fragile democracy

It is quite amazing to think how fragile democracy is. To think in 5 years what the Bush junta (can it be called anything else at this point?) has done to this nation is breathtaking. The revelations of spying on journalists is nothing short of a Nixon-on-steroids moment and still our Republican led Congress does what they do best - nothing. Actually more specifically they try to change the subject to immigration - a sure winner no doubt in their desperate attempt to keep their phoney-baloney jobs come November.

But still when the leader of your party is in fact stealing the show out from under you and you are the only one with a serious chance at bringing him to heel and you don't - what are you? We now know they are incompetent. We now know they are even more corrupt than we could imagine. We know that they are blinded by ideology. Now we know that they must also be cowards. Either that or they are SO blind that they will let George Bush to continue pissing on the Constitution and the American People he so often claims to be protecting.

That is beyond pathetic. That is despicable. It is immoral in our democracy. It is criminal.

But it does point up my thesis: democracy is fragile. One can argue with certainty that this is a perfect storm where the lockstep Republican party is taken in by a megalomaniac and his willing executioners who will glady run roughshod over them - when their turn comes. It is a perfect storm but throughout history we have seen it all before. How it usually ends is in the total dissolution of the republic in fact though the trappings stay aorund for a while. We have seen it from Rome to Paris to Berlin to Moscow.

How will this perfect storm end now? We have an abject press that even in its willingly suppliant state is still having the boot of state security applied to its throat. Congress - notably Frist Hastert Roberts and the late unlamented Delay who have turned the Congress in similar fashion into a "People's Chamber of Deputies" - are simply being ignored by a president who has chosen to ignore over 700 laws and has apparently been making up a bunch more on the fly.

Saddam weeded out the chaff from his people's chamber by denouncing them in a famous speech and having those he denounced walked out from the hall and into oblivion by his goons. How will George do it do you suppose?

Maybe the burgeoning corruption scandals that are overtaking the House in particular is really his clever way of appying the screws to the Congress whogave him everything he wanted. It would be surgically clean no? That would require a mind that certainly the boy king doesn't have and a finesse the even the overrated Karlness himself could only dream of.

No the corruption is certainly theirs and the DOJ is legitimately catching up with them. So maybe their is hope. The junta doesn't have the stuff to actually stand up for their own. So the scandals will gnaw away at the Republican hegemony and as the targets cut their deals the foundation will collapse.

And if that happens, maybe just maybe, like when Nixon tried the creeping coup gambit those that stood up for the Constitution fortified by some serious courage coming from the career folks in the DOJ found enough strength to cause Nixon to hit a wall of resistance. It is that wall that gives fragile democracy whatever resilience it has. But it takes instutions and most importantly the courage and conviction of those that take that this nation and its Constitution seriously - who believe that it is worth fighting for even when the enemies of state are the ones who hold the levers of power.