Welcome to the Police State

The ancient Chinese curse -- "May you live in interesting times" -- has never seemed quite so appropriate as it does at this point in American history.

Consider two stories in The Boston Globe. They were published within two weeks of each other. Individually they are each interesting. But if you slap them together in a sort of Eisensteinian montage, they become even more revealing.

I'm going to give the headlines in reverse order:

From today:

"Bush says domestic spying does not violate civil liberties"

And from April 30th:

"Bush challenges hundreds of laws"

Do we see the connection? If not, let's investigate further.

From the April 30th Globe piece by Charlie Savage:

"President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research."

With me so far? Okay, now here's the piece from today's Globe, written by Deb Riechmann:

"President Bush yesterday defended the scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs that have riled privacy advocates and threatened to impede the Senate confirmation of his choice to lead the CIA." [...]

Bush made his remarks two days after news reports revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

In a separate development, The New York Times reported in today's editions that in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney urged the administration to empower the NSA to intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants."

The combined thrust of these two articles is clear. Bush (whose poll numbers have dropped even lower than they were the last time I wrote about them -- ranging from 33% in one poll to below 30% in another) clearly has crossed the line into Nixon territory. He thinks that if the president does it, then it must be legal (or as Louis XIV put it, "L'Etat, c'est moi!").

He thinks he is above the law at exactly the same point when, according to an AP-Ipsos poll, 31% of Republicans want the GOP out of power.

Think about that for a minute: almost a third of Republicans want their own party out of power. And that's with a currently booming stock market.

Bush and Cheney are in the process (if it's not too late to use the present tense) of turning this country into a police state. They want total control of its citizens, and the right to make war with anyone they please without anyone, in or out of Congress, saying anything about it.

Luckily it looks like the American people as well as their congressional representatives have -- finally -- caught on. I think it's likely that Bush's nominee to head the CIA, General Michael V. Hayden, will not be confirmed. And it's also likely that the Republicans will take an historic drubbing at the polls this November.

Consider the AP-Ipsos poll numbers:

• 25 percent, now approve of the job Congress is doing, down 5 points in a month.
• 51 percent, want the Democrats to win control of Congress.
• Those now saying the country is on the wrong track include: 62 percent of conservatives, 77 percent of moderates, and 92 percent of liberals.

It looks like the majority of the American people have finally realized that this particular emperor, even though he may, as one young relative of mine put it, "love the Lord," has no clothes.

But have we caught on in time?

Tom Moran