Ignore All Those Fools/They Don't Understand/We Make Our Own Rules

I think President Bush should now be considered the worst worstest president ever in the history of the US of A. Yesterday, he signed into law a bill that should make the Founding Fathers rise from their graves to tar and feather Dubya, as it is so antithetical to everything that our country represents.

Shame on you President Bush (and VP Cheney). And shame on us for not rising up in righteous fury to protest the suspension of habeas corpus for anyone jailed by our government. I don't care if you're a citizen or not, the laws of our nation should apply equally to everyone! And shame on us for allowing people--whether they are terrorists or not--to be tortured in our name!

Here are the ugly details from Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing in the Washington Post:

"President Bush this morning proudly signed into law a bill that critics consider one of the most un-American in the nation's long history.

The new law vaguely bans torture -- but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn't. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture."

Don't it make you proud to be an A-murican? And for God's sake, what has Bush done over the past six years that would make us want to trust him to decide who should be imprisoned and for how long--and if they should be tortured or not?

Here's what the ACLU has to say about this travesty:

"With his signature, President Bush enacts a law that is both unconstitutional and un-American. This president will be remembered as the one who undercut the hallmark of habeas in the name of the war on terror. Nothing separates America more from our enemies than our commitment to fairness and the rule of law, but the bill signed today is an historic break because it turns Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. facilities into legal no-man's-lands.

"The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."

With powers like this, isn't President Bush more like a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il--a leader unfettered by laws of man or decency? Should we now expect to address Dubya as Dear or Supreme Leader?

Osama's got to be proud. All he had to do was convince a bunch of crazies to slam a few airliners into a three (almost four) buildings and kill 3,000 Americans to convince Bush and Cheney to destroy everything that is sacred to us: our freedom, our values, our laws, and our Constitution.

Here's hoping that the Dems come back into power in Congress and reintroduce the concept of checks and balances into our government--and that the courts overturn this outrageous, revolting law.

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This post's title lyrics come from The Damned's "I Just Can't Be Happy Today," off of the brilliant "Machine Gun Etiquette" album.