Upending the Mayberry Machiavellis

Sidney Blumenthal nails it in this essay at Salon.com: Upending the Mayberry Machiavellis

Read it and weep.

I am tired of ordinary decent people who happen to be Republicans giving trite and ill-thought out reactions to the current series of investigations being held by Congress. Blumenthal lays it out for you to see: the debasement of American democracy was the primary goal of the Bush regime, and in particular its political office run by Karl Rove.

No one can deny he has succeeded in trashing the core of American principled government. Great Republicans of the past: Eisenhower or Reagan for instance, would cringe at the blatant, rampant, and sordid attempt to turn every corner, every nook and cranny of the executive branch of government into a politicized and religiously zealous pulpit from which “Republican only” [and right wing Republican only at that!] views are promulgated.

The incident Blumenthal mentions, the speech at the GSA, is symptomatic of everything the Bush regime has tried to do: the urging of its career staff to use GSA funds to help elect Republicans is a clear violation of the law and deserves punishment.

Think about that all you Republican supporters: the people you continue to support are urging employees of the American people to interfere in the electoral process by diverting money into right-leaning districts. No matter what the projects are. No matter what the objective of the GSA is. All that is secondary to getting more Republicans elected. That’s banana republic politics. Worse it’s verging on dictatorial.

Does this not worry you?

And, please don’t respond with the canard: “everyone does it”. No. Not everyone does it. In fact no one in America has ever done this. That’s what makes it so important to us. All of us.

Think again: what would you be saying if this was a Democratic administration? Imagine the furor on Fox News. All those programs diverting “good honest taxpayer money” into inner city projects to pander to “minority” voter interests! Think what you’d say.

And it’s your party: the party of “small government”, the administration run on “business principles” that has perpetrated this attack on our freedom. We have an administration filled with people who have no training at their jobs, no skills, no experience, and no concern or compassion for the citizens who pay them. Instead their criterion is loyalty to Bush, backed by a simple extreme evangelical “vision”. They are commisars. They are apparechiks. They are the bullying thuggery that all one-party states put in place to maintain control. Mayberries every one of them. Indistinguishable from each other. Inculcated with extreme views that are so far from the mainstream of America that they done’t dare talk about what they really think from fear of ridicule. Instead they ridicule us by anonymously subverting our government and suborning it for their own ends. They are the epitomy of authoritarianism. No wonder Bush has been successful in establishing a near monarchy. His operatives were everwhere.

So I ask my Republican friends: do you have principles? Will you stand up against this corruption of America?

Or do you continue to think that it’s all a political “fishing trip” designed to aggrandize some media happy Democrats?

Shame on you! And shame on America for having been so complacent and lazy that it hasn’t, even yet, reacted with the outrage that such an attack on its historic freedoms surely deserves.