The Malignant Legacy Of George Bush

George Bush and his diabolically iniquitous administration will be leaving Washington soon, either when they’re legally removed or when the clock runs out. What his troubling legacy is will be hotly debated for years to come as his record will be attentively scrutinized by historians, pundits and the press. Heated public debate will abound and severe verdicts will almost certainly be handed down.

A conclusion can be drawn however that George Bush’s most damaging endowment to our country will not be Iraq, his relentless assault on the environment or any other deeply disturbing policy or executive action. Much of what Bush has wrought can be changed by future leaders and almost certainly will be.

The most pernicious bequest of the Bush administration might be that for the first time in our history we will have had previously impenetrable constitutional barriers breached, realized unprecedented losses to our civil liberties and had our faith in the democratic uniqueness that is America challenged. Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of the National Review said, “The Bush regime's assault on the Constitution is an assault on America”.

Most dangerous of all some might say, is the precedent that has been established for future administrations to commit the same egregious acts again.

For the American people under the Bush administration have become so desensitized to governmental abuses of power along with the accompanying unprecedented weakening of our civil liberties and rights, that it’s almost inevitable the citizenry will accept this degradation far more readily in the future.

At first we may fear and rail against these abuses, but in the absence of any substantive punitive action today against this administration and as our attention turns back to the more immediate necessities of our daily lives we may wearily come to accept them as being a part of the landscape. “It’s just the way it is”.

The Bush administration has done incalculable damage to the American political psyche, rendering previously assumed birthrights of citizenship to be nothing but superficial gifts granted at the pleasure of the all powerful Federal government. It was just this that the founding fathers warned us about so intently. Thomas Jefferson said, "The greatest calamity which could befall us would be submission to a government of unlimited powers." Throughout the Bush administration, there has been a slow but inexorable chipping away of the bedrock that protected the civil rights of the individual citizen. “The Patriot Act”, the diabolically named legal mechanism for the carnage wrought against the previously inviolate US constitution, carries with it the inescapable suggestion that you are not a patriot if you take issue with administration policy. “You are either with us or you are against us”. The line in the sand has been crossed and the examples of the Bush administration’s egregious contempt for the constitution are numerous and frightening. For the first time in our history, we can no longer say, we are America, we’re different.

1. The executive branch has declared that an American citizen can be apprehended and locked up with no arrest warrant, no reading of the charges against them and no need to inform their loved ones as to what has transpired.

2. A citizen can be imprisoned for an indeterminate amount of time, even for life, with no right to challenge their detention, to make a phone call or to retain a lawyer.

3. Federal officials can secretly enter your house with no warning and with no need to show a connection to a terror investigation.

4. The federal government can wiretap your phones, monitor your web usage and scrutinize your library habits and e-mail without probable cause.

5. We have tortured and sent detainees to other countries to be tortured.

6. Our elections are no longer assumed to be fair.

7. Our government routinely uses fear to intimidate, manipulate and control us.

8. The executive branch makes policy based on the secretive counsel of their corporate donors.

9. The administration selectively disseminates information to the public through a network of media sycophants operating under the guise of news organizations.

10. The administration has selectively suspended habeas corpus rights.

11. The government has decided to use satellites to spy on US citizens. Due to Bush’s ignominious legacy, I wonder if we will still be able to lead by example in the future. Will we be capable of saying with any degree of confidence that our country is a shining beacon of democracy for the rest of the world? Will we have the right to criticize others and what will be the world’s perception of our moral standing among nations? The answers to these questions would have been asserted confidently and proudly in the affirmative at one time, but unfortunately that’s not at all assured in a post-Bush future. This is his legacy. Ours will be determined by whether we allow it.