Dude, Where's My Country? Civil Rights Chased, No Child's Behind Left Alone & Other Horrors

There is not a shadow of a doubt that the actions of the Bush administration have made the world a more dangerous place, but let's reflect today on a frightening corollary -- those actions also have made the United States a more dangerous place.

As Greg Djerejian puts it, the U.S. has "become a clumsy, self-gratified and cocksure power" with a desperately mediocre political class led by clowns like Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who cannot understand why the wheels have come off of the American wagon in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

"Why do they hate each other?" Lott asks of Iraqis despite having had three-plus years to understand why the fool's mission led by his beloved president has been a doubled edged catastrophe -- not just in the Middle East, but also at home, as well, because it may well result in an end to the Republican hegemony on power in Washington.

"Why do Sunnis kills Shiites," a bemused Lott wonders. "How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me."

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The DF&C and I went to a football game at the University of Delaware Stadium on Saturday night. I hoped to catch up to Joe Biden, thinking he might be hobnobbing among the tailgaters. (Tailgaters are the hardest of the hardcore fans who arrive well before game time and set up tents, tables and barbeque grills and throw parties in the parking lot. Then there are tailgaters like Mark Foley; more about him in a bit.)

Delaware is a small enough state that you can actually walk up to a big time politician like the governor or a senator at the shore, the state fair or even the supermarket and say howdy.

Biden is a University of Delaware grad (he briefly played football in the school's legendary program) and is the state's senior U.S. senator. Although Biden sometimes acts like just another feckless Democrat, he is a rare politician who has a conscience and is a respected foreign policy expert who unlike Trent Lott understands that the world is a complex place and the U.S. is not always on the side of the angels.

But that's not why I hoped to shake Senator Joe's hand. (We didn't see him.)

I wanted to thank him for voting against torture.

Think about that.

Isn't it extraordinary that an American would even be in the position of having to reach out to his elected representative because he was one of a relatively small handful of people who stood up to a tyrannical president?

A president who has turned the balance of power on its ear, unilaterally imposed a policy of torture and secret imprisonment and abrogated fundamental liberties without legislative and court approval.

And when caught out by his Supreme Court went to a craven Congress led by Republicans whose conservative forebears would have been appalled at a power grab of this magnitude by a president who is accountable to no one.

The House and Senate obligingly gave the president everything he wanted, and the pro votes even included some legislators who questioned the bill's constitutionality in private but didn't have the guts to defy him in public.

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Equally extraordinary is the muted reaction to the approval of legislation that will alter the American system of jurisprudence in profound ways.

This includes allowing the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants even if they have never left Kalamazoo, did nothing more objectionable than give money to an Arab charity in the Mideast and indefinitely hold them in prison without the right of habeas corpus, let alone legal representation.

Yes, The New York Times and other usual left-of-center suspects fulminated for a few days. And I and other bloggers had a word or three to say about this sad state of affairs.

But as a nation, we seem to have become so acclimated -- or is it beaten down? -- after six years of presidential excesses that this profound alteration to what has made America tick for 230 years was greeted with nary a whimper.

Two days after the Senate sent the torture bill to the White House for President Bush's signature, The Times had moved on from uppity upset-ness to a Page One thumbsucker on how the legislation had come to pass. You know, the usual Inside the Beltway bullshit.

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Several churches were letting out as I drove down the main street of my college town the morning after the football game. The sidewalks were filled with mostly white, mostly older folks in their Sunday best. All fine Christian ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure.

A peace-preaching man by the name of Jesus was the victim of torture and the cross on which he died was one of the cruelest forms of execution. But church-goers have been conspicuous in their sinful silence about their government's anti-Christian policies like torture and secret prisons.

When we hear from the church-going crowd, and we do often and in the most strident terms, it's likely to be the so-called Christian nationalists who cherry pick from traditional morality to excoriate abortion supporters and gays but turn a blind eye to the inhumanness and criminality of the White House, which is lorded over by a president who claims to channel the wisdom of Mr. Christ. Pressing issues like poverty, homelessness and other inequalities in their midst are simply non-starters.

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Remember when the United States was the global gold standard, the society by which all others were judged? Ha ha ha ha.

That was then and now is now.

I'm one of those old-fashioned people who believes to the very core of his soul that what made American great was that it practiced what it preached. Beyond making the U.S. a more dangerous place for its own citizens, perhaps the greatest legacy of the Age of Bush will be the evisceration of that standard.

There is no greater irony than the notion that the U.S. is fighting the War on Terror supposedly to uphold core American values while consigning those very values to the dustbin.

It is America that has become a rogue state.

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This finally brings us to a perversion of another kind -- sexual perversion -- and Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, who is the head of a congressional caucus on children's issues.

Oops!

Foley was the head of the caucus, but has had to resign and quit his august House office, as well, and slink back to the Sunshine State.

This is because it was revealed that he sent a series of sexually explicit emails and text messages to a 16-year-old former page. These electronic mash notes were an open secret among Foley's Republican peers -- you know, the Family Values crowd -- but they had kept mum so that Foley could remain head of the caucus.

I guess Foley is part of that hitherto unpublicized Bush administration initiative: No Child's Behind Left Alone.