Whither the USA after November 8?

Like millions of other Americans, I anxiously await the outcome of the elections on November 8, in the sense that one might anxiously await the successful deployment of a parachute after jumping from a plane 20,000 feet in the air. I would not say that absolutely everything hinges on displacing the Republican machine in this election, but if we don't...splat.

The United States has slowly but surely descended into gangsterism at the highest levels of government, a horror-filled development that even our overheated political discourse cannot bring itself to acknowledge openly. Once the Republican Congress decided to countenance flagrant violations of the law, to permit the commission of felonies by the Executive Branch without so much as a harsh word of protest, we lost our Constitutional form of government. I don't see how anyone can deny that. A right-wing polemicist might argue with a straight face that authoritarian rule in an unconstitutional manner is necessary because of external or internal threats to the security of the United States, but this is very different from arguing that the extra-legal actions of the Bush Administration comply with the spirit, letter or literal meaning of many federal statutes and constitutional provisions. And it must then be admitted that the United States has become not so different from the Soviet Union which Reagan called the Evil Empire. To preserve our existence, we have forfeited our freedoms and our adherence to the rule of law.

The specific examples of George W. Bush's misprisions have grown to such a long list that they're difficult to summarize. He has illegally wiretapped and intercepted the electronic communications of American citizens without a warrant, a felony and a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He established a systematic program of torture, a felony, a war crime, and a violation of the Eighth Amendment. He incarcerated American citizens without charges, denied them the right to counsel, denied them the right to a speedy trial, and disappeared them, a felony and a violation of the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. He has violated his oath of office over and over and over again.

The Republican Congress refused, on all occasions, ever to censure Bush or to reprimand him officially for any of these countless crimes and misprisions of office. Even the high-minded Republican Senators, like Arlen Specter, have voted to deprive "enemy combatants" of the right to habeas corpus in the Military Kangaroo Court Act, while openly acknowledging that the bill they supported with their votes was unconstitutional. In other words, obviously, unrepentantly, cavalierly violating their own oaths of office.

You see, gangsterism is catching. It is a kind of killer virus, and the infected gang members begin to confuse their own opinions, their own attitudes, with the rule of law. Once that happens, they break the law casually and routinely, as we are seeing now, in an accelerating fashion. They think what they want to do is good for the country, and if the law, or the American Constitution, says otherwise, then the law will have to give way. Who is going to tell them anything different?

That's where we are. It's a crucial point in American history. There will be widespread voter fraud on Tuesday. The question is whether the tidal wave of revulsion mounting against the gangsters in Washington is sufficient to overcome even that last-ditch scheme, that final criminal conspiracy. If not, after that...the deluge.