George Mason University is in the news lately- as this very small school has become this year’s Cinderella story in the NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament, making it into the Final Four as a #11 seed (out of 16 in each of the four regions).

But even more impressive is a short, powerful essay entitled “The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration”, hosted on a website paid for by GMU. Go read it- trust me, it’s worth it.

Funny how I’d never heard of this school until a few weeks ago.

Anyway, the essay’s basic premise is something that everyone should awaken to- namely, that the Bush Administration is drunk with power, and that the Congress has essentially rolled over completely for them.

To any right-winger types that might read this (as if), here’s a little thought exercise for you. Imagine, just for a minute. Close your eyes and imagine that it’s not George W Bush in charge of the United States; imagine, instead, that somehow Hillary Rodham Clinton had run for President in 2000, had won, and was President on 9/11.

Now imagine that she’d done everything that King George has done. Imagine that a second Clinton Administration had its own lawyers in the Justice Department write memos that justified President Rodham Clinton instituting a policy where she could authorize torture; arrest and hold people indefinitely without warrant, hearings, or a trial; use the Secret Service to enforce large zones around her appearances where protestors were banned; set up a program where the NSA spied on Americans without a warrant in apparent violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Imagine that. Imagine the outrage from a Republican Congress. They impeached her husband for lying about a blowjob; can you imagine what the right-wing bloggers, the Bill O’reilly’s and Rush Limbaughs whould have done? Can you imagine, in any way, a President Rodham Clinton being allowed to stay in office?

If you’re on the right wing, you should be totally and completely ashamed of yourself. Merely because he is a Republican, you have given King George a free pass. He has, in effect, declared that the very Constitution of the United States means nothing, because of the war on terror. Could he, say, disband Congress and the judiciary? Why not? Because the Constitution says he can’t? It also says the government can’t spy on people without a warrant, but we’ve let Bush get away with THAT.

This is disgusting and amazing to me, that the people have let it go this far. I can understand it, to some extent, from the American people; we’ve become soft and spoiled, more worried about our flat-screen TVs than we are about civic basics like the system of checks and balances in our national government.

But Congress? Where’s the outrage? Have they become so craven for power that we’ll allow this to happen, allow a President to annoint himself King with the memos of a few lawyers, so long as the K Street project keeps the money flowing to the right-wing crowd?

More importantly… how do we wake the people up to this problem? When the media ignores someone as serious as a Supreme Court Justice making a speech comparing America to dictatorships, we’re in deep, deep shit.

Wake up, sheeple. Wake up. Mobilize. I know that voting a straight Democratic Party ticket might stink, might turn your stomach. It turns mine to think that I’m going to vote for Jim McDermott; the guy is a lazy turd. But for now, it’s the best we can do, at least until we start a People’s Party that can seriously compete in the national scene.

You have to wonder… how much longer will the Bush Administration keep us in Iraq? It’s becoming more and more apparent that they’re already in the midst of a civil war, and I seriously don’t think we’re making all that much difference. Then again, maybe we are- it’s so hard for someone here to say.

If we leave, would they explode into violence? If so, maybe I will need to rethink my stance on staying/going. Up until now, I’d thought that since we aren’t (as a nation) committing the resources needed to really do it right, we might as well get the heck out of there.

But I was thinking today about how, like it or not, we *are* responsible for a large portion of what’s going on in Iraq, and therefore if our presence helps keep a lid (such as it is) on the boiling pot of sectarian violence, maybe we do have an obligation to stick around.

Either way, King George and his cronies have still screwed it up. One thing that we should/could have easily learned from the rocky breakup of Yugoslavia is that when you’ve got long-suppressed violence among various ethnic or religious groups, if you remove the power that’s been keeping them in check they’re going to go nutso for a while.

We should have never disbanded the Iraqi Army and we should not have forced all the low-level people who were members of the Baath party out of power in Iraq’s government. That group of people are the ones who used to get things done; even in a dictatorship, someone’s got to take out the trash, someone’s got to keep the sewers and water mains running, someone’s got to run the civil authority.

Now we’re trying to get those folks back into their positions but it’s a big old mess. Things have devolved and it’ll take more work to get them back to where they were than it should have.

What’s so astounding about the Bush Administration is how 100% committed they are to the notion that they didn’t do anything wrong. This kind of arrogance is horrible and leads to worse decisions down the road.

Imagine this, just for a minute. Bush goes onto TV and says “folks, we screwed up. We through there were weapons of mass destruction, and there weren’t. We screwed some stuff up in not securing Iraq. I was wrong when I said “Mission Accomplished”.”

“But now we’re there, and we owe it to the Iraqi people to rebuild their nation, like we did after demolishing Germany and Japan after World War II. We also need to get a handle on the violence in Iraq, or else innocent people will suffer at the hands of religious extremists.”

“Therefore, we’re going to talk about the things we need to do, the money we need to spend. We’re going to have to sacrifice as a nation and raise some taxes. We’re going to have to ramp up the number of soldiers over there, quite a bit. But we must make this work, we must succeed. If we do not, and Iraq falls prey to massive civil war and unrest, the bloodshed will be high, and every good thing that we might have done will be lost.”

Or something like that. But can you imagine, anywhere in your wildest dreams, Bush coming out and saying something like that? It would be a brilliant move, cutting the legs out from underneath his critics, but he’s simply incapable of admitting error. That would mean that his theories are in error, and surely THAT can’t be.

I’m still leaning towards the “we’re not getting it done, so let’s just get the heck out”, but I’m not 100% sold on that yet.

Oh yeah… 30 bodies found, most beheaded, north of Baghdad; violence near a mosque kills 18 more. For a not-a-civil-war, this sure is a mess.

Well, as you can see from the timestamp, I am up late. I actually went to bed but this was sitting in the back of my mind, bugging me, so I came back to my office (second bedroom) and logged back in.

I figured out how to change the color of the text- no more red!- and also just flat-out deleted the goofy top links that were in the wrong spot in MSIE. Don’t need ‘em, delete ‘em.

I’m planning on adding plugins that will show the book I’m reading and also a really neato plugin that will let me use Google’s Analytics access stats program directly from my admin panel. Google makes great stuff, so it’s showing a lot of promise; I’m all signed up for an email and just waiting for my invite to use the Analytics program.

Apparently, geekiness has overtaken me.