Wednesday, May 17, 2006

What a Bunch of Hooey

Well President Bush is at is again. Monday night the President announced on national television his plans for stemming the tide of illegal immigration and for the deployment of the military along our southern border with Mexico. It’s amazing to see how this President continues to ignore the Constitution and how these abuses of power have become so commonplace in our country. The government is clearly playing to our fears about border security, jobs lost to illegal immigrants and the fact that we will all be speaking Spanish by the end of the decade. The President will have us believe that fencing off our newly militarized southern boarder will somehow make us safer. The fact is that his address to the nation was nothing more than a prime time photo op for a floundering administration desperately attempting to portray Bush as a wartime President, protecting our national security interests in post 9/11 America. What a bunch of hooey! If you are talking about national security in the post 9/11 era you have to begin with the actual event. You have to demonstrate an understanding of the basic causes of that terrible day and of the days leading up to the attack. Then you must develop and execute a strategy predicated upon those findings. The problem for me is that I have no doubt that this administration has done that. The fact that we have not been attacked again is not simply a matter of blind luck. However that is not the real issue is it? The real issue is that this President once again feels compelled to ignore U.S. Federal Law when it is politically convenient to do so. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of the United States military in civil law enforcement. There are those in the government and elsewhere who would debate this legal point and who knows they may be right. However, isn’t it interesting that the same President who this week claimed the right to deploy federal troops on domestic soil in order to stem the tide of illegal immigration, is the same President who refused to deploy federal troops on domestic soil in order to stop the chaos, looting and murder occuring in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina. If you recall, President Bush stated that he needed the Governor of Louisiana to request federal military assistance before he could legally approve federal troop deployment. How crazy is that? Can anybody say hypocrite? The fact of the matter is that it is all about party politics and what is in the best interests of the party. Now if you are still unsure about the Presidents political motivations or you actually believe that the deployment of U.S. troops along our southern border is critical to national security, ask yourself one question. How did Mohammad Atta and the rest of the 9/11 terrorists gain access to the U.S.? I’ll give you a hint; it wasn’t because of our porous border with Mexico.

These are indeed troubling times. It is troubling that most people today are so ambivalent and politically unaware that they are willing to sacrifice the precious rights and freedoms that so many of our sons and daughters fought and died to protect. More troubling than the general lack of political efficacy in this country is the absolute moral bankruptcy of our elected officials. When I think about this moral decay, I cannot help but to recall a famous quote regarding the corruptible nature of power and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to wake up and we need to wake up fast! It should be obvious to even the most uninformed person that this President and his cronies are willing to do anything in order to maintain their tight grip on power…even if it means violating our civil rights or trashing the protections guaranteed each of us by the Constitution of the United States. That’s what makes this political mumbo jumbo all the more disturbing. The deployment of federal troops on domestic soil is not about national security…it’s about votes. It's about Republicans talking tough and trying to rally their conservative base. It's really quite simple, mid-term elections are just around the corner, it’s looking ugly for the Republicans and they are all running scared. Apparently lost in all this talk about illegal immigration, building 500-mile fences and domestic troop deployment, is the fact that Republicans genuinely seem more terrified about the potential fallout from mid-term elections than they are concerned about actual terrorism and that the Republican leadership is currently more concerned about Al Gore than it is about al Qaeda.
Think about it.






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