UPDATED:  OCTOBER 29, 2006

                        AN AMERICAN GONE AWOL
                        [BY MICKEY WALKER*]  

This is the darkest hour in our history of these United States.  Under the Bush-can-rewrite-the-Geneva-Convention-if-he-wants-to new law, if you unknowingly give a $10 donation to a charity that might or might not have ties to terrorists, but the NSA or CIA or Bush Thought Police goons SAY that it does, then they can recommend to Bush that you be put on the enemy combatants "list."  Bush smirks and says okay, put 'em on the list (so what does he know?).   

What happens next is that you are immediately declared to be an "enemy combatant."  No sh--, Dick Tracy.  Read the law again.  Slowly this time.  From that point in the fiasco you get no due process under the law (what law?), no habeas corpus rights, no lawyer, no phone call and no appeal.  No charges are brought against you because there will be neither trial nor any court proceedings.  How can you appeal the charges when no charges are brought against you?  You can't.   

Next, all the Bush SS goons have to do is declare that you are guilty of a crime.  The nature of the crime is not revealed, nor is it required to be.  There is not only a presumption of guilt at the whim of an NSA Gestapo-like accuser, but the presumption also acts as a dual instrument of TORTURE.  It becomes your CONVICTION.  That's right, your conviction, and next comes the sentencing, but wait, let's slow it down some.  Don't believe me?  Read the law again, this time much slower.  Bottom line, you got a trial by NEOCON idiot and you didn't even realize it.  He accused you and convicted you.  Whoosh!  But wait a minute, what did he convict you of?  Oh, he doesn't have to tell you, right, I forgot that part.  Actually, the goon may not exist, either;  you may have been accused and convicted by a computer whose trigger was set up to declare you an enemy combatant once somebody put you on the Bush "list."  This same due process by software could even act as a travel agent and book your voyage to some lovely water-boarding spa in Syria.  Dude.  Are we beginning to get the picture yet? 

So here's your new duds, old chap; put 'em on and watch out the shackles don't pinch in the pant legs.  Torquemada would turn green with envy and lash his own back in despair if he knew how danged easy the Bushites cut through all the paperwork and court stuff.  Pretty easy for a dictator, eh?  But heck, we don't live under a dictatorship, yet, right?  Or do we?   

Read on! NO ONE knows the nature of your crime because it is a SECRET and CLASSIFIED as a matter of national security.  You still with me?  By this time you have probably guessed the next toe-stumper in this nightmare.  You disappear.  That's right.  POOF!  Gone.  You invisible now, see?  Your wife doesn't know where you are.  Your coworkers think you must have run into foul play, maybe been robbed, killed and buried somewhere.  But no way.  Not to worry because you are just a part of the new Bush due process that keeps us safe from terrorists under his own war on terra.  Forget that it preempts the Constitution;”It's just a goddamned piece of paper." anyhow.  Who said that?  Sounds familiar. 

Once more with feeling:  You never got to see a judge, a courtroom, a jury of your peers, nor will there ever be an appeal to the Supreme Court, much less to any of the federal district courts.   

Meanwhile, the NSA goons must really think it hilarious when you start groping for what you can remember about your rights covered in high school Government 101, can you blame them?  They are liable to bust a gut, laughing!  All that power jammed into such small cranial capacities probably begets a lot of chuckles, knee-slappin' and maybe even some involuntary slobbering.   

So back at the ranch, what can you do now?  How can you appeal?  No charges were ever brought against you to appeal, so get used to it, dude, there ain't gonna be no appeal.  You're, like trying to drive away and you're runnin' on your rims.  Note:  by this time the Thought Police put plastic pull tape locks on your arms behind your back are probably about to bust a gut, watching you try to figger it all out.  Bet they just love to see us damned, no accounts what got put on the Bush list squirm, and it's probably even funnier if they know we are truly innocent victims of an America gone mad.  Hell, to them it's like a video game with real people, so shoot, why should they get riled up like some bleedin' heart liberal?  Shoot, they the man.  They got the power.  Their liberties aren't the ones being sliced and diced and chopped and trounced into the floor.  But yours have been burnt slap up.   

So the Supreme Court, in essence, never gets to strike down the new law as being unconstitutional because no person gets to bring his case before any court to begin with.  And your wife or brother-in-law can't, either. The Justices never get to see any such case.  Nobody knows nothing.  Does this black eye on the face of humankind bring forth the vision of a dog chasing its tail?  That's what it reminds me of, this circuitous, masturbative, malevolent mangling of our right to due process under Constitutional law.  So then how could "it" (it? what do you mean it?  All I see is a blank page with no charges brought against no real person.) ever be appealed to the Supreme Court for the latter to overturn this, the most tyrannical, un American piece of dirt legislation ever to darken the once blue skies of this great nation?  Answer is, it can't.  "It" does not exist. 

They pulled the dictatorship off while we were asleep.  We got screwed about the time the home team was kicking off on Monday Night Football.  And bubba doesn't even realize the significance of this historic moment in American history when democracy died on the operating table, else bubba would have popped a can of Lone Star and toasted the occasion 'cause Bush seems so pleased about the law and the compromise and all on the TV, you know, and anything Bush does is all right with bubba.   

The ghosts of Jefferson and Madison and Franklin, our forefathers who wrote our great Constitutional laws.......... of the people, by the people, and for the people, must be crying out in the night, in these times of greatest sorrow since our Republic was born.  They might even kick our ass for acting like a bunch of whupped dogs while our democracy was trounced and shackled by these new conservatives that call themselves Republicans. The Statue of Liberty is surely weeping now, great tears falling from her big eyes that once saw liberty, freedom and fair-dealing as far as the other coast, in this, the greatest nation the world has ever known.  Her tears silently flow and fall softly, softly falling for all of us, to remind us that liberty and freedom, though daunted, are as real as are we who care about each other, people to people and brother to brother and who have known each other in a free society all the days of our lives.  Her giant tears remind us that we are a decent and free America, and always have been, an America with the right to a fair trial, due process under the law, freedom of speech, freedom to privacy and from unlawful search and seizure, freedom to assemble, and freedom to vote in elections and to have our vote counted honestly.   

We must remember that we are protected under our laws from illegal imprisonment, even though temporary fools in Congress dare to pass bogus laws that attempt to short-circuit liberty and to drown the spirit of freedom and our inalienable rights as Americans and as human beings.  They may attempt to take away these gifts the Constitution gives us, the people, but they cannot.  These gifts, written into law, are the property of the American people, not the property of a president or a congress.   

They cannot take them.  We will not allow it.  We must not allow a rogue president, on his whim, to wrongfully defeat or steal our Constitutional rights if he attempts to incarcerate and ship overseas anyone who disagrees with him.  That Bush wants to torture and to wield an iron-fist control over anybody he chooses, without accountability, to label an enemy combatant, is an embarrassment to our sacred laws, our country and to the rest of the world who know America to be the great country still, the one that it always has been.  This foulest and most omnipotent new law bespeaks a president eat up with paranoia.  And, it defines a Congress gone mad.   

We as Americans must stand up to Bush and his immoral lapdog Congress and remind them both that America lives still and is bigger than any president or any congress.  Or any Rovian spin or any Swift Boat manipulations of the truth paid for by a millionaire homebuilder from Houston.  It is the America that we all know and love and will embrace, always as our home.  It is the real one.  Not an America that's gone AWOL.   

"They may have kilt us, but they ain't whupped us yet."

 ________   

*Mickey Walker is a native Texan who is retired.  He was educated at Kansas University on a football scholarship (teammate with Gayle Sayers and John Hadl).  Commissioned in the Navy, Walker served in Viet Nam, Joint Services special weapons instructor, Sandia Base, New Mexico, plant supervisor weapons assembly plant, member US national disaster control, nuclear weapons.  Honorably discharged 1970, Lieutenant Commander, USN Reserve duty for 10 years. Upon discharge from service, he was employed in lumber manufacturing and a securities broker.  

                        A DARK AGE MIND
                        [BY JUNKIE] 

I rarely write personally in TPJ, but Rush Limbaugh’s despicable attack on Michael J. Fox demands it.  

Limbaugh had this response to the advertisement Fox appeared, advocating for Missouri citizens to vote for Democrats who support stem cell research: 

''He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,'' Limbaugh told his radio listeners. ``He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting.''   

''This is the only time I've ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has,'' Limbaugh said. ``He can barely control himself.' 

Fox’s commercial is painful to watch – and it should be.  The Parkinson ’s disease that Fox suffers is painful; for those who are afflicted and those friends and loved ones of the afflicted.  The physical ticks and involuntary body movements are a private dance of torture.  

Early in my career as a lawyer, I served as a clerk to the Honorable Hugh A. Wells, an appellate Judge of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He was an utterly brilliant jurist with an unbending commitment for justice for all of North Carolina’s citizens.  His career as a lawyer was distinguished; rich in both the breath of experience and contributions to the people he served.  

Judge Wells contracted Parkinson’s.  The course of his disease was painfully progressive.  From a tremor in his hands, he developed body ticks and involuntary movements almost identical to those exhibited by Fox.  Trying to visit with Judge Wells was torture.  He could barely sit in a chair for the involuntary muscle contractions unseating him.  Medication did little to provide relief.  

In desperation, Judge Wells finally submitted to brain surgery to freeze the site responsible for his physical symptoms.  It provided only partial relief.  

In the end, the disease took its course and Judge Wells succumbed. A good and brilliant man was leveled.  He is only one of hundreds of thousands who suffer ignoble lives and deaths from the disease.   

The greatest hope for a cure lies in stem cell research that most Republican leaders refuse to support.  Their political intransigence steals not only the quality of life for Parkinson’s suffers but it steals hope.  

But Limbaugh and his ilk steal from every American.  They steal intellectual and scientific freedom.  Bush has removed scientists and intellectuals from government service in favor of neoconservatives.   

“President Bush . . . dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics -- a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cell - In their places he appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the "threats of biotechnology." - The turnover immediately renewed a recent string of accusations by scientists and others that Bush is increasingly allowing politics to trump science as he seeks advice on ethically contentious issues.” —Washington Post   

Scientists have increasingly expressed their alarm.  In a wide-ranging and damning report signed by 60 leading scientists including 20 Nobel laureates, the prestigious Union of Concerned Scientists charged the Bush administration with manipulating "the process through which science enters into its decisions." Among the offenses they cite: 

• Placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees,
• Disbanding existing advisory committees,
• Censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists, and
• Simply not seeking independent scientific advice. – Union of Concerned Scientists

The appetite of the neoconservatives like Limbaugh to censor the truth is an assault on intellectual freedom.  More importantly, it is an assault on the American public’s right to know and is designed to subvert meaningful public discourse, including dissent to public policy, which is the polestar of our republic. 

In an even broader sense, Bush’s record exemplifies an open hostility to “intellectualism.” Truth and the principles of civic debate and dissent are meaningless to the neoconservative agenda.  

NEXT - TARHEEL DEMS 

Last Update: 11/18/2006