Not just the one that the Bush administration has tried (and so far largely failed) to create, but another one: “Caracas rallies over TV closure.”
Revealing Quotes:
Pro-Chavez supporters held a party outside the ministry of communication, celebrating the end of the station’s national reach.
“I agree with what’s happening,” one woman told the BBC. “We have to support our president. They went too far and they showed him no respect. It was too much.”
And, from the mouth of the dictator himself
“That television station became a threat to the country so I decided not to renew the licence because it’s my responsibility,” Mr Chavez was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
Your last few posts where you accuse Bush of trying to set up some sort of facist state sound deranged.
It would be deranged to come to any other conclusion.
The most shocking element of the Bush administration’s war on liberty was the attempt to suspend the writ of habeus corpus. That is really, really disturbing. Here’s a helpful interview with Bruce Fein on the topic:
http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/brucefein_civillibertiesinthewaronterror_20070525.mp3
Note that the courts have slapped down the administration on a number of its worst efforts. But that was despite their insistence that the courts had no jurisdiction! Had the administration gotten its way, the system of checks and balances would have been eliminated in the name of a forceful executive that is, allegedly, necessary to wage permanent war. That is a recipe for a police state. Thank God those attempts have been (at least substantially) rebuffed.
Addendum: The attempt to get around the judiciary with regards to Guantanamo is also shocking. Indeed, there is a long list of shocking elements of the Bush approach to the rule of law, which is that it is entirely dispensable.
One more clarification. I have never intimated that the US is headed toward “some sort of facist state.” There are no jack-booted, goose-stepping storm troopers on the horizon. But we have seen attempts, largely rebuffed, to effectively eliminate the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances that characterize the American constitutional system through attempts to centralize all decision-making powers in the person of the president. That is certainly a step toward dictatorship, in which all power rests in the hands of one person — the power to arrest and detain indefinitely without charge, for example, and the power to deny the courts any jurisdiction, to flout treaty obligations, and so on. That is positively un-American, if I may indulge in a bit of old-fashioned language.
(And let’s set aside the explosion in federal spending under this Republican President, undertaken with the active collaboration of the previous Republican Congress. Where is there any remaining commitment, in contrast to insincere lip-service, to the principles of limited government?)
The title of this post is “New American Dictatorship” and you wrote “not just the one that the Bush administration has tried.” Did you mean communist dictator instead of facist?
I am unaware that unlawful combatants captured on foreign fields of battle are guaranteed habeus corpus by the constitution. In fact, I think they should have been hung by their necks a long time ago.
The attempted suspension of the writ of habeus corpus was not for unlawful combatants captured on foreign fields, but for Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in the U.S.