The ethical need to remember Bush accurately, lest we become Ahmadinejad's Iran

Naomi Wolf (Wiki commons)

Author and journalist Naomi Wolf is a hero. So is Jerry Barrett, who, as Politex, operates the Bushwatch (and now also JoeBamawatch) website. Indeed, any journalist is a hero who, day in and day out, told the truth about the Bush Regime. For doing what they believed they had a right to do under U.S. law, and even an obligation to do by virtue of their chosen profession -- ferreting out and printing the truth -- they were subjected to various invasions of privacy and assaults on their person, particularly by Homeland Security agents at airports…as if Naomi Wolf looks much like a Islamic martyr wannabe.

Last summer was a very dangerous time in America. I began to wonder if there was a reason I was wanded virtually every time I got on an airplane all summer, and my entire purse was searched bit by tiny bit once. I’m a middle-aged woman, hardly the profile of a drug runner or even, I should think, a drug mule.

Perhaps I was paranoid. The thought occurred to me. But I had been reading Wolf’s blog all summer, and her take on the erosion of American civil liberties -- and the fact that my hassles at the airport were kid’s play next to what she endured, including missed flights and more -- scared me to the tips of my toes. I think not. I think anyone who loves the Constitution and would really not want to live in an America that had lost that most marvelous and most ethical of documents might have felt as I did, as Wolf did, as Barrett did…as an assortment of non-journalist friends did also.

American civil liberties have long set this nation apart from all others. The abundance of our resources and industrial output, our relatively decent public education, the variety of landscapes, the variety of cultural heritages…all those are nice perks. But the essence of America is precisely what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to eradicate, and very nearly did. Our civil liberties. Our Constitutional guarantees.

In fact, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney so thoroughly eroded those civil liberties that I trembled not only for myself, but for the nation my niece and nephew and three step-daughters would have to deal with if a right-wing Republican were elected again and the Constitution had to bear any more assaults. Today, in Huffington Post, a former right-wing evangelist, Frank Schaeffer, painted precisely the picture I saw in my worst nightmares:

Picture America if Sarah Palin was president, both houses of Congress had a deep Republican majority, and the last 30 years of appointments to the Supreme Court had all been far right choices. Picture Fox News as the only TV news with access to the government, and the editors of the New York Times in jail for ‘treason.’

Thank heavens we elected Mr. Obama. We didn’t have to fling ourselves into the streets to protest another stolen election, as much of the population of Iran is doing today. We didn’t, after all, have to risk death to keep what was best about what we had, some small part of which the protestors in Iran are willing to die to obtain.

The danger, however, is not yet past. In March, Wolf noted with thanks that we had escaped the worst fate on the horizon, but also warned that complacency was not in order. We need, she noted, to continue to demand that the evidence of the Bush Regime’s perfidy be revealed. She wrote:

For three years, since writing End of America, I have been arguing inferentially that the Bush team sought to possibly subvert liberty. Fortunately, this appalling and conceivably irrevocable subversion of the tenets of freedom was narrowly averted by citizens at every level -- from the grassroots to the courts -- resisting in time. But the release this week by the Justice Department of the “secret memos” sought valiantly by the ACLU confirms that Bush’s legal architects were building up the framework for something even scarier than our most anguished projections.

Today, Frank Schaeffer issued an even more impassioned warning to stay vigilant and to be thankful for what we have not had to endure or risk. In Huffington Post, he wrote:

Look at Iran and give thanks that the Republican Party -- the tool of America's mullahs married to the Neocon war mongers -- is in decline and has been rejected by the American people. Work to keep America secular, free and democratic.

Stay vigilant. Having failed at the ballot box the Republicans and their far right hate-filled supporters are beginning to foment violence with their crazy anti-Obama talk and hysteria. As Bob Herbert said in his NY Times (June 20) column; ‘I hope I'm wrong, but I can't help feeling as if the murder at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the assassination of the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the slaying of three police officers in Pittsburgh -- all of them right-wing, hate-driven attacks -- were just the beginning and that worse is to come.’

The battle between oppressive religion and freedom is not over yet -- not in Iran, nor here in America.

Where are those whose justifications for governmental terror against U.S. citizens and torture of our adversaries so completely eroded our civil liberties, and our national reputation as well? Where are George and Dick and Donald?

Donald emerged this week, denigrating Rice and Powell, the two voices that have emerged in retrospect as the only reasonable ones in that parliament of fools. Powell always stood out from that rat pack; Rice’s relative decency and intelligence was a surprise. Donald was ousted by Bush a couple of years before the end of Bush’s second term, so he’s damaged goods in their eyes anyway. Certainly, to most Americans, he has faded into obscurity already. Having him speak up and cast aspersions on Powell and Rice simply deflects attention from where it needs to be, which is anywhere except on what Donald Rumsfeld thinks about anyone or any thing.

Amazingly, Dick has gone quiet again. But he went quiet just about the time Iran was heating up. Perhaps he didn’t want people to connect him to that, to connect the excesses of his and George’s Oval Office with the lawlessness of the present government in Iran. Perhaps he did not want people drawing parallels. But he was too late; some of the media has already done so.

Nor might George’s relative silence be totally honorable; it might simply be a means to keep his name off the front page so that the only name appearing will be Obama. Eventually, human memory being what it is -- and the wingnut propaganda machine being what it is -- he and Poppy might be hoping that the United States electorate will begin to associate Obama with all the disasters caused by Bush. Stranger things have happened.

There is probably much to be gained by the right wing if George stays quiet. George W. Bush started two wars, destroyed America’s financial system, dumbed down the schools to the point of imbecility, transferred just about all the remaining wealth from the middle class to the millionaires, terrified the population with a system of alerts based on chimera in the fertile imagination of his Nazi-styled Homeland Security department, and all that after being about as democratically elected as Ahmadinejad was last week (if somewhat more cagily).

If Bush stays mum, then there is no other name in the public eye except Barack Obama. Before too long, those with short memories --  including the media -- will be laying George’s disasters at Barack’s feet…which is the right wing’s only hope for climbing back into office.

It is therefore incumbent upon all of us who know or even have an inkling of how close the Bush Regime brought America to a fundamentalist oligarchy to keep Mr. Bush’s name in the public eye, preferably allied with a laundry list of his assaults on American civil liberties disguised by the banner of a crusade against a different set of unholy fundamentalist oligarchs.

It is the only ethical thing to do. And at least, now that we are once again enjoying the rule of law -- and with some hope for restoration of the Constitution as we once knew it -- perhaps it is a lot less dangerous as well.