"[A]s we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world
 faces unprecedented dangers...the state of our union has never been stronger."
-George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2002-

Bush the Second uttered this stunning contradiction and received thunderous applause from the gathered politicians and guests in the capitol.  Why?  Over the past year portions of our constitution (that document that has been held up as a beacon of enlightenment throughout the world) have been shredded wholesale, while John Aschcroft orders concealment of the anatomy of Justice.  At Bush's direction, America has turned its back on every agreement with our friends, enemies, allies, and neighbors, except those that cooperate in a pact of war.  Thousands, if not millions of Americans have lost their jobs, thousands more have been killed, and even thousands more have lost both their financial and personal security.  The national coffers have been raided, and Social Security is about to become a distant memory.  Where it looked, only a short time ago, that we would pay off our national debt in only a few years, we are now screaming toward massive deficits, to be followed by the return of long term corrosive red ink.  Our individual patriotism is brought into doubt if we ourselves question undefined threats of never ending war at home and abroad.  Like a dog infected with rabies the Bush government, snarls, froths and foams at foreign enemies and friends alike.

Now, in this new age, war, recession, and unprecedented dangers, all couldn't be better.  They are worthy of a standing ovation for an aging frat boy who still develops boils on his face, mangles the simplest of ideas that aren't written down for him well in advance, and vacations almost more than he works.  He stands at the national podium and waves this divisive "trifecta" like a little leaguer who has hit his first ever home run.  The press, and the representatives of We the People applaud.

The specter of Enron stands in a darkened corner like a family secret, oozing toxicity that few in the press want to discuss, but none can ignore, while pundits debate whether it represents a business or a political scandal.  The press, the White House, and a majority in congress obfuscate that it is far more than either.  It is likely the most corruptive scandal in the history of this nation.  Like a cancerous tumor that channels its poison through the bloodstream of its host, Enron has left its disease in every portion of the corpus of our freedom, and turned our protective institutions against our own survival.  Enron money, and the money of yet to be discovered tumors, tainted by larceny on such a grand scale that it requires a new word in the vocabulary of man, signals the greatest collapse of an empire since the fall of Rome.  Nero only fiddled while Rome burned.  In Washington DC, a quartet entertains, with George W. Bush at the violin, congress harmonizes on viola, justice groans an undercurrent of bass, and a prostituted press eagerly wraps its legs around a cello.

After a six year investigation of former President Clinton, which cost taxpayers a measurable percentage of our national budget, proved that he may have been one of the purest presidents in our history (he only committed adultery and lied about it), Bush promised to raise the bar for the Oval Office.  He promised a renewed sense of "values."  It appears that he meant to offer scandals befitting the world's most powerful position.  Clinton committed crimes against his family, but only Bush is qualified to commit crimes against humanity.

Elevating the art of "newspeak," Bush has transformed Orwell into Nostradamus.  "Deregulation works!" thumps the executive branch, charged with enforcing our laws.  The White House did nothing, and an incompetent business failed.  Greed driven corporate executives picked the pockets of American taxpayers, as well as their employees and shareholders, and funneled their plunder into off shore accounts, aided and abetted by White House policy.  The victims should not whine or complain.  If they are concerned about the welfare of their families, they should display the type of initiative exemplified by Ken Lay, and buy politicians and members of the press, creating their own enterprises based on the Enron design.

Hot is cold, and green is purple.  Not counting the votes of the people protects democracy, stripping the Bill of Rights from the Constitution protects liberty, and governing by executive order provides bipartisan advice and consent.

And the religious right wing is every bit complicit in this charade.  They trumpet Bush as a shining example of a return to American culture and values.  Clinton shamed us by an affair with an intern, but the Bush family solicits respect throughout the world.  George has been arrested three times that we know of, for both drunkenness and violence.  His daughters, alcoholics themselves, have been arrested at least twice apiece.  His sister-in-law has been arrested for attempted smuggling, and each of brother Jeb's children has been arrested for crimes ranging from burglary to forgery.  His brother, Neil, sat at the center of the savings and loan scandal, and his father directed the Iran/Contra affair, pardoning the criminal perpetrators as he left the Oval Office.  Grandfather Bush traded with the most evil government in modern history after war had been declared, and promoted the Nazi regime's most repugnant tenant by using the treasonous proceeds to fund research into the despicable "science" of eugenics.

Congress, owned and operated by corporations like Enron, will not spend too much time investigating government corruption because such knowledge, even if the corruption is routed out, can cause Americans to lose faith in their leaders.  Yet they will spend endless resources investigating the privacy of sex.  Where we once had faith that the press would serve as our watchdog of government, the media has now joined the Republican/corporate cooperative, supporting anything, no matter how outrageous, that furthers deregulation.  It has recently been revealed that many of our "journalists" in the mainstream press, such as William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, were secretly on the payroll of Enron to promote deregulation and politicians sympathetic to deregulation.

Like a battered spouse who continually proclaims, "He only beats me because he loves me," we as citizens should now consider ourselves enabling fools if we fail to continually question the integrity of every member of the Fourth Estate who appears to promote policy or politicians, and every politician who fails to promote publicly funded campaign financing.

The radical right wing has learned that the surest way to electoral success is to minimize the turnout in national elections.  The right wing punditry, displaying an electoral map that is more red than blue, pushes the moronic notion that property, not people, elect presidents.  Michael Reagan, the mentally abused child of the ex-president, sells T-shirts that display the map on television, brazenly portraying the map as information covered up by the insidious left, and ignoring that, in spite of the disenfranchisement of perhaps millions, Al Gore won the last presidential election by more than a half a million votes.

As John Ashcroft, and others in the government, make every attempt to scare the people with phantoms of terror, the flavor of this essay is not just a warning but a prediction.  Very possibly in 2002, but certainly in 2004, the polling stations in America's blue zones, such as New York City and San Francisco, will be bin Laden targets on election day.  We will be told of  "specific and credible evidence," with no indication as to what that evidence is, that "terra" has targeted democracy in the blue zones, just as "terra" has targeted only liberal Democrats as recipients of anthrax letters.

Bush has made every effort to explore the limits of citizen outrage, and he will continue to do so until slapped down by an angry majority of the people and congress.  The theft of an election, and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore caused barely a rumble.  Bush understands that he can go much further.  Secretary Rumsfeld has recently sent up trial balloons to test the notion of mobilizing the military within our own borders, assigning regional sub-Commanders in Chief to prepare military mobilization into our cities in case of an "emergency."  When an election day "threat of terror" is announced, armed troops will surround and occupy strategic polling stations, and as the war against terror spreads to Somalia, Ashcroft will claim a legitimate excuse to racially profile African Americans.  In November, 2000, the press ignored disenfranchisement to the extent they were able, but on this autumn day in 2002 or 2004, the press will ride over the stormy waters like a duck, hailing the Bush administration for leadership in protecting the lives of Americans.

When all four estates of our society speak with one voice, further promoted by the advertising dollars of mega corporations, all that stands in the way of a totalitarian regime is the free flow of information on the World Wide Web, and a free foreign press.  But when the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government are safely in corporate hands, with the complete cooperation of our national media, censorship of the internet and the exclusion of foreign journalists unfriendly to the Bush regime is a small matter indeed.

If you think me paranoid, well, perhaps I am.  I assure you that I take no pride in this prognostication.  In fact, I would take great joy in being proved embarrassingly inaccurate.  But the reality is that we have never, as a nation, walked so close to the cliffs of Fascism, where all of the necessary elements interact with this measure of cooperative harmony.  The theft of election 2000 sounded an alarm that was heard in every part of the world, but the alarm was successfully muted to near silence in the USA.  If that alarm is not answered by 2002, or 2004 at the very latest, the damage from the fires of Fascism will be irreversible.