It is a sad state of affairs to have the President of the United States admit to the nation and to the world that he is spying on the citizens he is elected to safeguard.
It is worse to have the President aggressively justify his “big brother” politics in the name of an ill-begotten, counter-productive war on terrorism that, by his own admission, will go on for years and years and years. It would seem that George Orwell’s “1984” is now at hand; that Bush is aiming to outdo Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who also justified his assault on the human rights of Chileans in the higher name of a “war on terrorism.”
The slippery slope that Bush has embarked upon leads to a police state, plain and simple.
Bush argues that his powers as a president in “times of war” are plenary – that is, full, complete, without limit. Yet the very soul of a democracy is the equal powers that the three branches of government share, each serving as a counterweight to the messianic impulses that any one of the other branches might dare assume.
How can President Bush claim to want to instill a working democracy in Iraq, while at the same time violating our own U.S. laws, our own system of checks and balances? Terrorism is a serious risk to our nation, but a far greater threat is the centralization of American political power in the hands of any single branch of the government.
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