Monday, February 19, 2007

To Engineer a Totalitarian Takeover,
First Appoint a Clown to Be President

Coincidence or not, the NY Times editorializes, today, on language that was slipped without debate into a defense budget bill to make it easier to declare Martial law and, at the same time, Salon publishes an excerpt from Joe Conason's book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. The context is being carefully cultivated; perpetual war, recurring fears of attack ("over here"), erosion of Consitutional and legal rights, accusations that political opponents are "aiding," "comforting," or "emboldening" our enemies.

And the front man for all this, a goofy galoot who can't string two sentences together without creating a bit for Letterman, Maher, or Stewart. Our flavor of totalitarianism will feature not a dictator, but a decider.

Mickeleh's Take: I'd love to see an expose on how this language-slipping business actually occurs. Who is the cadre of bill-writers who sneak these bits of proto-totalitarianism into our body of law? Who pays them? Who commands them? And will it stop now that the Democrats are in charge?

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