All hail the tyrant

With the Bush administration’s grasping for more and more power, its insistence on more and more secrecy, its refusal to abide by international or domestic law, we are, in my opinion, seeing the rise of real tyranny. And since Bush isn't the first tyrant who ever arose through history, it's had me wondering how the hell it happens, again and again and again.

Why do people love and support tyrants? Why do they cheer when their own freedom is taken away? Why do they get positively giddy at the notion of their home-grown tyrant suiting up for war and beating other nations into submission?

Why, with the rise of this particular tyrant, doesn't anybody in Congress seem to care very much that Guantanamo's prison is, by the Department of Defense's own estimates, half-filled with people who have never done a blessed thing to anybody?

Among those innocent prisoners are ordinary people who have hopes and dreams, just like ours. And these men may be imprisoned for nothing, NOTHING, for the rest of their lives.

Unlimited detention without charges, the innocent swept up with the guilty, it’s just the sort of thing we'd expect from an oppressive tyrannical regime. How can the U.S. Congress allow this to happen? How can anyone, left, right or middle, in a position of power, not be screaming, raging, demanding the freedom of those wrongly imprisoned?

But nope. Our senators and representatives just sit there with their tails between their legs. And occasionally, when they think it'll look good on their resumes, they make a noise that pollsters tell them will be well-received. And then, they roll over again.

The most obvious sign that a tyrant is rising is how muted and timid are the Congressional complaints against warrantless wiretaps and other spying on Americans. By ignoring the law written by the legislature and refusing to go through the courts, the president has said he is simply not accountable to the other branches of government. If for no other reason than the prospect of losing their own power as members of a co-equal branch of government, you would think that every single member of Congress would be demanding a special prosecutor. Why is it, instead, that so many are defending Bush’s decision to go around them and treat them as, essentially, irrelevant when laws they wrote get in the way of what he wants to do?

I saw some of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony. He looked as smug as Dubya himself. His attitude, when answering the U.S. Senators’ questions seemed to be, "fuck you, what are you going to do about it?" He was thumbing his nose at them -- at their constitutional power to legislate. And they, with very few exceptions, were letting him.