“When the President Does it that Means that it Is Not Illegal”

[Time for change]

Although the United States of America was conceived, as President Lincoln stated in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, in recent decades our government has deviated markedly from that principle, so that today it resembles a monarchy in many ways more than a government of, by, and for the people.

It could be said that the presidency of Richard Nixon, sometimes referred to as the imperial presidency, was the beginning of that trend, or at least that it represented a sharp acceleration of it. Nixon’s own words capture that principle as well as any others, perhaps none more clearly than in his interview with David Frost, which aired on television on May 19th, 1977. Here are some pertinent excerpts:

FROST (To the audience): The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him. To this end, the Deputy White House Counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings… These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan… The president's approval was later to be listed in the Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.

FROST (To Nixon): So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition?

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly… Yes, and the dividing line and, just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate…. We also have to have in mind, that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress….

So, what is the difference between the form of government that Richard Nixon espoused and any run of the mill dictatorship? Could it be that, as Nixon later clarified, the legality of the President’s actions hinge upon some “national security” reason or other concept of the greater good? How could it? Almost all dictators claim that their actions are motivated by the purest of motives.

The worst effect of Nixon’s crimes is that they set a precedent for exactly the dictatorial philosophy of government that Nixon had in mind. His successor pardoned him before he was even indicted for his crimes. And that set the stage for what came later.


The Iran-Contra Scandal

The war and its precedents
On July 19th, 1979, a popular uprising by the revolutionary Sandinista Party overthrew the repressive dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas began reversing Somoza's devastation of the country with a program of land reform, social justice, and redistribution of wealth and income. Former members of Somoza's National Guards and other war criminals formed in opposition to the Sandanistas, and they became known as the Contras.

Supporting the Contras in their efforts to take over Nicaragua was one of the primary goals of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, despite abundant evidence of repeated atrocities perpetrated by the Contras, including:

murder, the rape of two girls in their homes, torture of men, maiming of children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, amputating the genitals of people of both sexes, scraping the skin off the face, pouring acid on the face, breaking the toes and fingers of an 18 year old boy, and summary executions. These were the people Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our founding fathers."… The human rights organization Americas Watch concluded that "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses…. so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war."

In addition to the Reagan administration funding the Contras, it used the CIA to assist them in their carnage, including the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors. By the mid-1980s, the Contra war had produced 14,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead children and adolescents, and 6,000 children had become war orphans.

Congress tries to fight back
The Boland Amendments were a series of laws passed by Congress beginning in 1982 for the purpose of cutting off funding to the Contras and other support of their war by the Reagan administration.

The Reagan administration basically ignored the orders of Congress, continuing to fund and support the Contras through various means, most notoriously by selling military weapons to Iran in return for assistance in obtaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon – a scandal that became known as Iran-Contra.

Avoidance of accountability by the Reagan/Bush administration
Investigations into this scandal were later led by independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, with consequent indictments of a long list of high level Reagan administration officials, most notably including the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger. On Christmas Eve, 1992, with less than a month remaining in George H.W. Bush’s lame duck presidency, Bush issued full pardons to the top Reagan administration officials who had been indicted, even though Walsh had not yet completed his investigations.

Despite overwhelming evidence indicating that both Bush and Reagan attended several meetings where there were conversations concerning the arms-hostages swap, they both continued to plead ignorance of the affair.

There ensued a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits, with the purpose of holding the Reagan administration accountable for their crimes. To prevent destruction of the relevant evidence, on January 6, 1993, Judge Charles Richey ruled that computer tapes containing copies of e-mail messages by Reagan and Bush White House staff must be preserved. However, on January 19, 1993, President Bush signed a secret agreement (See 7th paragraph) with Don Wilson, head of the National Archives and Records Administration, purporting to grant Bush exclusive legal control over the e-mail tapes of his administration.

The Clinton administration, for reasons unknown, proved reluctant to cooperate with efforts to bring crucial information to light (much less prosecute the Reagan administration crimes themselves), prompting Judge Richey on May 22, 1993,to cite the Clinton White House and the acting Archivist of the United States for contempt of court. On February 15, 1995, Judge Richey rejected the Clinton administration's arguments to continue to withhold the evidence as "arbitrary and capricious... contrary to history, past practice and the law". And on February 27, 1995, Richey addressed the Bush/Wilson agreement by declaring it “null and void” and writing that "No one, not even a President, is above the law."

But notwithstanding Judge Richey’s efforts to declare that the United States of America is not a dictatorship, neither Bush nor Reagan was ever held accountable for the Iran-Contra crimes


The George W. Bush administration crimes

Perhaps it was the failure of our system to hold previous presidential administrations accountable for serious crimes that encouraged the George W. Bush administration to embark upon a series of crimes more horrendous than ever seen in the history of our country, thus earning for Bush the reputation of the worst president in American history.

The list is too long to cover here in any substantial detail. A glimpse of the magnitude of these crimes can be seen from the 35 articles of impeachment that Congressman Dennis Kucinich presented to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 9th, 2008. Here is a summary:

Articles I – XIII: Creating a propaganda campaign and lying to the American people and Congress in order to build a false case for war against Iraq; then invading and occupying Iraq, in violation of U.S. and international law and in the absence of any good reason whatsoever; then failing to provide our troops with the body armor they needed, falsifying accounts of US troop deaths, and establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.

Article XIV: Exposing a covert CIA agent.

Articles XV-XVI: Providing immunity from prosecution to criminal contractors in Iraq and recklessly wasting US tax dollars on contractors in Iraq.

Articles XVII-XX: Indefinitely detaining our prisoners, including children, without charges or any legal rights, torturing them, and kidnapping people and transporting them to other countries to be tortured.

Article XXI: Lying to the American people and Congress, with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government.
Article XXII: Creating secret laws.
Article XXIII: Violating the Posse Comitatus Act
Articles XXIV – XXV: Spying on American citizens in violation of our 4th Amendment.
Article XXVI: Announcing intent to violate duly enacted laws with signing statements.
Article XXVII: Failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
Article XXVIII - XXIX: Tampering with free and fair elections and corruption of the administration of justice.
Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American people in an attempt to destroy Medicare.
Article XXXI: Failure to plan for or adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Article XXXII: Obstructing efforts to address global climate change.

Article XXXIII - XXXV: Failure to respond to the 9/11 attacks on our country; then endangering the health of first responders and obstructing investigation into the attacks.

Failure to hold the Bush administration accountable for their crimes
Despite Congressman Kucinich spelling out the evidence for each of these serious crimes and misdeeds, the U.S. House of Representatives utterly failed to hold the Bush administration accountable for any of them, through impeachment or any other means. The idea that a sitting President would engage in such things was seen as too painful for our nation to bear.

Of all these crimes, the most horrendous were an illegal, immoral and imperial war (Articles I-XIII) and the widespread abuse and torture of our prisoners (Articles XVII-XX). The evidence for these crimes is so clear that it would hardly take an investigation to uncover them. That evidence has been staring us in the face for several years:

The Iraq War
The rationale that the Bush administration used to justify the Iraq war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to al Qaeda that posed a vital threat to our country. Foremost among the WMD threats was Iraq’s alleged nuclear capability, based on their alleged attempt to purchase yellow cake (natural uranium) from Africa and their possession of aluminum tubes alleged for use in the construction of a nuclear weapon. Though these claims were frequently repeated by the Bush administration to Congress and to the American people, it is quite evident that George Bush and Dick Cheney knew all of these claims to be false.

Regarding the yellow cake claims: In March 2002, Joe Wilson, the man who was sent to Niger by Dick Cheney’s office to verify the yellow cake claim, reported that there was no evidence for that claim; our own government’s National Intelligence Estimate stated that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious”; and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told our government on March 3, 2003, that the Niger uranium documents were forgeries.

Regarding the aluminum tube claims: On September 7, 2002 Bush claimed that a new IAEA report stated Iraq was 6 months away from developing a nuclear weapon – though no such report existed; later that same month the Institute for Science and International Security released a report calling the aluminum tube intelligence ambiguous and warning that “U.S. nuclear experts who dissent from the Administration’s position are expected to remain silent…”; and on January 24, 2003, the Washington Post reported that the IAEA stated “It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you’d have to believe that Iraq…”

And to top it all off, on March 7, 2003, just a few days before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, the IAEA reported “We have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.” George Bush and Dick Cheney had to have known all of this. Yet they uttered not a word of it to Congress or the American people as they tried to sell their war, as George Bush repeated both claims, and more, in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech.

Treatment of our prisoners including torture
Rep. Kucinich sums up the abuse and torture charge in his articles of impeachment:

In a statement on Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared that in the US fight against Al Qaeda, "None of the provisions of Geneva apply," thus rejecting the Geneva Conventions that protect captives in wars and other conflicts. By that time, the administration was already transporting captives… to US-run prisons in Afghanistan and to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The round-up and detention without charge of Muslim non-citizens inside the US began almost immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon… The US, on orders of the president, began capturing and detaining without charge alleged terror suspects in other countries and detaining them abroad and at the US Naval base in Guantanamo.

Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000. An ACLU-sponsored 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies, of men who died in our detention facilities, found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides – probably only a small fraction of the total amount of Bush administration-sponsored torture-related deaths.

All of these atrocities – the same for which we sentenced Nazi war criminals to death at the Nuremberg trials – were made possible by Bush’s signing of the February 7, 2002 memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to his “War on Terror” prisoners. Notwithstanding the fact that Bush had pressured his administration’s lawyers to write legal opinions justifying his actions, the fact remains that violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is a signatory, is a clear violation of U.S. law. The torture that Bush’s memo unleashed is also a violation of the 8th Amendment to our Constitution. And even the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Bush administration guilty of war crimes in their Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision.


Conclusion

So it is that our nation’s failures to hold criminals at the highest levels of government accountable for their crimes destroys respect for the rule of law and enables more of the same. The United States now has the current world record for per capita rate of imprisonment, standing at 702 per 100,000 persons in 2002, and continuing to increase since that time. But the vast majority of those prisoners are poor and a highly disproportionate number are of minority races.

But when it comes to holding those with wealth and power, and especially those who hold (or held) high public office, accountable for their crimes our leaders suddenly become unconcerned with law and order. Instead they tell us that it would be traumatic to our nation to prosecute them, or that we should look to the future, not the past. In other words, they want us to ignore the crimes of our leaders, with the rationale that they happened in the past. What kind of a criminal justice system is that? That kind of philosophy is more like that of a dictatorship than a government of, by and for the people. Hopefully, sooner than later, the American people will rise up and tell their leaders what they think of that kind of political philosophy.

[Dragonfli]

1. K&R - Very well done!

:applause:

[Time for change]

3. Thank you

[kster]

2. What about Rove? nt

[Psychic Consortium]

20. Their lives are all about to become very difficult.

And for many years into the future.

[Kaleko]

4. Well, we're not ignoring the crimes and neither is the international press.

We just have to keep hammering away at this monolith of cowardice and corruption.

An awesome article like yours goes a long way to keep us talking about all of it.

Recommended.

[Time for change]

19. Thank you -- You're right that we need to keep talking about it, since our corporate media

certainly will not, nor will many of our elected representatives. William Greider says that democracy starts with conversations between people about what they care about.

[Hubert Flottz]

5. So why all the fuss about Monica?

[bridgit]

7. Hey, she said she was going to DC to get her presidential knee pads...

You gotta appreciate a woman with a sense of forward motion and pre-vision

[Hubert Flottz]

10. And a built in humidor too...

That "lady" was 100% for BIG tobacco I heard...

[Puzzler]

6. Hey... let's all accept the GOP logic on this one...

... since it means that Obama can do anything he wants, and it'll be "legal".

They'd have no problem with that would they?

[bridgit]

8. Whoa, whoa, whoa...the GOP...is *logical* about something/anything?

[Puzzler]

9. I didn't just say logic, I said "GOP logic"

The distinction is important :)

[Hubert Flottz]

11. Bush invented reverse bank robbery

Now the banks rob us instead of us robbing the banks...

[scentopine]

12. Obama Continues the Imperial Legacy

Amnesty for torture, Amnesty for Wall Street, Amnesty for Wire Tapping, Amnesty for Invasion built on lies. The seeds of the next great disaster are being sowed now with each act of amnesty.

As long as there is no justice for the these crimes, CIA, DOD, NSA, Oil Companies, Insurance Companies, Wall Street "Banks" will continue to push us toward a very real fascist state. The OP did an excellent job of chronicling the worsening behavior of our government. He showed that in each breach of trust, some actions of crossed into areas of treason, there was no punishment.

We are not citizens - there are no credible citizen protests we are afraid of police and FBI. There is no credible citizen participation in government beyond the act of voting. There is no justice and we are becoming more and more like indentured servants to corporate entities controlling our government.


USA - RIP.

[Time for change]

30. That pretty well sums it up

But all is not lost yet.

Possibly as more and more Americans obtain their news through the Internet (i.e. a much wider variety of original sources than is currently the case) they will reach a tipping point where they are sufficiently aware of the injustices being foisted upon them that they will rise up and demand justice.

[unpossibles]

13. Great post. I am having this discussion with a few people on two local boards

And I used some things from your links in my argument, and they keep turning the conversation back to how waterboarding is not illegal and is not torture, etc. I closed with this:

So, in essence, once again the rightwing media has reframed the story, has sold the idea to you that it's just waterboarding and that this practice is harmless (come see Hannity offer to be waterboarded for charity!), and that the left is weak for wanting to stop these practices and obey the law, and is just seeking political retribution, and these people are terrorists, etc. But that completely overshadows the truth that thousands of people were being rounded up and held without trial, and tortured, sometimes to death.

Now... call me crazy, but I don't get how a group of people who is afraid of the government when it comes to everything else suddenly trusts the government to make the right decisions on who is detained and if they deserve it, and if they should be tortured. I don't get it. You don't trust to keep track of your medical files, but you're ok with them deciding that Citizen A may or may not in fact be a terrorist?

I mean, shit - how many times have you heard of someone accidentally ending up on a No Fly list or you've gotten someone else's mail by accident? It doesn't bother you that mistakes are going to happen, but that if they do you're S.O.L. because you've gotten no trial? And what if they decided to interrogate you, and you told them you had no information? Guess who gets tortured now. Would you then suddenly find something to confess?

My last point amazes me - that these people do not trust the government to do anything right, but they're somehow ok with the government making the right decisions as to who is a terrorist. I broke this out because I kept getting them saying things like "well, those are the bad guys and they beheaded people" and "we get good information from waterboarding" (despite it being easy to endure? what?) and other similar arguments "inspired by" rightwing media - like they felt that torture was acceptable because the terrorists deserved it. I tried to ask if it was acceptable to steal their car, since it's not as bad as me raping someone or burning down their house, but they refused to see the analogy.

I just do not get the mental disconnect the right has. I don't. How can they manage to hold these opposing view points and not even understand the hypocrisy? I mean, everyone has their moments of contradiction and whatnot, but at least I am generally aware of them and work to reconcile them.

[Time for change]

14. Thank you -- Nice points you made in your argument

(and I'm very happy that you used my links).

Here are some interesting things that Robert Altemeyer had to say about the right wing (the good majority of them are right wing) authoritarian (RWA) mind:

As I said earlier, authoritarians’ ideas are poorly integrated with one another. It’s as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas--stored in a different file -- basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file holds, “My country, love it or leave it.” The ideas were copied from trusted sources,
often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never “merged files” to see how well they all fit together.

It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it comes to love.” High RWAs typically agreed with both statements, even though they
responded to the two items within a minute of each other. But that’s the point: they don’t seem to scan for self-consistency.

http://www.electricpolitics.com/media/docs/authoritarians.pdf

[Echo In Light]

15. K&R

[wizstars]

16. K&R!!! Thank you, Time4Change!!!

This needs to be told and told and told and told........."unto the seventh generation"!

These criminals should never know a moment's peace!!

INVESTIGATE
INDICT
INCARCERATE!!!
:mad: :mad: :mad:

[Time for change]

23. Thank you wizstars

There are many Americans, as well as concerned citizens of many other countries who are putting the pressure on.

[Overseas]

17. K&R ! Thank you for your comprehensive posts.

I've been disturbed by US foreign policy for years and have lived through a lot of the history you describe. It is sometime hard to believe what has happened. The Iran Contra pardons were excruciating, especially after watching all the criminal behavior perpetrated by the Reagan administration. I thought at the time that those pardons could come back to haunt us and indeed they did.

I sincerely hope that this time we will not excuse the Republican elite for their crimes. Finally holding them accountable would be a very welcome change.

I'm also thinking I should print out a few of your comprehensive posts for my scrapbook because they describe the times I've lived through so well, from my perspective.

I also used to wonder whether the Clinton impeachment sham was perpetrated in order to sour the public on Independent Prosecutors because the Republicans had leaders worse than Reagan in the wings that they wanted to foist upon the US people-- and then came Bush-Cheney. I remember a great deal of pundit babble during the Clinton impeachment process about how very divisive the prosecution process could be. And they had the smarmy Ken Starr waste a lot of money grasping for straws and intimidating witnesses to scrabble for possible reasons to extend the investigations. He really tarnished the image of "independent" prosecutors by not being at all independent. Being very partisan. And now we see lots of babble again about how investigations would be too partisan and divisive for the country. The GOP really have a great racket going-- create the bad example yourselves that you can later use to discourage prosecution of your next batch of criminals in the white house.

It really is time for a change.

[Time for change]

21. Thank you -- I think that it would be a great boost to the cause if we get

Dawn Johnsen confirmed as head of OLC:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5538560

I have generally not believed that the Clinton impeachment sham was perpetrated in order to tarnish the image of the Independent Prosecutor. Rather, I just felt that they wanted to ruin Clinton and were willing to do anything to get the job done. But maybe you're right. These people have no morals at all. That's why they have to talk about how moral they are all the time.

Your hypothesis reminds me of the way they castigate "government" and then make confirm their bad opinion of government in the public's eyes by botching everything they can when they have power -- as Bush did with Katrina, for example.

[Overseas]

33. I'd like to see Dawn Johnsen confirmed too.

I like her adherence to the rule of law.

Yes I certainly saw the impeachment process as one more way for Republicans to smear and destroy a Democratic President. Republican partisan attacks started before Clinton became president and continued throughout his presidency.

President Clinton gave them more ammunition through loosening the rules on media ownership and allowing right wingers to purchase and consolidate more mass media into conservative hands, where the media power remains today. A sprinkling of liberal voices are allowed onto TV news chat programming to sustain the illusion that we have a balanced mass media.

At the time of Ken Starr, I thought my suspicion that Republicans were trying to discourage the use of Special Prosecutors in the future might be a little overblown. But as I heard so much discussion among the punditocracy about how divisive and partisan the process was, I couldn't help thinking about there being an extra bonus in the Republican plans. Not only could they smear Clinton and his legacy, but they could also sour the public on appointing special prosecutors in general-- if they could establish a strong example of vicious, glaringly partisan procedures to taint the concept. They could spare future Republican presidents the indignities that Nixon suffered by souring Democrats and the public at large on the use of Special Prosecutors to investigate presidents.

And indeed, here we are after not impeaching an administration that perpetrated an illegal war, with "evidence" gleaned from torture and fraud, and a subsequent broader use of torture, and we hear well-meaning concerned commentary about how prosecuting their offenses would be too partisan and too divisive for our country in this time of crisis. Concerned comments about how it could be seen as a partisan witch hunt. Well, we know it wouldn't be that way. Crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. But gee, where did they get that notion? And why do so many Americans feel that way?

Memories of Ken Starr and his disgusting process. Partisan and very divisive.

The special prosecutor investigating Nixon led him to resign before probable impeachment for much less severe crimes than the Project for a New American Century wanted our nation to engage in. They needed the public to sour on the idea of prosecutors to enable them to save the country by making the USA an imperial power with control of the world's dwindling oil resources, legal constraints be damned.

I'm not sure when Grover Norquist gave the right wing their assignment to make people dislike government enough to support downsizing it so that it could be drowned in the bathtub.

But the Ken Starr process left dark clouds around appointing special prosecutors by being the partisan witch hunt that Republicans and well-meaning commentators now warn us to avoid.

And as you note, Bush appointed campaign cronies like Brownie to do a "heck of a job" at government agencies that had previously been run by professionals. (And even now, Republicans are holding up the appointment of an emergency services professional to head FEMA.)

The Bush Administration reduced budgets for food inspections, which helped right wingers prove government departments incapable of protecting the people. That got the feeling that "government can't protect you" onto kitchen tables all across America.

And Cheney's reckless disregard for the law chased lots of career professionals out of the state department and our intelligence agencies. That made more room for cronies who would write memos to order. And appointments from Liberty University who understood the importance of deferring to an all powerful executive branch.

Gotta hand it to those Republicans.
Or maybe it is time for a change.

[bertman]

18. Recommend highly. Thank you for the chronological listing, Time for change.

Your Conclusion sums it up well.

What most of us Americans do not want to admit is that this ongoing power grab by the Presidents since Nixon is not simply an Executive Branch overreach. It is in fact, an orchestrated, very well-financed power grab by the financial, corporate, and military/security sectors to gain control of our government. And it's working beautifully. We the sheep are bleating, but like sheep, we're still being herded to the shearing house and the slaughterhouse.

[Time for change]

22. Thank you bertman. It's very hard for people to admit those things.

But you can't even begin to solve a problem until you've taken the first step, which is to acknolwedge it. Most Americans haven't even gotten to step 1. Once they get there, I think that the rest will follow.

[bertman]

25. You are surely correct in saying that the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

What I have found by way of my efforts to educate my family, friends, and co-workers, is that people of all ages, income levels, intelligence levels, and even political persuasions, DO seem to know that the government is no longer "of, by, and for the People." Yet, they are so consumed by their daily duties, obligations, and rituals that they don't want to take the time to become better informed OR to actually become active citizens.

I wish I knew how to motivate them to do more. I wish I were more active. My feeble attempts to educate myself, to call and write my President and Congressional representatives, though far greater than they have ever been before, still feel like futile attempts. But, I will not stop trying to exorcise this insidious cancer that has afflicted our nation.

I appreciate the effort you make to educate and motivate others. Without truth-tellers like yourself and so many others here at DU, many of us would be ignorant and directionless.

[Time for change]

27. We can look at our attempts as futile -- which in some sense they are -- OR

we can consider them as part of a much greater whole, which when added together make all the difference in the world. The truth is that we'll never know for sure exactly what difference we make, but I suspect that most of us make a lot more difference than we realize. (I wouldn't know that my writings on DU make any difference at all if people like you didn't tell me that they did -- so thank you for that!).

I like what William Greider had to say about this:

Democracy begins in human conversation. The simplest, least threatening investment any citizen may make in democratic renewal is to begin talking with other people... People begin by talking about themselves, their lives and circumstances. This doesn't happen in some big public hall, but rather among family and friends (and I might add, DU)...

Everyone can talk about the contradictions that fill their lives and draw evidence from their own experiences and values. Once they take it up, some people find they cannot drop the subject, but instead are compelled to dig deeper.

I would add, from my own experience (and belief) that most people would accomplish a lot more with less work if they stuck to things that really interested them. I couldn't write my DU articles if they didn't interest me a great deal. I absolutely could not do it.

[Kaleko]

24. Kicking this fine thread.

[notesdev]

26. And now, Chrysler

[Raster]

28. Kick for truth!!! Thank you Time for Change!

Hold them responsible!:kick:

[Greyhound]

29. Auto K&R.

America suffered a psychotic break in the 80s and we have yet to recover.
:kick: & R

[Time for change]

31. Yes, a psychotic break

How else to explain electing Reagan twice and then Bush, all by large margins?

[Greyhound]

35. 1978 or 1979. Was it the deleterious effects of disco? Cocaine?

Maybe just the subconscious assertion of puritanical guilt?

Whatever happened, it has made us mean, selfish, and stupid.

[Time for change]

36. It is difficult to say what it was

It was the big comeback of the right wing authoritarian elites -- those who FDR called the "Economic Royalists". FDR and his programs were so popular that he was elected president in four consecutive landslides spanning 12 years, and the beneficial effects of his policies lasted for several decades following his death. He had stripped the Economic Royalists of much of their power, and their hatred seethed for several decades, though they couldn't do much about it.

But by the late 70s or early 80s few people remembered FDR, and the RWA revision of history was well underway.

[indepat]

32. Iran-Contra, imv, is but a microcosm of the holistic wrong-headedness (evil?)

of the gipper's policies, but thanks to the librul media, the beatification and sanctification processes are nearly complete and deification can't be too far behind. :D

[csziggy]

34. Thank you! Kicking this so it is back on top

Thank you for detailing what I have been thinking for years. No president should be above the law and we (the American people) have been letting our leaders off the hook for decades.

Have you sent your summary to President Obama? You should! Heck, send him the entire thread.