Trust

Stolen from: The Daily Brew

The really scary part isn't the military courts, the wiretapping of lawyers, or the arrests without charges. We expected that. After all, the Republicans had sent a mob, hired and paid for with American taxpayer dollars, to seize power in the first place. If the GOP was willing to stage a riot in broad daylight to deny Americans their right to vote in Florida, it is hardly surprising they would use Executive Orders to deny Americans their right to a fair trial back in D.C.

No, the scary part is the almost complete silence that has greeted these actions. Americans, understandably shell shocked by one disaster after another, seem unable to as much as complain as one after another of their freedoms are stripped away.

In the face of so little criticism or resistance, one can only speculate how quickly these new powers will be used by the Bush administration to stifle the Republican's domestic opposition. How long before death penalty opponents are swept up by Bush's secret police? When will the first union organizers be arrested without charge? Who will be the first environmentalists to be held without bail?

Actually, none of these scenarios are hypothetical. Leading up to last year's Republican Convention and WTO meetings, American citizens who planned on exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and freely speak criticisms of their government were arrested in "preemptive strikes" in both Philadelphia and DC. The sad fact is that the police have already used the new powers in the so-called PATRIOT Act ("Puritan Ashcroft Trashes Rights In Orwellian Travesty") to stifle domestic dissent. The new rules simply provide an ex post facto approval for these prior acts.

Of course, there is also the hypocrisy. With the Republicans, there is always hypocrisy.

On the one hand, the Republicans want us trust the government to conduct secret investigations, secret detentions, and secret trials. We are asked to trust our government with these, the most precious of our rights, the very rights that define us as a free people, because the Republicans tell us our government is trustworthy. The Republicans assure us that the checks, balances and safeguards established by our Founding Fathers and our Constitution are not really necessary because the government possesses not only a level of trustworthiness, but also of competence, that these most precious of our rights will be kept safe.

Then, in the next breath, the Republicans tell us that this same government, or indeed any government, is intrinsically incapable of determining whether a person is bringing a weapon onto an airplane. No, the Republicans argue, this basic function is far more competently performed by minimum wage workers in the private sector. Well, if the government cannot be trusted to perform the most basic of police functions, a simple search, why should we trust it to perform any of the other police functions, which the Republicans now have hidden from the American people? Because they say so?