America the Fearful - New York Times
The New York Times

May 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

America the Fearful
By
BOB HERBERT

In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans
to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is
this
president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear -
so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of
their
rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear
is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential
power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even
overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the
nation
has ever known.

Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and
sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in
Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly
unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak
of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of
the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.

The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly
secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on
all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly
wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for
Chinese
takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in
Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants
to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.

The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective
hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its
fearmongering
and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the
Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of
government
checks and balances.

Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully
appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the
United
States, including the right to privacy.

The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant
to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and
women
amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal
safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power,
starting
with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The
United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W.
Bush,
employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war
in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.

If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful.
In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war
that
will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to
the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.

So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the
extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo
Bay and elsewhere
without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're
allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all
is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the
e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to
inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism.
Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance
on secrecy,
the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for
military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion
of
blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of
law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy
of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage
that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look
at
itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.

Posted by Miriam V.