Government Secrets - Chaos

Our government has secrets, always has had and in a real world should have some. It is in the nature of government to have some secrets, nobody would advocate wide dissemination of the design specifics of a hydrogen bomb. We understand that and get along with it. This administration has taken that understanding to greater lengths than any previous one.

There are times it has worked to the government's advantage in the legal arena, see Chuck for... to see how this worked for kidnapping and torturing the wrong person in the Supreme Court. The government should be able to wiretap because it says so, it's secret so you can't know why or even how much, just 'cause. Habeas Corpus gets to go away because, well it's secret, because the government asserts it is in its interest while saving us from those secret threats. A Portland lawyer wrongfully accused cannot have back his own documents because they are secret. A report on Iraqi government corruption compiled by the State Department is secret at the same time the administration is asking for hundreds of billions of dollars for Iraq. It certainly cannot be public, it would embarrass our government or maybe the corrupt Iraqis. We're headed down a rabbit hole here folks and the outcomes are all bad.

Laws are passed affecting our civil liberties without review, citizens can be disappeared, crimes cannot be defended against, the government engages in policies nationally and globally that we are responsible for and yet know nothing of. It gets deeper and deeper, the President asserts the authority to ignore or enforce laws in secret at his discretion. No one is allowed to know what the government is up to, you're allowed platitudes and "trust me."

So, we come to a certain pass that we should never have come close to, your vote is meaningless, your rights are meaningless, all that matters is what the Executive branch wants. That means that what exists is force. Reason and compromise are without import, the interests of the government are protected and projected through force and the countervening forces of legislation and judicial review are abrogated, so the citizen's interests are only protected by whatever level of force they are willing to avail themselves of.

Does anybody in the Executive Branch stop to think about anything at all? Are they so divorced from reality that they do not understand that the limiting of options reduces action to its simplest forms? Democracy is a very complicated and somewhat delicate system, it operates through compromise achieved through informed debate, if you short circuit that process you stop it. If you remove information from the scheme debate becomes nothing but partisan power seeking and the public's interests vanish from the process. Why should any citizen consider himself represented? Why should any citizen consider themselves safe around their government? The rabbit hole is not where we want to be, we cannot go there without chaos ensuing at the very simplest point, the only reasonable approach for a citizen is to be armed and dangerous at all times in any contact with the government. What is that? The only possible redress from the government is revenge taken through force?

If someone proposed to set you on such a course you'd consider them lunatics and have them locked away for the protection of them and others. Is it incremental stupidity that afflicts them or an actual agenda? These people have to go and all their enablers with them. I include the Democratic Party weasels who cave to every BushCo whim. It is that, or chaos.