False Choices from a Failed Presidency
O. Max Gardner III

The American People expect the President to safeguard our nation from legitimate threats posed by terrorism but not to constantly terrorize us with fear of those threats. However, this has been the “political model” followed by President Bush and his Administration. According to the President, either we are with him or we are against the United States of America. There is no room for dissent or disagreement with Bush. Everything is either black or white. We are either Patriotic or unpatriotic. And, for those of us that even venture to doubt him, we are commanded to “trust him” for he alone knows what is the “right thing to do for America.” This type of self-deception is down-right scary. Furthermore, it implies that Bush may actually believe that God has selected him to “show the way to the nations of the world how they can walk in the path of liberty.”

To date, Congress, the courts and the American People have given the President great leeway in the so-called “war on terrorism.” But, as the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, the fight against terror does not give the President a blank check. The President has a sacred obligation under the Constitution to protect both the nation’s safety and its constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms. His failure to do so would compromise the very principles and ideals that we are fighting for. And, even if Bush thinks he is doing the “right thing,” we should remember the great jurist Louis Brandeis, who warned us that “experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.”

These principles include the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures by wiretaps or forced entries into our homes and bank accounts and public libraries and private telephone calls. And, yet, this same President whose goal is to remake every country in the world into an “American style democracy,” has secretly and surreptitiously wiretapped thousands of conversations of Americans without any court oversight. And, at the same time, he has touted a “Patriot Act” that would have caused a second American Revolution by the original patriots. And, I am sorry, but I don’t think the “founding fathers” ever considered it an option that the President, on his own, had the right to suspend constitutional freedoms. Perhaps the President has forgotten the sage advice of Thomas Paine, who said more than 200 years ago in his pamphlet Common Sense that “while in England the king was the law, in America the law is king.” In fact, it was the use of warrantless searches by the British almost 230 years ago which was the match that ignited the American Revolution.

At this point, I am not sure anybody can really say with any degree of certainty why we went to Iraq in the first place or why we are still there after all of the terrible blunders, errors, mistakes, miscalculations, and misjudgments by the current Administration. Suffice it to say, we have not been greeted as “liberators” as the French did when American troops liberated Paris from the Nazis. The fact of the matter is that most Iraqi’s want us to leave their land just as soon as possible. And, we most certainly will never recover the financial costs of this War from Iraqi oil revenues. More importantly, the blood of more than two thousand of American’s youth will forever stain the deserts sands of that God-forsaken land. I use the term God-forsaken the literal and not the figurative sense, because we all know that Muslims in Afghanistan are trying to kill one of their own for the high-crime of converting to Christianity. Yes, these are the people we are trying to save with our blood and money.

It took us 14 years of fighting for a lost cause in Vietnam before we finally came to our collective senses and called it quits and came home. You would have thought that America would have given up on the impossible work of “nation building” after this terrible chapter in our national history. But, we never seem to learn from our mistakes. We have no right to force our brand of democracy on other nations. Such actions would be completely inconsistent with core democratic values. Richard Nixon, who most assuredly was less than perfect on the domestic front, certainly knew about the folly of nation building. During his inauguration in 1973, Nixon said: “The time has passed when America will make every other nation’s conflict our own, or make every other nation’s future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs.”

George Bush, regrettably, has provided irrefutable proof that Nixon was wrong. The time “nation building” has not passed. In fact, it seems with George Bush it is just not beginning since he appears to planning of all things a nuclear attack on Iran, our next victim in his war to create more terror. We have some pretty bad governments in Iran and North Korea. But, should we really go to war with them? And, after them, then who is next? Where does it all end? When will it end? America must come to its senses and stop wasting America’s precious blood on what is practically the exact opposite of the “principles that gave American birth.” The Founding Fathers could have cared less about Sadam and Iraq and Iran, to say nothing of the government structure of those countries. If they came back today and saw what George Bush has done to their America, I feel sure they probably would revolt all over again.

It is time for the madness to stop. In fact, it is way past that time.