Philip Slater: Why America's First Major Terrorist Attack is Forgotten, and what it Shows us | The Huffington Post:
"...Americans need to wake up to the fact that right-wing Republicans don't believe in democracy and never have. They have always admired military dictatorships and seem to be working hard to set up the equivalent here in the United States. Their goal is to create an authoritarian government, with control of the media and the judiciary; to weaken all restraints on executive power and eliminate democratic freedoms; to undermine the public education system through fiscal starvation and rote learning, so that the poor will learn only enough to follow orders; and to create the kind of economic inequality so many Third World countries enjoy--by filling the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich individuals and impoverishing the rest, thereby providing a mass of cheap labor. This policy began under Ronald Reagan and has made huge leaps under the Bush regime. We don't have too much further to go to achieve this right-wing 'ideal'.
The 'war' on terror was a pretext to help achieve this goal. By defining the crime of 9/11 as a 'war', and invading Iraq--though the perpetrators of that crime, and its leader, were all Saudis--Bush could dress up in an unearned uniform and declare himself a 'war president' with near-dictatorial powers, treating all who disagreed with him as enemies and traitors. As a 'wartime President', Bush has declared that our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, international treaties, and international law, don't apply to him.
If our country's increasing disaffection with this Pinochet wannabe reaches serious proportions what will he do? Declare martial law, like his South American idols? And will Americans lie down docilely, content with their TiVos and ipods?
One of the many ironies of modern American life is that our military establishment--never the first group that comes to mind when we think of democratic institutions--is so disgusted with the irrationality of the neo-cons that it may turn out to be our best protection against becoming a full-fledged dictatorship."
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