Activists arise

In case that you have not noticed, the Bush Administration sounds like a one tune organ. Their approach to Social Security reform, their flagship project for 2005, is exactly the same as their approach to the Iraq invasion.
First they claim an imminent danger. In the Iraq case it was the Weapons of Mass Destruction that were not there. Now it is the bankruptcy of the Social Security system (is 2042 imminent enough for you?).
Then they tout a solution that has nothing to do with the problem. Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with terrorism, and invading the country has done nothing but create new and this time real problems at immense cost in life and treasure. In the Social Security case the Private Accounts offered will do nothing to solve the purported problem but will cause a slew of new problems of its own. Like a couple of trillion dollars in new debt: the Baby tax.
This is typical of the Rove approach. When some policy is shown to not work, change the subject, shift the focus. Three card monte. You remember those nifty fingered guys on 42nd street in NYC, shifting around the aces or the pea under the cup to extract money from naïve passers-by? That is where the Republicans have learned their political skills.
The ideological roots of their policy are clear: invade Iraq to fulfill the neocons' imperial hubris, while enriching the corporations that have financed the Republican takeover, and gut Social Security to undo sixty years of successful Democratic citizen protection. Let us show the world that Big Government can do nothing right: let's eliminate the most blatantly successful income security ever devised. And this coming from an Administration that has enlarged Big Government beyond the dreams of the most extravagant bureaucrat, and incurred the largest yearly deficits of any Administration in history.
Do we have more and better security now than before 9/11? We do have more intrusion from Big Government and our civil liberties have been seriously curtailed. It is telling that, even under the new rules of the Patriot Act, vastly expanding the Government's powers of search and seizure, not one of the prosecutions of detained purported terrorists has been successful in proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
We the People must become increasingly active in showing the second Bush administration that in a democracy their ideological goals and uncivil methods are unacceptable and that we will not stand for them.