You know---"Democracy"

[kurtyboy]

Hubris made itself obvious to George W. Bush yesterday, and he’s only a few thousand days behind the rest of us. Hubris happens to people who do more than acknowledge a distinction between right and wrong. Hubris is what happens when people just KNOW which aspects of the world fall on which side of the right-wrong divide—only to later find that they can be miserably mistaken. Hubris creates costly inevitabilities.

Make no mistake; the War in Iraq is the naturally-occurring, utterly unavoidable consequence of the moral righteousness of the modern conservative movement. The black-and-white, absolutist worldview adopted by GOP adherents as a way of attracting “values voters” painted itself into the ideological corner of, “It is imperative that we stop talking and do something about evil in the world.”

The only real question was, what forms would that something take? Would the party of conservatives press into law measures that would punish abortion providers? Or stiffen penalties for drug possession even further beyond the draconian levels now in place? Or make Biblical indoctrination a mandatory facet of public education? All of these possibilities were nibbled at in local forms, but none seemed to survive the test of broader general acceptance.

No, these options would not do, because they required agonizingly cumbersome processes of consensus-building, deliberation, and compromise. You know, “Democracy.” Another option had to be found, one that allowed for action to be taken with the least amount of hemming and hawing, and forced dissenters to keep their democracy-holes shut over process, which after all, is talking about doing something, and not actually doing something.

Once all of the options about which something could be done were evaluated, the GOP and this President chose the one that accomplished their most valued strategic objective—an open war and the destruction of a government sitting atop ten percent of the world’s oil reserves. At last, the elusive something was found, and the right could make it their rallying point for as long as the truth about war—any war—remained cloistered with the assistance of embeds, liars, and insatiable opportunists. Eventually the truth would out—certainly—but (presumably) not until the major strategic objectives had been accomplished.

On 11 September 2001 Mayor Rudy Giuliani was asked for an estimate of lives lost in the tower collapses. He would not give a number, but did say that the losses would be, “Too much to bear.” By the end of this coming January, US war deaths will exceed the 911 death toll—demonstrably too much to bear for the voting public. The truth did out.

That said, I have to give the President and his team of corruption some credit: They held that hubris hill for much, much longer that I would have thought possible in anything but an out-and-out dictatorship. They managed the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the press (and the Justice Department, and internal dissent, etc.) in a way that would have made Uncle Joe Stalin proud, and all at the cost of just a few thousand American lives—volunteers, no less! Control of the oil fields is nominally westernized, and we appear likely to have a military presence in the region for many years to come. The door has been opened for an expansion of hostilities against other regional powers.

But today I also have to give the American electorate credit I thought I might never have a chance to award. They have used a constitutional method to put an end to the hubristic vision of the right wing and the neoconservatives. Things may not change quickly enough for our tastes, but we can at last be assured that the words, “Not in our name,” will ring out with the clarity, volume, and force that the founders dreamed about when they wrote checks on power into our Constitution. The public did this in the face of the most effective propaganda machine ever assembled in this nation; they did it in the face of seemingly insurmountable party discipline.

They did it in spite of redistricting, and voter-suppression, and illegal wiretaps, and dirty opposition research, and vote tampering.

They did it because it is their job to check hubris. It is their job to remind not just the President, but all of us, that ours is not a Republic which allows for personalities to dictate our collective vision. Ours is a Republic of laws.

After what seemed like an interminable journey into the wilderness of despair, my hope that we can, “Let America be America, again,” is gloriously, vigorously restored. Let us now get back to the hard work of consensus-building, deliberation, and compromise.

You know--“Democracy.”