The bottom is nowhere in sight

I can't help but feel a lot of "I told you so's" welling up from my righteous gullet. Recall that I said that the creepy revelations about the administration were only the tip of the iceberg? Hello iceberg. I can barely contain my contempt for this kind of ignorance and self-serving justification. I know he believes that this surveillance, blatantly illegal and totally contrary to the laws of our country though it is, genuinely helps fight terrorism. And perhaps it does. But for a President to a) blithely authorize such a massize, sweeping, secret program, and b) purport to see absolutely nothing wrong about the legality of it is worriesome in the extreme. This man has been so sheltered in life that he wouldn't know how to approach an intellectual gray area if it resembled a bottle of Jack Daniels. To him, God put him on this earth to do the Republicans' bidding, and that's exactly what he's doing - carrying out a sinister, Messianic mission of subverting the founding principles of our country, one by one. Fuck the founding fathers, screw the Constitution, bugger off Congress - I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to because I am Jesus. I really believe he's that extreme and that scary.

This is when I get truly frustrated with the press's insistence on representing all viewpoints. As my NY Times professor Malcolm Browne told us, the running joke at the Times was that when reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust, the second sentence would begin "Mr. Himmler said, however..." I'm not saying this is anything close to that magnitude of seriousness, because what is, but I still sense an unwillingness of the press to go for the Administration's jugular and take them out altogether. Why did the Times sit on this story for a year? Why isn't the massive propoganda campaign being waged domestically and abroad causing more comparisons with totalitarian regimes of the past? Why isn't Cheney's staunch defense of legalizing torture and indefinite imprisonment being held up next to the frightening police states throughout history? Taken separately, none of these actions are enough to call any organization "evil", but taken all together the Administration's record of violating rights, reinterpreting the law to their own advantage, and overturning longstanding precedents that keep our citizens' civil rights safe amount to a broad spectrum move away from Democracy and toward a much more restrictive system of government. Thankfully, the public seems to finally be getting how duped they've been by lies and doublespeak for the past 5 years, but to my ear it's still not enough outrage to overcome illegal gerrymandering and the power of incumbents. Because that's the only way we're going to effect our regime change - via democracy and fair voting. That's how civilized societies do it.

We have to vote this regime out of existence before the iceberg reveals itself to be even more massive than we could possibly suspect.