... I think their focus groups and pollsters tell them they've created and sustained enough fear to keep the peasants terrorized without having to go through all the trouble of another 9/11.
It's kind of funny in a sick way: all those millions of swaggering, rugged individualist wannabes out there in red state land living closeted, fear-saturated lives of doom and desperation because they were conned about the whole phony war on terra by the stupidest man ever to occupy the offal office.
But you can't ignore the signs. The Bushies have been hard at work for the past seven and a half years to put together the infrastructure and systems necessary to implement a full-blown national security state.
One of those pieces is NSPD 51/HSPD-20 (see the link below). It will be the legal justification to implement the new "Continuity of Government" protocols spelled out in that PD and referred to in the OP.
If that's not enough to turn your stomach, NSPD 51/HSPD-20 also anoints Bushie Lord Protector of the Constitution, no doubt an acknowledgment of his veneration for Constitutional law, and makes him solely responsible for ensuring that the rule of law is maintained.
It's not known if the entire cabinet collapsed in gales of uncontrollable laughter when they heard about this colossal joke, but it's a fair bet that they at least broke out the foot-long cigars or, as they're known in pentagon jargon, "Combustible, Tubular-Shaped Tiny Weenie Compensation Devices; Not to Exceed 95 Centimeters Length."
As a side note, I wonder if the world would be an entirely different place now if we had all contributed a thousand bucks toward penile enlargement surgery for the whole Bushie gang. That would have seemed pretty expensive back in 2001, but imaging the savings we would have realized by now. Nor would their madness have caused the deaths of more than a million Iraqi civilians and almost 4,050 US troops. Another missed investment opportunity.
But back to reality. Here's a longer list of reasons to freak. We now have, on the books and I suppose enforceable,
repressive legislation,
executive orders and
presidential directives; massive federal invasions of privacy regarding
medical and
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/washington/23intel.html?ex=1308715200&en=168d69d26685c26c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">financial records; monitoring US citizens'
electronic communications;
re-targeting spy satellites for domestic surveillance; the
TSA cavity search specialists (
for attractive young women only; the rest are presumed to pose no threat to the state); no-fly and terrorist
watch lists;
Halliburton/KBR's detention camps;
RFIDs in all new passports and in the new national ID cards scheduled to be issued this year; new
TSA "behavior detection officers" to spot those who don't "look quite right;"
all this wonderful new stuff from the DHS;
private armies featuring mercenaries from companies like Blackwater and SAIC springing up like mushrooms after a light rain... All that and the
Patriot Act, the
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/detention/commissions.html">Military Commissions Act,
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/22203res20051206.html">extraordinary rendition (whatever the hell that means) and
torture, too. (Note: the torture link is graphic and disgusting.)
Also, see the blockquote in
this post, which is a small part of H.R. 1585, the fiscal year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act. Note the orders to prepare to use regular troops -- as opposed to the Guard or Reserves -- to respond to "natural disasters and terrorist events." In other words, martial law.
Each of these legal or physical pieces of a totalitarian infrastructure is an important link in the chain. Taken together, and when placed in context of a government completely in thrall to the power and influence of mega-business, what else could it be?
I look at the massive power the executive branch has acquired for itself since 2001 -- with the complete complicity of congress (no matter the majority party), non-stop cheerleading by an uncritical mass media, and the tacit compliance of our brain-damaged debt slave population -- and it's hard not to come to the conclusion that all the pieces are in place to lock this country down like a bank vault. They just haven't gone operational yet.
And maybe they never will. Maybe the implied threat is enough, although the Cheneys of the world don't strike me as the type to do stuff like this just for fun.
Rather, fun to them is shooting animals and, occasionally, each other. We need a lot more of the latter and far less of the former.
wp