November 2nd
On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country including high
schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive
Out the Bush Regime launches the first national movement in American
history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office. Our call
is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a
national series of events, demonstrations, direct action, to begin a mass
movement that will have, as its eventual goal, to drive Bush out of power
and out of out lives.
Don’t stand on the sidelines; don’t stay in school. Join this movement,
the stronger we are on the 2nd, the stronger the movement will be after
the 2nd. Send this email to your friends, your lists, and everyone you
know that wants to change the direction this country is being led. The
future of the planet depends on our action now. Check out the web site at
www.worldcantwait.org.
www.worldcantwait.org
Why don’t we simply wait for the election of 2008 or campaign for
Democrats in 2006 and then push them to issue articles of impeachment?
Let’s look at what’s fallen down the memory hole since November of 2000.
On November 7th of 2000, Albert Gore Jr. won the election for President of
the United States.
A recount in Florida which would have put him over the top was stopped by
a riot of Republican congressional staffers, none of whom were ever so
much even charged with a crime. How many people remember this? What would
have happened to them had they been anti-war protesters trying to disrupt
the Republican Convention? Or ‘Critical Mass’ activists trying to organize
a bike ride at Union Square? And why didn’t the press cover it?
By the time the case came up before the Supreme Court, it was a moot issue
since we had already seen that neither the Gore campaign nor the Democrats
would fight the stolen election. Most likely they knew just what an
extremist and incompetent president Bush would be and were hoping for the
‘pendulum to swing’. They were sitting around doing nothing, waiting for
Bush to self-destruct, to sweep the Congressional elections in 2002 and to
retake the White House in 2004.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
The only problem is that Bush and his campaign staff decided not to
self-destruct. Once in the White House on January of 2001, they already
had a fully developed plan to remake the US government in their image. All
they needed was the right excuse. At lunchtime on September 11th, 2001,
while the rest of us were still in shock from the worst terrorist attack
in American history, the infrastructure put into place all through the
first half of 2001 swung into action. The Bush Regime rammed though the
Patriot Act. They dusted off their Power Point presentations (the ones
with the boxes titled ‘smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’ and
‘freedom for the Iraqi people’) and turned them into hard fact. They
steamrolled the Democratic Congress in October of 2002 into authorizing
them to invade Iraq. They opened up the federal coffers to ‘faith based’
Christian extremists to allow them to build permanent institutions that
would carry over even if the Republicans lost in 2004. They unleashed
Arial Sharon in the West Bank. The rolled back environmental protections
and started taking a sledgehammer to the Wall of church/state separation.
If this all seems familiar, remember, none of this is in dispute and none
of it is coming from ‘left wing extremists’. I’m only repeating what has
been well-documented in the ‘mainstream media’ and now by the Special
Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If you think the rhetoric coming from the
‘World Can’t Wait’ organizers is ‘unrealistic’ or ‘shrill’ or ‘extreme’,
then remember. It’s essentially the same rhetoric that is coming out of
mainstream elite liberals like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman, the
progressive wing of the Democratic Pary, and traditional conservative
Republicans like Tom Wilkerson, Brent Scowcroft, Paul O’Neil, Richard
Clarke, and Larry Johnson. None of it, not the stolen election in 2000,
not the highly suspicious vote in Ohio in 2004, not the marriage of an
extremist Evangelical Christian agenda to the federal government, not the
manipulation of the press or public opinion, not the cocked up war in
Iraq, not the restrictions of civil liberties or the extraordinary
decision to ignore long established international regulations on rules of
war and treatment of prisoners, none of this is in dispute.
You think I’m exaggerating?
Here’s a quote from the World Can’t Wait’s call:
‘People look at all this and think of Hitler ( and they are right to do
so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very
quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now;
the future is in the balance.’
And here’s a quote from the Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin:
‘If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent
describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you
would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in
their gulags or some mad regime ( Pol Pot or others ( that had no concern
for human beings.’
Senator Durbin, of course, was bullied into recanting his statement by the
Republican ‘guided’ media, the pro-Israeli lobbying infrastructure in
Washington, by Chicago democratic boss Richard Daley, and by his own
reluctance to lose the power and status
that getting along by going along will give you. Slipping up and telling
the truth in Washington isn’t tolerated kindly. And he learned that lesson
the hard way.
Durbin apologized and went back to the accepted role of the Democratic
Party, which is basically to ‘sit around and do nothing while Bush
self-destructs’.
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing
while Bush self-destructs and Bill Frist and his fellow evangelical
Christian extremists raised the specter of the ‘nuclear option’ to
intimidate congress and ram though extremist judges.
Durbin joined the rest of his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing
nothing while Bush self-destructs and voting 97-0 last month to continue
funding the war in Iraq (a war which he himself had brought up the image
of Fascism and Communist totalitarianism to describe).
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing
while Bush self-destructs and approving John Roberts as Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court and setting in place the machinery that’s eventually
going to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Griswold. Durbin joined his fellow
Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs
and the Bush regime continued to torture prisoners at Gitmo.
While Durbin and his fellow Democrats are sitting around doing nothing
waiting for Bush to self-destruct, American citizens like Jose Padilla are
still being held in jail without being charged with a crime.
And while Senator Durbin and his fellow Democrats sat around and did
nothing while they waited for Bush to self-destruct, 2000 American
soldiers and anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians
have died.
I was about to make some snide remark about Senator Durbin, make a joke
about him going back to his limo after swallowing his pride, but then I
realized that if I don’t take concrete actions to remove Bush from office,
I’m much worst then Senator Durbin. At least he dangled the truth in front
of us before being smacked down. What have I done?
On my IBM ThinkPad, I have a screensaver. If you’re French, or British, or
Canadian, you’ve seen it. If you’re an American, you haven’t. It’s a photo
of an Iraqi girl (she’s about 5 or so) covered in blood after watching her
parents get slaughtered by American troops in front of her eyes. She’s
covered in her parents’ blood. It serves as a reminder. What we’re afraid
of in the United States is already hard fact in the rest of the world.
What I’m worried about in my little suburb in New Jersey is already hard
fact in New Orleans. Every time I think about my worst, most paranoid
fears something like police kicking in my door, it’s already a mundane
fact of life in Baghdad. That photo is there to remind me. I can’t afford
to sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs.
And yet, if I’m not subject to the same amount of terror that poor people
in the rest of the world are, I can also learn from them.
I can learn from the Ukrainian people, who took to the streets to protest
the stolen election in their country. They didn’t sit around and do
nothing while the people who stole the election self-destructed.
I can learn from the Indonesian people, who removed Suharto from power in
1998.They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the dictatorship
self-destructed.
I can learn from the workers in Poland in the 1980s who overthrow
Communist totalitarianism. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the
Stalinist bureaucrats self-destructed.
I can learn from black American in the early 1960s who overthrew the one
party totalitarian state in the south, not by voting for Kennedy or the
Democrats, but by an extended campaign of putting their lives at risk,
breaking unjust laws, and, finally, marching on Washington. Jim Crow
didn’t self-destruct while people sat on their asses and did nothing.
Don’t sit around and do nothing. They won’t self-destruct.