Who are they? Well, here's the short list. John Ashcroft, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, Rick Santorum, Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, Don Rumsfeld and they taste blood. Why? Because they are just inches away from accomplishing their objective"the take over of our country by their radical, extremist, right wing, Christian agenda. What will they do when they have accomplished that? Take over the world. Think I'm kidding?
John Ashcroft, who, as we all know, lost to a dead guy in his home state, before being appointed by our first appointed president to the attorney general spot, was anointed with oil by Clarence Thomas, the supreme court justice whose wife was on Bush's transition team when he halted the Florida recount and appointed Bush president. Let me repeat that"John Ashcroft was anointed with oil by Clarence Thomas after his attorney general appointment. This custom was started by King David sometime during the Old Testament.
Here's what John Ashcroft is against: abortion, homosexuality, Christians making friends with non-Christians, "mixed gender" dancing, (so he's OK with same gender dancing??? I'm confused), sexually explicit anything"books, movies, statues. Let's just say he's exactly the kind of guy who would have chiseled all the penises off of every work of art in the Vatican and put tacky, expensive fig leaves over them if it hadn't already been done.
Here's what John Ashcroft is for: speaking in tongues, being anointed with oil, government laws that reflect the teachings of Jesus Christ, abolishing attorney/client privilege, loosening restrictions on secret government surveillance of citizens, including phones, e-mail, libraries and bank accounts, a "deport at will" option to avoid all those tiresome immigration laws, increasing the list of federal death-penalty crimes, the ability to open the graves of deceased victims of terrorism without permission, restricting access to information about corporate pollution and environmental crimes, and keeping an eye on lenient judges so he can oust them when he puts himself in charge of appointing judges.
Here's what John Ashcroft has accomplished: ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Tom Delay, the ex-exterminator who never met a toxic chemical he didn't like, would like to: dismantle the EPA, pass the flag burning amendment, outlaw abortion, pass the anti-gay marriage amendment, do away with any pretense of separation of church and state, shut down the federal government, change the words to "I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag", put the ten commandments on the wall of every classroom, turn the entire world into a Christo-American paradise, teach nothing but creationism in schools, (Tom blames the Columbine shootings on the teachings of evolution, not the fact that two seriously disturbed young men had access to guns and explosives), ban contraceptives, abolish day care, give everyone in the country the weapon of their choice. How long do you think it's going to take before Tom gets all of his wishes? About as long as it takes to say John Ashcroft.
Rick Santorum is a whimsical kind of fellow. Rick thinks that homosexual sex between consenting adult humans is no different than bestiality, incest, bigamy, and adultery. Rick needs to learn the definitions of the words consenting, adult and human. Rick doesn't believe the constitution guarantees Americans the right to privacy, so he would like to see that fictitious right revoked. John Ashcroft has taken care of that for Sen. Santorum. (George Orwell was exactly 20 years off.)
Rick would rather see a woman die rather than terminate her life-threatening pregnancy. This has also been accomplished. He would also like to see: doctors incarcerated for trying to save a pregnant patient's life, non-procreative sex outlawed, birth control outlawed, day care outlawed and homosexuals jailed. It's just a matter of time before Rick accomplishes his goals.
Justice Antonin Scalia is a member of Opus Dei. (So, by the way, is Clarence Thomas.) To have a real feeling for exactly how scary that is, look it up at http://www.mond.at/opus.dei or read The DaVinci Code. A small taste of what you will find out about them is their church's attitude towards women: "Woman are so sinful"that they have been dislodged from the Garden of Eden. And the only possibility for them to lessen their guilt is by subordinating themselves... 'You should be like a carpet where people can step onto.'" (Heard by a lot of people at an information evening of the Opus Dei in Dornbirn Austria. Easter 1994. from the book "Gottes Rechte Kirche" by T.M. Hofer.)
Mr. Scalia makes no bones about his disdain for any modern interpretation of the constitution. In his view the constitution is a "dead document". In other words it means what it meant when it was written, and nothing more. This makes things very easy for Mr. Scalia in that he doesn't have to spend precious time agonizing about the 21st century application of any law or guideline that was written into the constitution in the 18th century, thus giving him more time to shoot birds with Dick Cheney.
Some of Justice Scalia's beliefs include: abortion is murder because it is the act of an individual. The death penalty is not murder because it is the act of the government. He, in fact, says, and I quote from his manifesto entitled, God's Justice and Ours, --the more Christian a country is the LESS likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral." He feels that Christians are "MORE likely to regard punishment in general as deserved." Could this be the kind of thinking he applies to his decisions on the bench?
If so, do you think he and Dick Cheney have had any discussions in the duck blind about the treatment of terrorists, the deposing of tyrants, the justification for war? Cheney's push for a "for a new and long-term war and spreading the military into new areas of the globe," in his speech to the World Affairs Council in January, smacks of imperialism and fascism. ("Aggressive militarism even to the extent of glorifying war as good for the national or individual spirit" is the definition of fascism by an old college dorm-mate of mine, Chip Berlet. Chip has spent 25 years studying the political right all over the world.)
In her article entitled The New Pentagon Papers; March 10, 2000 in Salon.com, Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, reports on what she saw after being assigned to the newly created Office of Special Plans, which was, according to her account, "Secretary of defense-sponsored insanity." "I saw a dead philosophy""Cold War anti-communism and neo-imperialism""walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counter terrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East".But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni." She goes on to say, "Before the Iraq invasion, many of these same players labored together for literally decades to push a radical defense strategy that favored military intervention and confrontation with enemies, secret and unconstitutional if need be" [which] is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and misleading"false by design."
Dick finally got his war. He's been working on it for decades.
The bombing in Spain would seem to lend credence to Cheney's dark vision that, "Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives as a result of a single attack, or a set of coordinated attacks." However, the fact that this horrific act may have been perpetrated upon the people of Spain as punishment for supporting the Americans in their invasion of Iraq, belies that fact and leads us to the conclusion that it wouldn't have happened had the US not invaded Iraq. And had the US not been distracted in Iraq, we quite possibly could have been paying more attention on an intelligence level and perhaps prevented it from happening at all. But we'll never know what might have been had we not rushed into Iraq under false pretenses. This, however, will not stop Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle and company from using it as an excuse for further aggression in the Middle East.
Did anyone else notice that on the same day as the bombings in Spain they were also making a lot of noise in the media about Uday and Qusay being granted asylum in Syria at the start of the war? Why they came back is beyond me. But you don't have to be psychic to know who's next on their list.
George W. Bush was quoted by Bob Woodward in his book, Bush at War, as promising, during a meeting at the governor's mansion in 1999, "to export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil." Keep in mind; this was before he was even appointed president and way before 9/11.
Stay tuned for news of Bush & Co. ignoring repeated warnings by Richard Clarke, Sandy Berger and others from Clinton's team about Bin Laden and threats to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings"the last of these warnings coming on Sept. 6th, 2001.
Pat Robertson declared on The 700 Club, "The Lord has blessed George Bush. "He could make terrible mistakes and come out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad. God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him." Oh, also, God told Pat that George was going to win in a landslide. Does God work for Diebold?
There you have it. The short list of men who are within a hair's breadth of achieving their new world order, and believe me, that is no joke. Although, I'll bet they got a good laugh when we capitulated and allowed them to stop the Florida recount because they suckered us with lies about GW being a "uniter not a divider" and a "compassionate conservative." I'll be they still get a chuckle over how easy it was to fool us. To quote one of my favorite writers, William Rivers Pitt, "Fish, Barrel, Boom." We can't afford to waste another minute in our quest to destroy these guys"not another second.
I saw Bill Clinton on the news last night defending John Kerry and I felt like I was seeing the Cavalry rushing to the rescue. I am now officially sending all my money to John Kerry, the DLC, the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus, Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Sidney Blumenthal, Barbara Boxer, Molly Yard, Chip Berlet, Diane Feinstein, Jesse Jackson, Howard Stern, Al Franken, Max Cleland, Harvey Fierstein, Tom Daschel, Jeanine Garofolo, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, Sophie Masloff, Larry Flynt, Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Graham, Dick Gephart, Aaron McGruder, George Soros, Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Tom Hayden, John Edwards, Bob Woodward, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Barney Frank, Patti Smith, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, Carol Moseley Braun, Arianna Huffington, Lou Dobbs, Ben Bradley, Tom Robbins, Rob Reiner, Tom Harkin, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Gen. Wesley Clark, Col. Anthony Zinni, Robin Williams, Whoopie Goldberg, Jim Hightower, Williams Rivers Pitt, Peter Coyote, Molly Ivans, Wayne Madsen, Rob Kall, Hunter Thompson, Ira S. Levine, Patrick Johnston, Michael Allen, Paul Krugman, Walter Cronkite, Madonna, Mrs. and Mrs. Rosie O'Donnell, John Dean, Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, Gloria Steinham, Cheri Huber, Joe Trippi, Susan Saranden, Tim Robbins, Robert Kennedy, Jr., the Paul Wellstone Foundation, MoveOn.org and anyone else who will promise me that for the rest of their lives they will spend every waking minute trying to defeat these lunatics.
It's going to be a long and brutal fight and you MUST REMEMBER" these guys have already seen the whites of our eyes"now they can taste our blood and, just like sharks, they attack the wounded and they fight to the death.
Ms. Burgwin's writing has appeared in Newsweek, Time, New York Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review as well as several online Op Ed sites. She is also involved in gay rights, women's issues and the environment. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.
