Robert Devereaux

And the Constitution is further dismantled by our so-called representatives, infuriating cowardly robots on the Republican side, insufficiently oppositional, abandoning even an attempt at a filibuster on the Democratic side, handing the sociopathic asshole in the White House even more discretionary powers, saying that torture’s just fine with us, and tossing even more American liberties and just plain humane values out the window.

I commend Andrew Cohen’s editorial to your attention.

Lead paragraph:  "Of all the stupid, lazy, short-sighted, hasty, ill-conceived, partisan-inspired, damage-inflicting, dangerous and offensive things this Congress has done (or not done) in its past few recent miserable terms, the [passage] of the terror detainee bill takes the cake. At least when Congress voted to authorize the Iraq War legislators can point to the fact that they were deceived by Administration officials. But what’s Congress’ excuse now for agreeing to sign off on a law that would give the executive branch even more unfettered power over the rest of us than it already has?"

Please, God, let the American people be sufficiently awake to toss wholesale the GOP scoundrels out on their ear, the voting machines not as compromised as we fear, the Supreme Court not quite yet so wacko-rightward-listing as to let this assault against law and sheer decency stand!

Robert Devereaux

I was in Denver International Airport Monday and Tuesday, jetting back and forth to L.A.

It had been at least a year since my last plane flight.

How sad and omnipresent the institutionalized paranoia is.

"Due to heightened security…" really means "Due to heightened INsecurity…".

Another repeated announcement very (un)helpfully informed us that today’s threat level was at ORANGE ALERT and we were to please be aware of this heightened alert, which is to say, "Kindly feel even more fear than before; oh, there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it, but Feel the Fear anyway."

How badly we need leaders of FDR’s persuasion.  "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  And yet we are run by a pack of lying fearmongers, led about by the nose, fed catch-phrases to force our minds their way.  You cannot make war on terror, and the desecrater of People’s House is not a war president, he’s a poseur, a dangerous fellow whose mental instability alone should be sufficient to boot him out of office.

That’s by no means to say that I’m blind to our perils.

But the world is so much more complex than the current pack of jackals pretends it is.

So much potential for right leadership, so much of it squandered to make the rich even richer.

Let’s do all we can to ensure accurate vote counts this time, and soundly reject a strayward direction.

After that, we really need to figure out how to fight back against propagandistic techniques long before the practitioners of same get anywhere near a seat of power.

Robert Devereaux

This is an apology to the world for the sorry state of U.S. politics.

Yesterday, after putting up a fake struggle of principle against torture and Bush’s violations of the Geneva conventions, the so-called rebellious Republican senators, led by that odd duck John McCain, caved in to our dictator yet again.  We see again an inexorable descent into totalitarianism, though for six years progressives among us have done everything they can to stop it.

And we didn’t believe it could happen here.

How naive we were.

My judgment of the German people during the twenties and thirties has softened considerably.

We will work to make the 2006 elections, assuming they are not stolen though automatic voting machines with no paper trail, an upset victory for the so-called opposition party, and then work to make them truly hew to the ever-receding ideals of the American republic.

If you are religious, pray for us. 

We need all the help we can get.

Robert Devereaux