Steps towards Dictatorship

Digby over at Hullabaloo describes the politics of the last decade quite well. I don't think it applies to all Republicans, but the ones it does apply to have been in the national leadership of the party.

I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.

The smear jobs of the early to mid-90's were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn't invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.

But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we've ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in "wartime" (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.

They need to be exposed, the exposure needs to be recognized and believed, and they need to be stopped. Where is the media? They have been AWOL. They have no right to criticize bloggers for exposing their lack of action.