NO COURAGE

"We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply our host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal--known to armed and shown to be dangerous... Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down of waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?"

Lewis Lapham, in The Case for Impeachment in this month's Harper's.

Now, why couldn't John Kerry have said that as candidate for President? Why won't Hillary Clinton say it now? Or Harry Reid? The first (and last) time Reid called Bush a liar he spent an entire week backtracking, trying to explain his remarks. And then last month, after hitting the corrupt Republican party hard on the floor of the Senate on the Abramoff scandal, he returned two days later to grovel like a dog and beg for forgiveness from his colleagues for his 'indecorous' behavior. If you want a lack of decorum, consider George Bush's famous sixteen words in his infamous State of the Union speech as he and his fellow war criminals were in the process of lying and misleading this country into perhaps the single most damaging premeditated act in its history. He said this is war, which it is. What he didn't say, as he began to run roughshod over some of the most basic American values as exhibited at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo, is that this is war by the corporate/military interests against the interests' of the individual. When time is running out on America and the experiment in freedom and democracy is at its twilight,and when fascist elements are hoping to follow through and secure their legacy, this is hardly the time to get caught up on issues of style and decorum.

So, what is Harry Reid waiting for? Forget the 'deer caught in the headlights' look. This pretend leader is caught in the "sweating like someone tracked by a laser guided missle" look, who, after one negative word, is going to be blown to smithereens. He's scared to death, as are most of his colleagues, and unable to carry an honest message to American people, unable to state the case that Lapham makes. And when he does let out out an occasional outburst, it's more in the manner of Chicken Little than Martin Luther King. Sure, there's an occasional measure of moral outrage, but rarely is there any action. At this point he's neutralized himself, is damned either way and should step down for the good of everyone. With Sandra Day O'Connor, hardly your left-wing radical, now warning of a a dictatorship in the making., someone with some credibility has to take charge before the Bush junta does more damage from which we can ever expect to recover, if they haven't accomplished that already; someone to come forward who can speak with heart and intelligence to articulate what's happened to our country; someone who can hold these elected criminals responsible for all their crimes and then begin to repair the damage; someone who can act with the conviction set out by an early democrat, Andrew Jackson, who believed that "one man with courage can make a majority." Why that hasn't happened already is a mystery. Harry Reid should resign.