Oversight

No matter how well conceived and operated, governments are never able to satisfy all people and the disaffected can never be won over completely. Terrorism is the strategy of choice for non-governmental entities and individuals without allies who rage against governments.


Most citizens cannot comprehend the likes of Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, or the alleged terrorists arrested today in Miami, but we can understand anger at governmental regulation and law. Obviously, a number of the Right to Life movement members were ready to harm, even murder, people willing to perform abortions and still more of them were willing to coerce those seeking the procedure. On the left, during the Cold war there were American communists and Stalinists ready to undermine the American government by stealing military secrets and delivering them to operatives sworn to harm us.

The anger that impelled Eric Rudolph to set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympic Games is beyond my understanding. Just what had the governments of the United States done to develop such rage?

Clearly, the acts of terror perpetrated in New York, Arlington, Madrid, London, and elsewhere demonstrate that there are substantial numbers of disaffected people willing to make war on governments from outside of the framework of legitimacy. And many of these people are not from Islamic countries; indeed, many of the terrorists are home grown in the Western countries and some of them are at least nominally Christian.

The attack in Oklahoma City seems to have brought many – but nowhere near all - domestic whackos to their senses, and the militia movement that had been growing in the months prior to the attack proceeded to shrink precipitously as a result. But terrorists like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, can never be won over to something akin to American Civilization due to their mental state.

It is obvious, however, that even discounting the mentally ill, governments can never be universally loved; indeed they are not instituted for anything like that purpose. Trying to be as objective as possible, the United States and many of its Western allies have developed liberal and flexible systems designed as much as possible to let their citizens live and let live and to permit the pursuit of happiness, but some do not find the pursuit enough and get angry when things don’t go their way. President Garfield was shot by a fellow who didn’t get a job that he had been seeking, and we all know that you can’t hire everybody.

If the charges in the indictments handed down today in Miami are proven, it will demonstrate a danger to our system that is very difficult squelch – the copy catting of al Qaeda successes. A disaffected group of individuals coming together can magnify their problems and injuries and become a mad mob intent on destroying whatever institutions they perceive to have wronged them or their kind.

It is at moments like these when I become empathetic to President Bush and his underlings who are doing their level best to protect us from all manner of individuals and groups who want to harm us. But I’m also a civil libertarian who deplores the loss of individual freedom.

And naturally, it is clear that in his zeal to defend the nation, the president overcooked the intelligence on Iraq and made the greatest blunder of modern times by listening to Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon friends and attacking Iraq fully expecting to be absolved by uncovering great stocks of weapons of mass destruction. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men…

Our system of government and our personal freedoms are and will always be in danger, and the President must do all that is possible to defend our government and our persons and property from those who would harm them. But he must not become a tyrant in the process. The argument today centers not on what is being done but rather on the oversight of the executive by the Congress and the lack of restraints being imposed by the courts.

I’m not as paranoid as many of my friends about what the administration is doing in this area but want the checks and balances of the branches of government to be fully operative. I’m disappointed in the Republican majority in both houses for permitting the president to accrue more power than is warranted without proper oversight by the Congress and the courts.

Unless and until the other branches of government aggressively defend the roles assigned them under the Constitution, there will be great unhappiness with the Bush administration, indeed with the presidency itself. If the president has accrued too much power, it is because the other branches have failed in the performance of their duties.

We must have divided government if we are to check the executive in these perilous times.

Had enough? Vote Democratic!

Blog on!

Wild Bill