On Kingdoms

I watch a lot of political TV. I watch Hardball , Maher, Countdown, Jon Stewart, Colbert, all of it religiously. I read blogs, newspapers, magazines all day long, I am constantly on YouTube, Crooks and Liars, etc. And I can't remember the last time I read or saw a segment like this, so brutally honest and so incredibly alone in its place among its peers. It comes from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! and details just what America lost today. The rest of the media should take a cue from Ms. Goodman and cover this, but I guess burning the Constitution isn't all that "sexy."

Thank God for Patrick Leahy and shame on the twelve Democrats who joined with the Republicans; Tom Carper of Delaware, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, as well as Senator Menendez of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Pryor of Arkansas, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. They, along with all but one of the Republicans, helped to eliminate basic human rights held since the Magna Carta. They are an embarassment to America and to the Democratic Party. They are the personification of the charge that the Democrats are spineless dogs. They should be ashamed and I hope they are haunted by the screams of defenseless, forgotten prisoners in their sleep. Those Democrats along with all Republicans except Chafee are guilty of crimes against humanity and ushering a nightmareish Orwellian reality of absolute power.

This is as much of an embarassment in the history of our nation as the internment of the Japanese. We are literally watching a democracy turn into a Kingdom right before our eyes. Hopefully sanity will return someday and this will be seen as a black mark on the Congress like the Red Scare is seen today. But as these maniacs go forward and the opposition lays down time and time again, the light at the end of that tunnel is getting fainter and fainter.

Here's a snippet:

Senator Patrick Leahy: ... Of course, in the Hamdan decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it very clear that it is available in somebody captured. In a case like what he was talking about, if somebody had been captured there and held in prison, and they said, “You have the wrong person,” they could at least raise it.

And you also have, of course, under the Constitution, that habeas can be suspended if there is an invasion, if there is an insurrection. We have neither case here. Even the most conservative Republican legal thinkers have said this is not a case to suspend habeas corpus.

You know, they can set up all the straw men they want, but the fact is this allows the Bush administration to act totally arbitrarily with no court or anybody else to raise any questions about it. It allows them to cover up any mistakes they make. And this goes beyond just marking everything “secret,” as they do now. Every mistake they make, they just mark it “secret.” But this is even worse. This means somebody could be locked up for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. They have the wrong person, and they have no rights to be able to say, “Hey guys, you’ve got the wrong person.” It goes against everything that we’ve done as Americans.

You know, when things like this were done during the Cold War in some of the Iron Curtain countries, I remember all the speeches on the Senate floor, Democrats and Republicans alike saying, “How horrible this is! Thank God we don’t do things like this in America.” I wish they’d go back and listen to some of their speeches at that time.

Michael Ratner, President of the Center For Constitutional Rights: ... The President can decide tomorrow that you, Amy, or me, or particularly a non-citizen, can be picked up, put in jail forever, essentially, and if you're a non-citizen in Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world, you never get a chance to go to court to test your detention. It’s an incredible thing, and any senator who voted for this, in my view, is essentially guilty, guilty, guilty of undermining basic fundamental rights and may well be guilty of war crimes, as well.


All I ask is that you watch the segment and ask yourself if you still recognize your country.