Quis custodes ipsos custodies?

My comrade Phil Carter opens a discussion of the opinion piece in today's Washington Post website authored by a group of junior officers with Iraq service questioning the worth of expending more American blood and treasure in that benighted land. Former CPT Carter asks - as do the officers writing to the post - whether it is possible for us to continue to fight a war that the American public has neither stake nor serious interest in while maintaining our "volunteer Army".
--
While this is a worthwhile question, I would opine that it is much less than the question we should be asking. For the continuation of this pointless venture calls into question the very health of our country's democracy.
--
It seems to me that this sorry imperial war shows as plainly as a bloated corpse lying in the public square that, having chosen to follow a clearly dysfunctional "leader" and his coterie of bobos, yes-men and connivers, America will do nothing to save itself.
--
American subjects - oh, sorry, we haven't acknowledged that truth yet, have we? - I mean citizens might have, at any time in the past several years when the public happy face of "compassionate conservatism" peeled off and exposed the people presently running the country as a pack of greedy, self-interested, neoimperial boobs more concerned about the possibility that Americans might want their kids to have health care provided by government than that their foreign policy was a faith-based fantasy and their domestic policy a Peter Principle-based attempt to prove that when Republicans said that "government is the problem" it wasn't a philosophy but a statement of intent, taken the opportunity presented them by the Founders (whose contempt for, and designs to prevent the seizure of power by, such partisan scumbags was written into the very Constitution those scumbags are presently ignoring) to defenestrate the canaille and reclaim their country.
--
They have not.
--
No more will the American people attempt to stop this train wreck. The Deciderer and his smoke-and-mirrors, executive-privilege-loving Veep will have driven the Army I loved and the country they hold in contempt into a ditch rather than admit that they were wrong.
--
I honestly believe that history will look back on the past half-decade as a watershed. This will be America's equivalent of what the Revolt of the Gracchi was for Republican Rome, the Dutch Wars were for Imperial Spain and the First World War was for Imperial Britian - the sign that the days of youth and vigor were past, that decline had set in and political senescence fast approaching.
--
We have chosen, like those historical powers, to follow the quicksilver lies and glittering promises of a mendacious few rather than make the hard choices and take the pain required to preserve the soverignty of the many. We have chosen our path, and will now begin to recieve the "blessings" of the government, and the policies of that government as typified by the futile sacrifices of these young officers, that we deserve.
--
If you have the stomach for it. tonight's "Frontline" adds a post-mortem to Mr. Cheney's contribution to poisoning the Tree of Liberty. This sneaky, lying, power-mad prick knows perfectly well that outside of the bugfuck fascist 25% of the American public that is willing to accept a red-white-and-blue Fuhrer who will protect their widdle bottoms from the eeeeevil Islamofascist meanies that he couldn't sell his vision of Pax Americana and a revived Imperial Presidency to the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world. Hence the whole "Cheneybunker" thing, where he and his diligent crew of cheese-eating GOP rats burrow under, nibble away at and defecate on in night and fog the Constitution they swore in the daylight to protect and defend.
--
I can't say I regret the passing of the "Parson Weems" school of American history. But I do regret that we as a people do not learn more of the kinds of people who have historically betrayed this country and its ideals - the Arnolds, Burrs, Fisks, Goulds, Oaks Ameses, the Ohio Gangs, and now Cheney and his cabal - so as to develop a more sensitive nose for this sort of praetorian treason. Perhaps we might be more willing to get out of our cozy recliners and drag this scum down to their proper place, hanging as fruit from that Liberty Tree.
--
But we won't. And in consequence we will live see that tree uprooted and burned.
--
Not a bonfire, though, just a cheery and subtle glow to warm the torturer's cell and heat the Star Chamber.