The Bush Putsch

Paranoia, anyone?

Overthrowing a government doesn’t always involve violence. Edward Luttwak, who wrote the book, defines a coup d’etat, or as Adolf You-Know-Who called it, a putsch as “the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.”

Doesn't that sound like what’s been going on in Washington?

Congress and the people want to end the war in Iraq, but they are powerless to do it.

U.S. Attorneys are fired by the Justice Department for not being submissive enough to help Republican politicians retain control of Congress and then threatened if they complain about it.

Those who weren’t fired have a curious record, a new study of 375 cases finds, of investigating “seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.”

In The New York Times today, Paul Krugman cites Molly Ivins’ observation that in Texas “Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed investigations...After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”

Government secrecy, wiretapping, illegal detention and accusations of treason against opponents of the regime are rampant, just as in any other banana republic.

In the late 1960s, student protesters and the underground press ranted that Nixon and Agnew were planning to cancel the 1972 elections, an accusation dismissed as paranoid nonsense. America was too diverse and stable for anything like that to happen.

But 9/11 has made us vulnerable to a White House that claims unprecedented powers and goes about exercising them with or without the sanction of the Patriot Act.

Wasn’t this new Congress elected to put an end to that?