Stop This Man Before He Kills Again!


By Steve Bhaerman

As President Bush and his shadowy puppeteer unblinkingly prepare for another stare-down with reality, those who remember are comparing our current situation with the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon a third of a century ago. Agnew went quietly over some corruption scandal which nowadays might be classified as “business as usual.” With Gerald Ford in place to replace him, Nixon received the delegation of Republican leaders from the Senate (Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater), and House Minority Leader John Rhodes who told him his Congressional support was gone. After a final confirmation from the two most powerful men in his administration, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon resigned himself to the inevitable resignation.

As we should well understand by now, our current misleadership makes Mister Nixon look like Mister Rogers. A better comparison for Bush and Cheney would be Enron execs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who acted legit until the moment the handcuffs were slapped on. So we would expect that whoever gets the assignment this time around will have to do more of a classic “intervention” than a political persuasion. It won’t be pretty.

And it won’t happen without the awakening and participation of the American people.


Our Choice -- Freedom or Empire?
What we face over the next six to nine months is the most challenging choice point for America since the Declaration of Independence itself. In 1776 and the years that followed, the American colonies had to choose between freedom and empire. The empire at the time was the British empire, and the colonists saw and felt firsthand how their economic and political well-being was being compromised. Hand-in-glove with the British empire was the largest and most powerful multinational corporation of the day, the British East India Company. Together, these two institutions imposed topdown political and economic control over the colonies.

As Americans are now waking up to discover, there has been a “re-colonization” of America as multinational corporations and our own government have reestablished the rule of a would-be King George. The American “middle class” is becoming as archaic as the family farm, as a modern “taxation without representation” bleeds the many to feed the few. The outrageously ridiculous financial price we pay to support our unsupportable empire is not only bankrupting America, but doesn’t even benefit the vast majority of us. A pertinent analysis can be found in this recent article by Chalmers Johnson, an author and former CIA consultant who also appears in Why We Fight.

So we must do what the media will not. We must understand that the America we imagined we were living in has become a dangerous monster, all the more dangerous because of the still-pervasive belief that our intentions are benign. We must understand -- as Paul Levy most eloquently puts it in his book The Madness of George W. Bush -- that George Bush is simply the outpicturing of this unacknowledged shadow, the most glaring and blatant symptom of our potentially-fatal malaise.

So as we move the “up-wising” forward to rightfully remove a wrongfully-elected chief executive, we must understand that George Bush is the symptom and not the cause. “Impeachment,” which I prefer to call a massive, nationwide, transpartisan vote of no confidence, becomes necessary as we the people take the first step to restoring “government of the people, by the people, and for the people where the government does our bidding, not the bidding of the highest bidder.” The good news is, we don’t need a revolution in this country. We’ve already had one, and the documents born of that “up-wising” are good enough for us, thank you. What is now required is an American Evolution where ordinary citizens wake up, speak up and stand up to apply these founding principles to these extraordinary times.



A State of Emerge ‘n See
Like the American Revolution, the current American Evolution is a grassroots process, where “we the people” emerge from a long slumber as passive bystanders and become active participants in choosing the world we live into. As with any grassroots activity -- and very much like the internet which now provides this movement’s “nervous system” -- this movement is not hierarchical. Instead, it gains its power from a solid foundation of understanding, agreement and action from the ground up. This may sound too simple, but America’s political recovery program involves just three steps (and that puts us nine steps ahead of those 12-step folks!):


Set an intention.
Share this intention, so it is held by as many other people as possible.
Show up, and act when appropriate.
I would suggest then, that we hold the intention that America make the choice of freedom over empire, and that we reframe the issues we currently face in that context. That is a broad and complex conversation and too much for this short email. However, we have only to look at how much we’re spending in lives and fortune in Iraq and how diminishing the returns are for the average American, to make a persuasive argument that what we are doing isn’t working. When we look a little further at issues like climate change, environmental destruction, species loss, outsourcing of jobs, and an alarming “Greenspan Index” (far too many Americans don’t seem to have enough “green” to span the average month), we can see that the track we’re on is headed for a train wreck.

So ... what do we do now? There seem to be two immediate urgencies, and by addressing each we may be able to “feed two birds with one scone”: express and build the power of “we the people,” and at the same time possibly change the course of history. The most urgent urgency is to stop that man from killing again, specifically from bombing Iran (or provoking an incident which can lead to the bombing). While Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a definite wild card -- he’s been called Iran’s George Bush because his warlike policies don’t reflect the feelings and aspirations of his people but he rules nonetheless -- an attack on that country would lead to unnecessary death, untold destruction, and would send the world closer to that apocalypse George Bush’s rapture friends seem to be praying for.

One immediate way we can fortify our Senators’ spinal tissue to help them stand up to this insanity is to partake in MoveOn.org’s Virtual March tomorrow, February 1st. This campaign to get millions of people to contact their Senators to stand up and oppose escalation of the war in Iraq (and by inference, help pre-empt a preemptive attack on Iran), and it’s something simple anyone can do. Keep in mind that the lobbying of organizations like MoveOn and Code Pink right after the election helped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid find the courage to oppose escalation of the war. Please feel free to send this email and link to friends so that even Republicans will see that it’s time to abandon a ship that increasingly seems under the command of a Captain Queeg who has lost his marbles.

Paradoxically, in order to really take this country back -- and take it forward -- we must see that the impeachment or removal of George Bush, while necessary as a first step to restoring America’s moral authority, is only a step. Rather than focus on the crimes of one man and one administration, we must face our roles as silent enablers for a system that has outlived its uselessness. As the wall of lies crumbles -- and it will -- we must take responsibility for something that might even be more challenging than facing the awful truth. We must now embrace the awesome opportunity to help create a world that has not been seen before.

Let the good times roll.



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