Tongue-tied

At this point, I can't even remember the number of times I've sat down to write during the past five days about my shame and horror at George Bush's advocacy of torture, kangaroo courts, and continued spying on American citizens, all wrapped up in an exaggerated PR campaign titled something like "the titanic struggle to save civilization as we know it."

Which, translated, means "all fear, all the time."

But on each occasion, I just haven't been able to do it. I'm stymied at every turn by my absolute incredulity that we've reached a point in our history wherein the President of the United States is lobbying for the very practices and despotic barbarities I've always associated with Stalin's Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Good God, America. How can anyone who dares to call himself "American" support the twisted vision of this madman piloting our ship of state?

I simply can't put into words the outright absurdity that these things would merit any "debate" whatsoever in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Torture? Indefinite detention? Withholding of evidence from criminal defendants? Secret overseas prisons? Redefining the Geneva Conventions to excuse U.S. war crimes retroactively? At least 34 prisoners killed as a result of their mistreatment while in U.S. custody? There's no debate here. No discussion. Period.

And if you don't get that, you're nothing short of a traitor to the very principles of an enlightened democracy.

I just don't know any other way to say it. How much proof will it take for our Congress and all our citizenry to finally acknowledge that Captain Queeg is at the helm? With this latest abandonment of our moral core, Bush has moved beyond inept, beyond uninformed, beyond deceitful, beyond dangerous, all the way to treasonous.

That's right. Treasonous.

My jaw drops to the floor every time I hear a defense of the President's proposals by his steadfast apologists, read an "explanation" of the "necessity" to resort to the same level of behavior as the repressive regimes from which we've historically distanced ourselves, or witness those who crucified Bill Clinton for his "parsing" and "technicalities" bend and twist and defile and fabricate to excuse a level of barbarity not even considered by the 20th Century leaders of this nation who fought a two-front war against a genuine Axis of Evil.

And so I'm tongue-tied, compositionally paralyzed, rendered incoherent by an instinctive and virulent disgust at what George and his pals would have America represent in the eyes of the world. The U.S. cannot bear two additional years of Bush's domestic and global insanity - and this issue should motivate every American to work for an early end to his shameful reign.