The American Crisis

Although I've been reading blogs for over two years, I've been taking a closer look and reading various blogs over the last two months from the lesser known to the more famous ones that get mentioned on TV or news articles and I've been trying to get a sense of the national gestalt. I don't have a lot to say yet except to observe that there's a lot of frustration out there. Facts get uncovered on a wide range of issues and those facts need to be dealt with. Too often, facts are just sort of absorbed in a kind of collective forgetfulness.

We know Bush lied about WMDs and it's become irrelevant whether he knowingly lied, lied to himself first, was lied to or is simply incompetent. We know that Bush has far exceeded his presidential authority and yet Congress not only looks the other way, seemingly, but refuses to use the Patriot Act as a device to hold Bush accountable. So I understand the frustration even among bloggers that are rational and who are far from those bloggers that get somewhat shrill. Always Question, a thoughtful blogger who I wish would blog more often, has some observations:

I allowed myself a moment of optimism at the end of last month. It passed, of course, as moments do; but for that moment I could conceive of politicians acting according to their conscience and in the best interests of their constituents... their voter constituents.

It came to me in that moment that Congress might step up and reassert the primacy of the people over a corrupt administration with no political future and bills to pay to their multi-national corporate backers. At 58, I can still dream.

(snip)

And the public? Have you ever watched a bad horror movie and wondered why the guy just stood there and let the vampires bleed him dry? That'd be us.
We absorb the information that the President has decided to ignore the formality of a retroactive warrant to wiretap in clear violation of a law he pressed for, and eventually we convince ourselves that it's really okay because the guy... who has lied to us how many times before... says "trust me, I'm only doing it to suspected terrorists."

Our Constitution is being eroded by the current administration; and Congress, led mainly by Republicans, is not doing much about it. Now sometimes it takes more time than any of us thinks is reasonable to restore some common sense to our government and even to our media, but my take on it, as frustrating as it is, is that there is little other choice than to keep pressing on, even if it takes years to get our government to do the obvious. The right wing conservatives wandered in the wilderness for thirty years cooking up their schemes and now that they have succeeded and shown how flawed their philosophy is, the rest of us have to keep pushing for a government that is fair for all Americans and for a pragmatic approach to the world where a president can't go to war because, well, he felt like it.

Obviously, there is more to say and more work to do.