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...are given (or take) power they don't deserve (in Cheney's case, two stolen elections; power derived strictly from money, not from merit). They become megalomaniacs and tyrants; delusional, cruel--or the megalomania, tyrannical tendencies, delusion and cruelty that already characterize them become worse, take over their personalities and push out all human empathy and ethical judgment. History has told us the tragedy of undeserved power time and again. The Constitution was designed to prevent it, but has been amazingly subverted, by both Cheney and Bush, and those behind them. Our democracy is hanging by the thinnest of threads right now--the THEORETICAL power of the legislative and judicial branches to curtail these men, and the only THEORETICAL sovereignty of the people and right to throw off tyrants, which has been gravely subverted by Bush partisan electronic voting companies. They have shown what horror they can unleash with their power over the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Their possession of nuclear weapons is truly scary.
The good people in this country--the sane, the progressive majority--are having to lurch from one crisis to another, trying to prevent or mitigate a continual succession of outrageous actions by these tyrants, from having to throw conniption fits just to get the government to NOT let people die of hunger and neglect in a disaster, to preventing the appointment of a total nincompoop toady to the Supreme Court, to trying to get secret torture prisons stopped, to trying to investigate and prosecute unbelievable crimes, such as the treasonous outing of a CIA agent, against the non-stop lying and spin of the Bush-Cheney White House.
There is no room left to address global warming--or other signs of the collapse of our planetary ecosystem. There is no room left to address potential financial meltdown caused by disastrous tax cuts, completely unaccountable military spending, and the crimes of unregulated global corporate predators.
I don't think we should necessarily focus on personalities--because I think what we have here is a cabal, more than an individual madman. Take Rumsfeld, for instance. I find him even scarier than Cheney, as a matter of fact. Cheney's pathology is just a symptom of a larger problem: that it is in the interest of certain powers--for instance, the war profiteering corporate news monopolies--to destroy our democracy. The Fourth Estate should have prevented these men from gaining power--most certainly in 2004, if not in 2000--and failed to do so. The signs of tyranny were/are blatant and many. Yet the news organizations have gone out of their way to cover up for this junta--indeed, to promote it. Our government is in fact being run by war profiteers--Cheney among them--to an extent that it has never been before, even in WW II. (FDR and Truman would be appalled at the massive looting that has been going on under this junta.)
The Democratic Party leadership also bears some responsibility. They should have cried foul at certain points (for instance, when Bushite companies took over the election system), and did not--likely more for reasons of corruption, or fear, than collusion, but the effect is the same. The people have no advocate; no one working in their interest to counter these criminals and expose them, and remove them from office.
These conditions seem to be changing, to some extent--probably because of the junta's extremism. (--I don't believe in their incompetence; I think they are doing exactly what they want to do, in every case--and that their overall motivator is short term greed, on a grand scale.) (That's why they have no "plan" in Iraq.) We are seeing acknowledgment of their failures; acknowledgment of their unpopularity (that must be hard for the corporate news monopolies to admit, since their prime goal, for several years now, has been to create the illusion that these criminals have support); and the apparent success of the "white hat" military and intelligence establishments to at least slow these tyrants down and circumscribe their actions. But we'll see. Widening of the Mideast war still threatens. And fundamental change cannot really occur until we restore the transparency of our elections and begin to get more non-corrupt, non-collusive representatives.
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