rigging the election

There really is an excellent reason for supporting war with Iraq, or at least for talking about such a war. If one is of the Republican persuasion and one wishes to maintain and even increase the Republican domination of the American polity, talk of war and the imminent danger to America presented by the imagined threat presented by a demonic foe will do the trick. Absolutely. \n\nAny other justification is superfluous. In fact, any other justification may be impossible, even for many Republicans, since, aside from its immediate advantage for the politicos, this war is almost certain to be disastrous for all but oil and armament moguls. \n\nThe economic and political health of the country is in very real danger, but we are all being distracted by the Republicans' manufacture and sale of this absurd sideshow adventure.\n\nAlmost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001. \n\nI was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.\n\nAbsent any compelling case for Republican involvement in the events of September 11, we still have a case for a Republican conspiracy, one which is subverting the political process at this very moment, and it's working very well indeed. Most of the Democrats have bought into the monstrous idiocy of this regime's war arguments and practices, with disagreement only in the details, at best.\n\nIf they get away with it this fall, a Republican executive, a Republican Congress and a Republican judiciary will virtually guarantee their success with a frightened and gung-ho citizenry in 2004. Dictatorship accomplished. \n\nAs far as the current situation is concerned, I do not have an opinion about whether their war-thing is merely a political device, that is, a gambit for sabotaging what whould otherwise be almost certain victory for Democrats in November and a long-overdue accounting for the Republican executive, or whether the Administration is really serious about this thing. \n\nI would like to think that it is the first scenario (which represents I suppose the greater cynicism) that we are dealing with here, especially since what is at stake is our own lives, our property (but not our sacred honor, which is already lost and perhaps irretrievable).\n\nAt this point I'm expected to ask anyone reading this to communicate with her and his senators and representatives, on the outside chance that they have not already performed the ritual, but I honestly believe that the demons are now beyond recall. It's now summer, 1914, and the mobilization cannot be retracted. \n\nBut write anyway. \n\nYou'll feel better in the morning, I think, especially if you realize that the next opportunity for nobility may not involve letters or emails.\n\n\n\nTo locate your member of Congress, use this.