(Remarks by C. Colvin as prepared)
Thank you for that kind introduction.
Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, addressed the New York Conservative Party on June 22, 2005. What he said in his speech was fundamentally wrong - not only in fact, but in paradigm. Mr. Rove, a textbook neoconservative, has twisted the fundamental assumptions of American politics. Words like "liberal" and "conservative" have entirely different meanings to Mr. Rove than they do to you and me.
I grew up in a world where liberals believed that the power of the government should be used to correct social injustice. Contrariwise, in the words of former President Reagan, "Conservatism is a desire for less governmental interference, or less centralized authority." Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for the late President, wrote "Reagan... believed that government out of control is the main threat to individual freedom in the modern world." Conservatives believed it was the role of society, not government, to correct social ills. Government control was a problem, not a solution; the government does not have the authority to (for instance) invade people's privacy.
"Government out of control" was a problem in the Soviet Union. The government controlled everything - businesses, unions, politics, etc. People were not allowed to protest government decisions made without their input, yet they were forced to attend parades on holidays in the name of patriotism.
Karl Rove spoke to the Conservative Party as one conservative to another. But Rove is not a conservative, who believes in limited government. He is a neoconservative, who believes in the absolute authority of the executive.
Should the government be allowed to regulate who is allowed to marry whom? According to conservatives like Ronald Reagan, the answer is no: for that is no business of the government. But according to neoconservatives like Rove, the answer is yes. The idea of mixed race couples is so abhorrent to some that the government must step in to prevent it from happening, anywhere. My apologies, I meant same sex couples; I was in the wrong decade there for a moment.
Should the government be allowed to search your home or your records with a secret warrant, without reason to suspect you of a crime? It happened all the time in the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan believed no: the government cannot invade a person's privacy without a reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. It's called due process; it means suspects are innocent until proven guilty. But according to neoconservatives like Rove, the government can do exactly that, under the so-called PATRIOT Act. The government can even arrest an American citizen on the streets of Chicago - such as ex-convict Jose Padilla - and imprison them forever, without charge, counsel or trial.
Should there be any limitations on the power of the President? Conservatives like John McCain believe that there should be. He believes in senators' use of the filibuster. He believes that a 60% majority, not a 51% majority, should have to agree on lifetime appointments of judges. But neoconservatives like Karl Rove don't like that. The President should get whatever he wants, Rove thinks, with Congress acting as a mere rubber stamp.
That is what the neoconservatives believe - in the absolute power of the President to decide who can be imprisoned indefinitely without due process, in the complete authority of the President to decide who can marry whom, and in the unquestionable role of the President to appoint whomever he likes as judges, without anyone second-guessing him. It is the role of one man - the President - to decide what medical decisions are ethical and which are not.
"You provide much of the energy and activism and hard work," Rove told the Conservative Party, "that has brought us to a moment when conservatism is the dominant political creed in America - and when we are making progress on so many important issues."
Conservatism may be the will of a majority of voters at this time. I believe that this nation's conservatives believe as President Reagan did - that the government does not have any business spying on you or telling you who to marry. But this is not what Mr. Rove believes. He does not believe in the principle of small government any more than Joseph Stalin believed in the empowerment of the working class. Rove is a neoconservative in conservative's clothing - and it is the subordination of the conservative agenda to the neocon agenda that has placed our country in the precarious position we are in today.
"What is significant about November's victory is not simply that the President won, but how he won," Rove told the Conservatives. "The President persistently made the case for an 'ownership society;' championed a culture of life; defended the institution of marriage; stood with the people of Iraq in their passage to liberty; remained committed to spreading democracy in the Middle East; and continued to aggressively wage and win the war on global terrorism."
In November 2004, Bush received 51% of the vote. 49% of the electorate wanted a different President. That 49% minority didn't believe championing a culture of life meant sacrificing almost two thousand of our soldiers invading another country. We didn't believe that a culture of life would exaggerate another country's arsenal out of any recognizable proportion, then invade that country, kill tens of thousands of its people, and finally concede that the other nation had never posed any kind of threat. We believe that defending the institution of marriage means that couples should make their marriage decisions without the President stepping in and telling them he's decided they're wrong. We didn't believe that bombing Iraq would turn it into a democracy, or that killing tens of thousands of Iraqis was the way to bring freedom to their country. We didn't agree when the President had legal opinions written making our anti-torture laws ambiguous. We don't think marginalizing the war in Afghanistan - base of the terrorists that attacked us on September 11th - and then invading a country that had nothing to do with it was the way to win a war against terrorism. President Bush and Mr. Rove knew that Al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime were enemies, and even though Wesley Clark, Brent Scowcroft, and others warned them that attacking Iraq would backfire, they did it anyway. Now Iraq is a terrorist threat when it wasn't before.
America is not a greedy, hypocritical, or immoral country - but the war in Iraq is all those things, and has helped Al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda enormously. That is not the way to fight terrorism.
"President Bush received more votes than any other candidate in American history," Mr. Rove pointed out. Technically, that's true - but the silver medal went to John Kerry, who also received more votes than did any of the 42 men who became President in previous elections.
Mr. Rove did not touch on the disenfranchisement of thousands of African American Democrats in Ohio. According to BBC journalist Greg Palast, the exit polls showed that Kerry had won in Ohio - but because a few thousand ballots from primarily African-American districts were not counted, the state's electoral votes were given to Bush. The person in charge of counting the votes accurately was J. Kenneth Blackwell, chairman of the Bush campaign. Similar things took place in Florida and New Mexico. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how George W. Bush won. According to the BBC, John Kerry should be President today.
"As all of you know," Rove told the Conservatives, "President Bush is making a powerful case for spreading human liberty and defending human dignity." But he is not. He is attacking liberty at home. He has sent the FBI to investigate, infiltrate and harass peaceful anti-war protests. He intervened in the Schiavo family's personal medical decisions. He is indifferent to liberty abroad, for he has looked the other way as our allies Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan torture people imprisoned there. He has closed his eyes to brutality and abuses by the new Iraqi government. And as I alluded earlier, he has disparaged the principle of human dignity by agreeing to legal opinions that justify torture. Likewise, he has denied due process to nearly all of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
"President Bush," Rove extolled, "...is committed to something no past President has ever attempted: spreading liberty to the broader Middle East." But Bush's actions have pushed that goal farther away. American troops torturing Iraqis does not bring liberty to the Middle East. Instead, it means that Iraqis, who once admired the United States, now hate us. Bush has stood by and watched as the new Iraqi government - our ally - tortures its own people. Some of Saddam Hussein's old torturers are now back on the job. Bush's vision of liberty, as carried out while Paul Bremer was heading the coalition government there, meant that American firms took over Iraqi banks and oil companies. It meant that Halliburton could bring in foreign contractors to work on reconstruction projects as local unemployment neared fifty percent.
"President Bush's eventual goal," Rove continued, "is the triumph of freedom and the end of tyranny in our world." But that isn't true either. For what is tyranny? According to dictionary.com, tyranny is a "government in which a single ruler is vested with absolute power." It is in the pursuit of absolute power that the Bush Administration has sought to abolish the Senate's use of the filibuster, so that Congress will simply rubber-stamp anything the President wants. It is in the pursuit of such power that the President can use the so-called PATRIOT Act to spy on Americans without due process. Only a tyrant - a chief executive with unchecked power - could arrest and imprison anyone he likes, without due process. Proof, charge, counsel, trial, judge, jury, appeal - none of those exist if you are deemed an "enemy combatant." This is in direct contradiction to the conservative ideal of limited government. The neoconservative creed - put into words at the website newamericancentury.org - is "the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." The absolute power of the executive is the natural outgrowth of this idea. The neoconservatives want an all-powerful American military, led by an all-powerful President.
Rove claims: "We are seeing unprecedented progress when it comes to spreading liberty in the Middle East." He is wrong. Yes, there have been elections in Afghanistan and Iraq - but the Afghan elections were marred by allegations of fraud. Iraq's elections were an important milestone, but with thousands of Iraqis afraid to leave their homes for fear of snipers or kidnappers, the situation there can hardly be called liberty. And of the nations in the Middle East, only two - Turkey and Israel - are functioning democracies. Indeed, two of our allies - Pakistan and Uzbekistan - are dictatorships. Saudi Arabia, another close ally, is an absolute monarchy.
Rove said, "This confidence in the power of liberty is anchored in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the arguments of President Lincoln, and the policies of President Reagan and President Bush." Rove says that he agrees, and that Bush agrees, with the principles of Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan. But we've already seen how the neoconservative pursuit of absolute power is diametrically at odds with Reagan's view of the role of government.
Rove's great duplicity is to equate the principles of Bush with the principles of Jefferson. Bush has relentlessly claimed absolute power. When the Constitution was inconvenient to him, he ignored it by executive order, as he did when giving tax dollars to religious charities. He subverted it by laws rammed through Congress, as happened with the so-called PATRIOT Act. And he scorned it with the torture memos, starting a debate in this country as to how much abuse actually constitutes torture, all the while brushing aside the Bill of Rights that bans all "cruel and unusual punishments."
The words of the Declaration of Independence do not support these policies of President Bush. For instance, the charges brought against George III included the following: "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power." For his part, Bush has established a prison at Guantanamo Bay, a military prison where the inmates are neither criminals nor prisoners of war, and thus are theoretically beyond the reach of any law. Jefferson also charged George III with "depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury." Sound familiar? Jefferson had words for such a ruler: "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
Lincoln, too - the first Republican President - would be appalled at the powers Rove claims for the Chief Executive. "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation," Lincoln wrote, "whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion. . . and you allow him to make war at his pleasure. . . How could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of [an enemy invasion],' but he will say to you, 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.'"
Rove continued, "To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools." Now, I thought that conservatives believed that education was the domain of the states, not of the Federal government. Putting that debate aside for the moment, let me show how the neocons have brought the highest standards to our schools.
A few months ago I met a gentleman who has a friend in Texas. This friend has a son who is semi-retarded, but is able to attend public school along with others of his age group. However, when it comes time for testing, the Texan father receives a letter from the school. It tells him to keep his son home during testing week - or else the school would average poorly on the tests, be deemed "failing," and lose their funding.
As you can imagine, my eyes bugged out when I heard this story. My friend looked at me solemnly. "He showed me the letters," he said.
Sounds like the No Child Left Behind Act is leaving a lot of children behind. It is in favor of this strategy that the Bush Administration has discarded programs like Upward Bound, that have a proven history of success.
Is that what conservatives believe in? Bringing Rove's high standards by telling some students to stay home? This is the neoconservative quick fix, to undermine education in the name of strengthening it.
Rove went on: the President "...signed legislation that insists on testing, high standards, and accountability in our schools..." To below average students, that means: stay home during testing, or else the school won't be able to meet the high standards and will be held accountable. We need to make sure all the schools and all the students have the resources they need, and the so-called No Child Left Behind Act simply does not do that.
Rove claimed, "We are putting government on the side of reform and progress, modernization and greater freedom, more personal choice and greater prosperity." Reforms that leave more children behind in the name of leaving no children behind; progress that would protect the flag but subvert the Constitution; "more personal choice," as long as the person you choose to marry is someone the President approves.
"The great goal of modern-day conservatism," Rove said, "is to make our society more prosperous and more just." Rove's words are correct: conservatism does want to make society more just by limiting government power and by standing up for everyone's right to live their lives in peace, without the government interfering in our private lives. Neoconservatism, as embodied in Bush's economic policies, means if you're a billionaire, you don't have to pay as high a percentage of your income in taxes as the rest of us. This is not just, and the state of the economy shows that it does not bring prosperity.
Rove continued: "Conservatives have long known that political liberty depends on a healthy social and moral order." He goes on to say that President Bush "is building a culture of life and upholding the dignity of the human person..." We've seen what Bush's culture of life is. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused tens of thousands of deaths. One can argue that the Iraqi people are better off than they were under Saddam; but this is to brush aside the fundamental fact that since the invasion, the blood of the dead Iraqis is on our hands. This was a war of choice: Saddam had no ties to terrorists and no weapons of mass destruction. He was a dwindling danger, while North Korea and Iran are rising threats. We started a second war when we were already at war with Al-Qaeda. Because we started this second war, we are in grave danger of losing both.
We've seen George W. Bush's stance on human dignity in the torture memos. Alberto Gonzales wrote some of those memos, but despite that, the Senate confirmed him to be Attorney General of the United States. Torture is the gravest assault on human dignity. What did Bush and Gonzales think? That they could safely decide, in the clean surroundings of the White House, that some forms of torture are acceptable? But even though they wrote those memos, no soldiers within the walls of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo would ever actually act on what those memos declared legal? Is this what Americans consider a "healthy social and moral order?"
Rove said: the President "has provided unprecedented support for religious charities that provide a safety net of mercy and compassion." He is proud of this, even though Bush's donating tax money to these charities is illegal under the First Amendment. We should all support faith-based charities, but for the government to pick and choose which churches should get our tax dollars is unfair to all the churches that don't.
Before 2000, being a conservative meant that you can spend your money as you see fit; being a liberal meant the government will spend your money as it sees fit. By those standards, Bush and Rove are liberals, because they believe in taking your tax dollars and giving them to religious charities. They don't think that we can make those decisions on our own. They have to do it for us.
Rove explained: "President Bush supports the protection of traditional marriage against activist judges." That slogan - "protection of marriage" - is just a veil for bigotry. I'm happily married to my wife. In what way is my marriage threatened by some other couple getting married? If the President really wants to protect my marriage, he could abolish the IRS marriage penalty. But that's not one of his priorities.
Here's what happened. When I got married, I was moved into a different income bracket on my tax forms, and had to pay more taxes - just because I checked the "married" box. It would have saved my wife and I money on our taxes had we stayed single! This penalty is being phased out, as it should be. However, the President's tax cuts for the richest one percent of Americans took effect at once. They weren't phased out. And guess what? We now have the largest deficits in history.
"We want few regulations; they want more," Rove maintained. He is pretending to be a conservative who thinks we should have less government interference in our private lives. But he's really a neoconservative, who believes that the Federal government should regulate marriages.
Rove explained the President's motivations. "President Bush supports these things because he believes they will lead to a society that is more compassionate and decent, stronger and better." That sounds Orwellian: a No Child Left Behind Act that leaves below average students behind. Compassion means an Attorney General who has written that it's all right to torture prisoners so long as you don't call it torture. Decency means saying that only people like me are allowed to get married. Stronger means we can fight more unnecessary wars.
Rove said, "We are attempting to spread liberty abroad...." But that statement isn't true either. Neoconservatism believes in liberty, so long as it doesn't get in the way of the President's absolute power.
Rove went on to say: "Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes." Notice that he doesn't say what neoconservatives believe in: the largest government in our nation's history. But since they need the traditional conservatives on their side, they seduce them with the appearance of lower taxes, thus creating the biggest deficits in our country's history.
Do liberals believe in higher taxes? Maybe some of them do. But I'm a centrist, along the lines of the Clinton-Gore Administration. I believe in fair taxes. Not high, not low, but fair. I believe that the government should govern only as much as absolutely necessary. As the Declaration of Independence says, we have established a government to protect our rights, and to maintain that government it's only reasonable that we should all pay our fair share.
Rove claimed, "We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government." "We?" Since Bush came to power, we now have the largest and most powerful government in the history of our nation - after it was actually starting to shrink during the Clinton-Gore years. Rove's neoconservative ideology long ago betrayed the principle of small government. After all, how can an all-powerful executive reign with a small government?
Rove declared: "...The most important difference between conservatives and liberals, can be found in the area of national security." Not only is Rove's philosophy invalid, he got his facts wrong. He claimed that "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
But Rove was lying. Once it was determined that the murderers had been Al-Qaeda terrorists, 80% of liberals believed that war with the Taliban was the right decision.
Rove's neoconservatism reveals itself to be dangerously akin to fascism. The propaganda of Mussolini and Franco said: "There is an enemy in our midst. We must hate and fear them, and we must give up our freedoms to save our lives." But there has to be an enemy. Bush called terrorists our enemies, and he was right. Now Rove calls liberals our enemies, and he is wrong.
Rove continued. "In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban. In the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be to 'use moderation and restraint in responding to the... terrorist attacks against the United States.'"
No, he was not joking: he was lying. Bush masqueraded as a "compassionate conservative" during his 2000 Presidential campaign. But as soon as he came to power, he showed his true colors. He's a reactionary, who thinks that Church and State should not be separate, who thinks that the restrictions against arsenic in our drinking water are too stringent, and thinks that arms-control treaties belong to the past. Because of this, I opposed the Bush Administration from the start.
But I never heard of any petition calling for moderation and restraint after the September 11th attacks. It turns out that such a petition was circulated, but not by MoveOn.org.
Rove droned on: "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt as I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the earth; a side of the Pentagon destroyed; and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."
September 11th, September 11th , September 11th. This is the propaganda of the fascist. "You have deadly enemies to fear. The price of your safety is your liberty."
Rove claimed: "Moderation and restraint is not what I felt - and moderation and restraint is not what was called for. It was a moment to summon our national will - and to brandish steel."
It turns out that moderation and restraint were pretty good ideas at the time. Before going to war, we had to figure out who had attacked us. According to Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War
But Bush did help Bin Laden in another way. A year and a half later, he invaded Iraq. This gave Bin Laden exactly what he wanted: propaganda fuel. The unprovoked war in Iraq has convinced millions of Muslims across the world that the United States is in the wrong - something the September 11th attacks did not accomplish. Bush then refused to take responsibility when some of our soldiers tortured the people the were supposed to be liberating. People like Bin Laden can now point to the pictures at Abu Ghraib and say, look, we were right to attack the United States! Bush has played right into Bin Laden's hands.
Back to "brandishing steel." Rove maintained: "MoveOn.Org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean may not have agreed with this, but the American people did."
Agreed with what - waging war with Muslims that had nothing to do with 9/11? The American people did not want that and do not want that. The only reason so many of us went along with the war in Iraq is because George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and their colleagues in the Administration went out of their way to imply that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the September 11th attacks - even though Al-Qaeda was actively trying to overthrow Saddam's regime by arming Kurdish rebels. I can't speak for Moore or Dean, but I am an anti-war protester. I supported the war in Afghanistan, but I protested the war in Iraq. The prevailing mood of the protesters is this: we think the best way to fight terrorists is to fight terrorists - not start another war with a country that had nothing to do with it.
Rove alleged: "Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies."
Rove is supposedly a historian, but somehow he has missed the lessons of history, and believes brute force is the solution to every problem. But all Americans, liberal and conservative, must work together to win the battle against terrorists. Why is this necessary? Because we must understand our enemies in order to defeat them. We are not fighting just on battlefields, but also with ideas. Bush and Rove do not understand ideas. If they did, they would have realized that attacking Iraq was just what Bin Laden wanted us to do. Because of the war in Iraq, more and more Muslims worldwide are beginning to believe that America is at war with Muslims, not terrorists. This is what Bin Laden wants, because when Muslims hate the United States, more soldiers come flocking to his banner.
Or maybe Bush and Rove do understand Bin Laden's propaganda, and they have no problem with pouring gasoline on the fire. In time of war, people are more inclined to give up their liberties to a powerful President in order to win. And if the war continues indefinitely, the President will be able to take on more and more power, until his power is absolute. And that is neoconservatism: the modern lust for absolute power. The neocons believe in spreading American power abroad while subverting American values at home.
Rove lambasted his liberal enemy. "Conservatives see the United States as a great nation engaged in a noble cause; liberals see the United States and they see ... Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia." But, thanks to Bush, we are both. America is the greatest nation, and we are engaged in a noble cause. But it was Bush and his people who drew up the torture memos and built a prison at Guantanamo Bay. It was Bush and Rove who dreamed up phony reasons to attack Iraq. They then feigned innocence when seeing photographs of Iraqi civilians tortured at Abu Ghraib, some 90% of whom had been arrested by mistake. I do not look at the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore and see gulags. I do see a gulag when I look at Guantanamo Bay, because that is exactly what Bush built. Patriotism is loving our country and our values. Patriotism does not include closing our eyes to our mistakes. Patriotism means standing up to the President when he is wrong.
Then came the best part of Rove's speech. "Has there been a more revealing moment this year," Rove related, "than when Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans had done to prisoners in our control at Guantanamo Bay with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot - three of the most brutal and malevolent figures in the 20th century? Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
I have read story after story about what is going on at Guantanamo Bay, and some of the things turn my stomach. And I guarantee you, I am not the only person who has seen those images on 60 Minutes and read those articles in the papers. Dick Cheney says he's offended that Amnesty International would use the word "gulag" to describe Guantanamo Bay; but when Amnesty International says that there are human rights violations, people listen. If Cheney and Rove are offended by gulags, then their Administration should not have built one. And although Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both called for the Guantanamo prison to be closed, the Bush Administration has hired Halliburton to build a new prison there, for $30 million.
But that isn't the worst part. What Durbin actually said was that chaining prisoners to the floor for hours on end, not letting them eat, drink or relieve themselves, was un-American. That's the kind of thing that dictators do, Durbin said, and he went on to say that such things have no place in an American prison.
But according to Rove, the torture itself wasn't the problem. It was Durbin's criticism that endangered our troops. It was Durbin protesting this abusive treatment that was so deadly. If Al-Jazeera actually did broadcast Durbin's speech - no American networks did - I hope they showed it for what it was, an American senator standing up to protest torture. But according to Rove, this protest is what emperils our soldiers - not the torture itself.
What really endangers our troops boils down to one thing: greed. Greed for absolute and unquestioned power; greed for another country's oil. Greed made Bush and Rove shamelessly exploit the tragedy of September 11th in order to justify invading Iraq, a war that Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Richard Perle had called for as far back as January 1998. They linked Iraq and September 11th in speech after speech, even though Iraq had had nothing to do with international terrorism for twelve years. They still claim that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror. But the truth is, even if Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction, he would certainly never have given them to people who wanted to kill him. After the September 11th attacks, world opinion was overwhelmingly on our side. We received so many offers of help we didn't know what to do with them all. But attacking Iraq - a war against a defeated foe that had not and could not threaten us - has galvanized world opinion against us. And Bush claims that the war in Iraq has somehow made us safer.
But the war in Iraq is only part of the neoconservatives' dream. The greed for absolute power brought about the torture memos and the PATRIOT Act. The desire for total authority compelled John Ashcroft to send the FBI to harass anti-war protesters. Trent Lott's insistence that no one question the President was the first step on the path that denied suspects in American custody the right to due process.
All-in-all, the Bush Administration has violated nine out of ten articles of the Bill of Rights. They have ruthlessly exploited the deaths on September 11th, using the tragedy to justify sending over 1700 of our soldiers to their deaths in a needless war against a country that had nothing to do with it. This dishonors the memory of the people killed that day.
Karl Rove said that criticizing the torture memos endangers our troops. But freedom from torture is not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. It is a human right. Rove said that anyone who opposes torture is a traitor. He said all liberals endanger our troops. Thus, the 49% of the electorate who voted against George W. Bush are all traitors. Remember the fascist's mendacity? "There are traitors in your midst, and you must give up your liberties in exchange for safety." No more needs to be said about the motives of neoconservatives.
Rove concluded his tirade by saying "We" - we the Conservatives, even though he has betrayed conservatism in the quest for absolutism. "We have been given the opportunity to govern; now we have to show we deserve the trust of our fellow citizens." But who gave the neocons governmental power? The Supreme Court did, in a 5 to 4 decision halting the recount in Florida and accepting the flawed 537 vote margin awarding those electoral votes to Bush. Those five justices misused their power to override the electoral process, because two of them had family members working for the Bush campaign.
How have the neocons used their governmental power? They started with a conclusion - that Iraq was a danger - and then looked for intelligence to justify their conclusion. That was putting the cart before the horse. Today, over 130,000 of our soldiers are in Iraq putting their lives on the line for the Bush Administration's irresponsibility.
How else has the Bush Administration has used governmental power? They have curtailed freedom of assembly and the right to privacy; they have ignored due process for those arrested. I can think of many words for a leader who does these things, and 'trustworthy' is not one of them.
In the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, the Marquis de Lafayette wrote, "A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all." In the Soviet Union, the laws were a sham. There were laws on the books protecting freedom of speech, for instance, but those laws were never enforced. That is the neoconservative vision for America: an all-powerful President, emperor in all but name, who answers to no one, and uses our nation's military might to impose his will upon the rest of the world. Our Constitution established three branches of government, set up the separation of powers, and placed limits on the executive's authority. But Bush and Rove don't want you to read the Constitution. They don't want you to remember that government exists to protect your liberty.
There is a force more powerful than the strongest tyrant. That force is freedom. William Faulkner wrote: "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." The time has come for each of us to stand up and claim our freedom. Why should we care what Bush does in Iraq? Why should we care when Karl Rove equates conservatives with absolutists and liberals with traitors? Because as Martin Luther King, junior, wrote: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." We cannot turn a blind eye to what our leaders do abroad, content to call ourselves free at home while our leaders torture and bomb in our name.
A great conservative once said, "History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." The power of freedom is yours. Use it. Write your members of Congress and demand that Karl Rove be fired. Demand that Bush and Cheney be impeached and removed from office. God gave you liberty, but it is your choice how to use it.
Thank you, and may God bless America.
This is a personal essay by C. Colvin.