"Accountability Now and Strange Bedfellows: The strategy and rationale
by Glenn Greenwald
In the 2006 mid-term elections, Americans handed The Democratic Party a sweeping, staggering, and historic victory -- as the GOP was removed from power and Democrats given control over both the House and Senate. It marked only the third time in the last 60 years that there was a change in control of the Congress. The Democrats defeated six GOP Senators, and picked up 31 House seats. Six Governorships switched from the GOP to the Democrats. Not one single Democratic incumbent in Congress and not one Democratic Governor lost -- only the second time in U.S. history in which one of the major parties failed to defeat even a single Congressional incumbent from the other party.
Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:
- Repeatedly funded -- at the White House's insistence -- the Iraq War without conditions;
- Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- Jim Webb's bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;
- Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;
- Enacted -- at the White House's insistence and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous Republican support -- the so-called Protect America Act, vesting the President with extreme new warrantless eavesdropping powers;
- Overwhelmingly approved the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a "terrorist organization," an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made "regime change" the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;
- Deleted from a pending bill -- at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House -- a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;
- Overwhelmingly enacted -- at the White House's insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support -- the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008," to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration's illegal NSA spying program;
- Confirmed, with the indispensable support of two key Democratic Senators, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, despite his support for radical Bush theories of executive power and his refusal to oppose torture;
- Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.
All of this highlights the central political dilemma in the U.S. The Bush-led Republican Party, marching in virtual lockstep, has been the author of the radicalism, extremism and lawlessness of the last seven years, presiding over an endlessly expanding Surveillance State and accompanying war-making machine, and the dismantling of numerous core Constitutional principles. While numerous individual elected Democrats have opposed many of these measures, the Democratic Party's leadership, and the Party collectively, has done nothing to stop it and much to support and enable all of it.
As the 2006 election and these subsequent events conclusively demonstrate, mindlessly supporting and electing more Democrats for its own sake doesn't solve or even mitigate anything. But it's also true that actions which result in handing Republicans control over any branches of the Government -- including supporting third-party candidates or abstaining from the process altogether -- makes matters worse still. Nobody who finds the above-documented events objectionable can rationally embrace a course of action that directly or indirectly empowers those who are the prime forces behind these events: namely, the mainstream GOP in its current incarnation.
All of that, in turn, leads to this pressing question: what is the best course for those who want to battle against these civil-liberties-destroying, rule-of-law-trampling, war-making policies that the GOP leadership pushes and the Democratic Party leadership supports, enables, and/or passively accepts? In a two-party system where blind support for either party will do nothing but perpetuate these policies, how can they be undermined?
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Increasing the Democrats' margin of control doesn't achieve that goal. It does the opposite. Conveying to Democrats that you will support all of them no matter they do, no matter how egregiously they trample on your values, only ensures that they will ignore your political priorities and values even more. Working to expand the margin of control Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel and Harry Reid already enjoy -- further entrenching them in power -- only ensures that they will be less responsive and accountable. Only by attaching a serious price to their enabling of these extremist, destructive policies will their behavior change. If they are rewarded with greater control and greater comfort for doing what they've been doing, then it's just guaranteed that they'll continue to do the same thing. Only if they suffer loses and have their power threatened from this behavior will the behavior change.
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"Enabling Tyranny—Brigitte Bardot And Other Victims
by Paul Craig Roberts
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According to Information Clearing House's running tally as of July 12, 1,236,604 Iraqis have been slaughtered as a result of the Sarkozy-supported US invasion and occupation of Iraq. If Bardot is a hate criminal under French law for complaining about how Muslims prepare their mutton, why isn't President Sarkozy a hate criminal for supporting an American policy that has resulted in the deaths of 1,236,604 Muslims and the displacement of 4 million Iraqis?
Such incongruities are everywhere. It is as if people are no longer capable of thought.
Last week the US Congress passed an ex post facto law that legalized the illegal behavior of telecommunication companies that enabled the Bush Regime to violate US law and to spy on Americans without warrants. Retroactive laws are unconstitutional. But, alas, the US Constitution does not make campaign contributions, and telecommunication companies do.
The Bush Regime claimed that its illegal behavior, which requires an unconstitutional retroactive law to protect telecommunication companies and President Bush from being held accountable, is necessary to protect us. But as our Founding Fathers and every intelligent patriotic person since has patiently explained to the American public, it is the Constitution that protects us. No safety can be found by fleeing the Constitution.
Without the Constitution we have no protection. We simply stand naked before unbridled government power.
That's pretty much how we stand now after 7.5 years of the Bush Regime. Electing a Democratic Congress in 2006 did not make any difference. Indeed, it was a Democratic majority Congress that last week gave Bush his unconstitutional ex post facto law.
As Larry Stratton and I point out in the new edition of Tyranny, 
Across the political spectrum, Americans are happy to shred the Constitution in behalf of some agenda or the other.
The government is happy to oblige, because shredding the Constitution removes constraints on the government's power.
It has fallen to the private, member-supported organization known as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge the retroactive law that destroys the privacy rights granted to US citizens by the Constitution. The ACLU is regarded by conservatives as a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity, and the right-wing idiots on Fox “News” and talk radio will denounce the ACLU for wanting to empower terrorists.
Conservatives will repeat endlessly that Americans who are doing nothing wrong have nothing to fear. If this argument held any water, there would have been no point in the Founding Fatherswriting the Constitution.
The position of the US Government is that the rights granted Americans by the Constitution facilitate terrorism. To be safe from terrorists, the argument goes, we must allow the government to take liberties with the Constitution. This argument gives government the power to set aside the Constitution, and, thus, enables tyranny. As Milton Friedman and many others taught us, rules are the essence of freedom, and discretionary power is the essence of tyranny.
Bush's “war on terror,” essentially a hoax, has transformed the United States into a lawless nation. We are not lawless in the sense of an absence of laws. We are lawless in the sense that despite a surfeit of laws, we no longer have the rule of law.
If the President doesn't like an existing law, he ignores it. If the President doesn't like new laws passed by Congress, instead of vetoing them he prepares a “signing statement,” which says that he will determine what the law means.
This lawlessness has spread from the top of the federal government down to local governments and community associations. Recently the state of Georgia passed a law that reaffirmed that anyone with a carry permit was entitled to have their concealed weapon when dropping off or picking up passengers at the Atlanta airport. The Atlanta city government said it would not obey the state law and would arrest anyone, including the state legislator who sponsored the legislation, who carried a permitted weapon onto airport property. [Airport's Ban on Guns Is Disputed in Atlanta, By John Sullivan, New York Times,July 2, 2008]
A community in which I live has by-laws that forbid members of the board of the property owners association from serving as general manager of the designated community. This did not prevent the board from appointing one of their own the general manager. The POA board regards the by-laws which govern it as merely words without force.
Just like Bush regards the US Constitution.
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So what to do, what to do?
.... Your vote for one or the other makes no difference. Voting for either is the same as throwing your voting ballot in the toilet. Political hacks that throw away people’s rights and their protections against arbitrary governance do not deserve to be elected at all.
If you want real change and you think voting can bring some change, then know this: the only difference you can make by voting is casting a protest vote. Tell the establishment they don’t represent you in a written, documented form.
Write in your own name on the ballot; better, write in your grandmother’s name. Stop handing blank checks to a government that is so plainly bent on screwing you. Stop being slaves. At least spit back in their face. Don’t waste your vote, don’t waste the only political force you can legally exercise, and don’t waste your voice; vote for Nader, vote for McKinney, for anybody but the establishment boys.
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