flag day

Flag day. Day after the Supremes issued a third rebuke to the administration (I can’t even write his name) about the habeas situation at Guantánamo. Of course the troubling thing about the decision was that it was 5-4. Just one more justice and we’d be sending people to jail for thinking bad things about the government. The tipping point is ever so much more precarious now than ever. We’ve got to get these guys out of office. They have made incompetence a professional virtue. They have politicized every level of government – particularly and especially those management and professional levels that used to actually do the work. Agencies that used to manage the everyday goings on of policy making and enforcing are now bloated with ideologues. I doubt the damage this administration has done can be undone in my lifetime.

I remember an episode of The West Wing where a reporter (I think) refused to stand when the president entered the room because she did not agree with or respect his policies. He rebuked her strongly saying, that although she certainly had the right to disagree, she did not have the right to disrespect the office of president. “You stand for the office.”

If that man entered a room I was in, I might be able to stand for the office. I think I could. But I could never respect him. How could I even remain in the room with him? What would I say were I in a position where I had to speak with him. I have nothing but contempt for him. He’s a war criminal. He’s plundered his own government. He took us into a war in a fashion so irresponsible it could be a farce if it weren’t so serious. He’s so far worse than the “drunken frat boy drives country into ditch” stuff we said about him in his first year. Before 9/11 made him into a war president. I’m not sure I could keep from spitting on him. It would be a test of all the grace I could summon just to say an innocuous hello.

We got Nixon and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then we got Reagan and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then the Bush continuation, the man hardly had a personality. During the Clinton years it felt as though the person who’d been hitting me with the stick for 12 years had finally stopped. And now this. Not even elected. A stolen election, in a state run by his brother and a woman who had not even a passing acquaintance with the law, lost the popular vote, did it again the next election. The extent of the damage, the trashing of civility, policy, and practice so far reaching, it’s hard to begin comprehending its enormity. The puppetmasters making plans since the Nixon administration let presidential powers slip have finally had their triumph. We are a country gutted.

So flag day. Is there a glimmer of hope for us to halt the slide this November? One small possibility we can prevent the court from tipping for the next forty years into indecency, return reason to policy and remove politics from pragmatics? A chance?