Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero has a spot-on post about our current state of affairs in the wake of the abysmal cave-in by Congress to the dictatorial Presidency of George W. Bush.

[emphasis added]

The truth is that the United States government is presently holding, torturing, and even murdering countless numbers of people who have no chance in hell of obtaining a lawyer, let alone anything resembling a trial. The government is doing this under the direct orders of George W. Bush. There is no law, no bill, and no legislature who can stop him. If Congress were to pass a law unequivocably banning torture and send it to him, he’d use it for toilet paper. If the Supreme Court were to rule against Bush in the harshest and bluntest language, he’d yawn.

The truth is that there is a rogue presidency and there has been, since January, 2001 (earlier, if you count the stolen election). Certainly, everyone in Washington knows it, but no one dares to admit it. The bill legalizing torture merely enables Congress to pretend they still have some influence over an executive that from day one was governing, not as if they had a mandate, but as if Bush were a dictator. If, for some miracle, the bill didn’t pass, every congress-critter knows Bush would keep on torturing.

Better to vote to pass and preserve the appearance of a working American government, the thinking goes. For the very thought that the US government is seriously broken - that the Executive is beyond the control of anyone and everyone in the world - is such a truly awesome and terrifying thought that it can never be publicly acknowledged. If ever it is, if the American crisis gets outed and Congress and the Supremes openly assert that the Executive has run completely amok and is beyond control, the world consequences are staggering. It is the stuff of doomsday novels.

I haven’t posted anything in a while and it is because of this steady drip, drip, drip erosion of our nation’s foundational principles and documents. This must be what it was like for rational Russians watching Stalin and his successors ripping their country to shreds while their neighbors stood by silently or went along out of fear. It must be what it is like whenever a democracy is subsumed by a dictator claiming to be acting in the national interests (all dictators start out as nationalists) while actively demolishing the nation itself and its citizens.

Take heart all you bush supporters, you can now point fingers and whisper “terrorist” and this administration will happily follow your pointing digit and declare the object of your derision an “enemy combatant” and haul them off to a 21st Century Gulag, real or virtual, run by us or by proxy in some other nation, and torture and try and convict in absentia at will and execute on a whim. Rule of law is gone now, habeas corpus a historical footnote of no importance, the idea of democratic Republic a thing of the past.

This is the darkest day in this country in my lifetime, to be made darker still the day King George signs the bill into law, though with this legislation making an utter shambles of the concept of the rule of law I see no reason for Junior Bush to even bother going through the formalities of a signing ceremony because such an event no longer has meaning. All decisions are now his, all interpretations of the Constitutions are now his and no one, not Abu Gonzalez who seems to have forgotten that his job is to be the Constitution’s lawyer instead of being the President’s lawyer, not the Supreme Court which having put Bush in office in 2000 is now dismissed by him as irrelevant, and certainly not Congress which has rolled over now once too often, can change any of that.