to a consistent message, you fail to protect the interests of the voters by whose graces you serve, and you fail to stand up for your own principles. I naively hoped that your inaction was merely a clever strategem; those hopes were occasionally buoyed by minor victories. Perhaps you were just biding your time, I thought...waiting for your chance, giving the Republicans enough rope to hang themselves.
Then came the Samuel Alito nomination. You had the perfect opportunity to begin to reverse the course of this train wreck of an administration. Instead, you fucked yourselves and the rest of us.
You knew Alito had boasted of his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist alumni organization, when applying for a job in the Reagan administration. He claimed now not to know anything about the group or to have had any involvement with them, which offered only two possibilities, either of which was sufficient to instantly disqualify him--that he had lied to get the job then, or that he was lying to get the job now. You knew he had vigorously advocated a fight to reverse Roe v. Wade in his Reagan years, that the Supreme Court had explicitly rejected his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey where he argued in favor of requiring spousal notification--thus, in effect, giving men veto power over their wives' medical decisions and ownership of their uteruses. You knew of his failures to recuse himself from cases in which he had a financial conflict of interest. You saw his ruling allowing a warrantless strip search of a 10-year-old girl, just the most outrageous of many data points illustrating his contempt for individual rights. You knew of his support for the notion of an omnipotent "unitary executive" unconstrained by Supreme Court precedents, by the laws passed by Congress, even by the Constitution itself (that "goddamned piece of paper" as Bush calls it)--a grotesque concept utterly alien to American jurisprudence. You knew that most of his most important rulings were overturned by higher courts, that he usually dissented from the majority opinion in cases he heard, and was often the lone dissenter, indicating that his legal views were not mainstream and were often at odds with long-established precedents. Christ, he wouldn't even state that it was unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law stripping American-born children of illegal immigrants of their citizenship because he might have to rule on it in the future, in spite of the plain, unambiguous text of the Fourteenth Amendment.
You knew this battle was coming. You fought over the "nuclear option" a year ago to ensure the availability of the filibuster for use against such an extreme nominee. You had three months to get your act together, to put together a plan of action, to build public support. But in the final climactic moment, the vote for or against cloture, the nineteen of you caved. You worthless, cowardly bastards, you caved. You threw away the only vote that mattered. Good God, what the hell is wrong with you? What reason could you possibly have had for not supporting the filibuster? You handed a Supreme Court seat to a man with no respect for the Constitution, no respect for individual rights--a defender of the indefensible, an enabler of fascism, a rubber stamp for tyranny. And in so doing, you have given Bush a blank check for any abuse of power he wishes, knowing that he's got all three branches of government in his pocket. Furthermore you've jeopardized:
€ fifteen years of disability rights legislation
€ thirty years of abortion rights precedents
€ thirty-five years of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights
€ forty years of minority voting rights
€ half a century of black civil rights
€ seventy-five years of labor law
€ 115 years of antitrust legislation
€ 135 years of environmental protections
€ the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth,
Tenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments
€ and perhaps even the authority of the Supreme Court to constrain unconstitutional acts by the President, dating back over two centuries to Marbury v. Madison.
In short, you've undermined everything the Democratic party supposedly stands for and crippled your ability to revive your moribund policy goals. The death rattle may not come this year, or next, or five years from now, but as long as Alito is on the Supreme Court, the bloodletting will continue until nothing remains of the Democratic agenda. And so-called Democrats like you are responsible. As Edmund Burke wrote, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And at the moment when decisive action was most desperately needed, YOU. DID. NOTHING.
That's why I no longer consider myself a Democrat. You cannot be trusted not to betray your core constituency, and I cannot in good conscience associate with such duplicitous cowards. The Republicans may be right--maybe you are traitors to your country; maybe you do hate what America stands for, if you violate your oath to support and defend the Constitution, if you see the enormity of this administration's crimes against our country, our people, and our world, and do nothing to stop them. The GOP is far worse, of course, but I know enough not to take my eyes off them...I expect them to stab me in the back. I expected better from you. But no more. The Republicans' actions in the past five years have wounded my faith in our nation's future, but you killed it.
