Riverbend blogging on life in Baghdad this week

“Where’s baba?” J. asked, panicking for a moment before we heard his slippered feet in the driveway. “Did they take him?” Her voice was getting higher. Ammoo S. finally walked into the house, looking weary and drained. I could tell his face was pale even in the relative dark of the house. My aunt sat sobbing quietly in the living room, T. comforting her. “Houses are no longer sacred… We can’t sleep… We can’t live… If you can’t be safe in your own house, where can you be safe? The animals… the bastards…”

We found out a few hours later that one of our neighbors, two houses down, had died. Abu Salih was a man in his seventies and as the Iraqi mercenaries raided his house, he had a heart-attack. His grandson couldn’t get him to the hospital on time because the troops wouldn’t let him leave the house until they’d finished with it. His grandson told us later that day that the Iraqis were checking the houses, but the American troops had the area surrounded and secured. It was a coordinated raid.

How wonderful. Our gift to the Iraqi people, George Bush’s idea of homeland security, coming soon to a domestic neighborhood near you.

Well, that’s more than a bit of hyperbole but think a minute about what has happened this week. Bush’s Attorney General goes before Congress, not as an upholder of law and the Constitution but as a defender of a wide ranging, completely unConstitutional, internal spying program put into place by Bush which has at its core the basic belief that no American can be trusted and that the President alone can determine which of us is a threat and which of us is not. Warrantless eavesdropping is only one issue, remember that we’ve already had them make it quite clear they can declare an American citizen an “enemy combatant” whenever they choose and send that citizen off to a foreign country to be tortured and/or imprisoned indefinitely without notice or recourse to legal assistance.

It is fundamentally unAmerican, fundamentally unConstitutional, it is everything our Founding Fathers fought the first King George to escape and now, in their names, an unholy cabal of right wing extremists and their apologists, aided by a cowed citizenry and impotent to non-existent political opposition are dismantling the great experiment that was the American Democratic Republic.

And that is not hyperbole because AG Gonzales actually lectured Congress on their new reduced role under the Imperial Presidency. As he put it they can “suggest legislation” to the President. Amazing isn’t it? It is the President’s role to suggest legislation to Congress and sign off on the product of their deliberations. But “Abu” Gonzales just described the Bush vision for his new America, with Congress playing the role of Politburo and Bush and his family (Jeb to follow) playing the combined roles of Soviet Premier and Czar.

The Republican party, as currently constituted such that it brooks no dissent, no unapproved opinion, no doubt, no questioning and valuing loyalty to the Great Leader and The Party over loyalty to the country and its citizens.

All the pieces are in place, all the seeds sown and now the bullshit begins to pile up on top, fertilizing the growth of a rabid America our founding fathers would never recognize.