All Those Little Liberties? Yeah, They’re Still Mine, President Bush

I thought when President Obama was elected, we would finally be able to rid ourselves of President Bush. He would go off into hiding and President Obama could make his attempts at fixing the economy, ending the two wars we’re in, and creating all the programs he wanted. We had our eight years of President Bush’s bizarre policies and I was ready to see things change – because that’s change we can believe in.

Who was I to think that we could actually have that?

As one editorial put it so wonderfully when it said, “we were horrified to be reminded that the nation still has not plumbed the depths of the Bush administration’s abuses.” Despite the fact that President Bush is no longer in office, we are still dealing with the things that he did while he was in office. We’re not talking the wars and the screwed up economy; we’re talking the fact that he took advantage of loopholes so that he could abuse both our rights and the rights of others.

First, there’s the 92 video tapes that the C.I.A. admitted to destroying in the two years after 9/11. These tapes, while currently no one has confessed to knowing anything about, could contain vivid documentation of the types of torture that they used.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that President Bush found ways to deploy the military in the United States, directly contradicting the Posse Comitatus Act, by saying it’s for “anti-terrorist operations.” In the same note given to President Bush saying that, it also included the way in which we could be denied our First Amendment rights.

The President of the United States now had the capability to suspend the very first amendment we created? We the People of the United States…It doesn’t read, We the People of the Land of President Bush, all Mighty Tyrant Who is Controlled by Puppet Master Dick Cheney. Yet, in his mind, he felt that it was alright to come in and seize our civil liberties. It didn’t happen all at once, but it did happen. Slowly.

Can someone tell me why we let this guy do these things for eight long, bloody years?

The ten amendments were created to ensure that the people of this country were protected from the tyranny of government. For quite a while, it worked. Every once in a while, someone would come along and do a bit of damage, but overall, it worked quite well. We’re still here, aren’t we? I’m still allowed to write this, aren’t I?

Then comes President Bush. Never before have I seen a President so blatantly screw with our freedoms. Within the first year of being President, he signed the USA PATRIOT Act. Now the government could eavesdrop on us. Not only were they going to eavesdrop on us, though, but they were going to eavesdrop on our soldiers too. That’s classy, isn’t it? Spy on the same men and women who are fighting your “War for God,” President Bush.

I’m not the kind of guy to hold a grudge, I’m really not. However, when I look at these reports that are coming out, I see that President Bush was a President that held little regard for the common America or the common man, for that matter. Torture was not something he was above. Trying to take away our rights was not something he was above. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to try and get him arrested and tried like some people are suggesting; however, it would be nice to know exactly how much he did try to do.

Our civil liberties are there to protect us. We elect a President to act as the executive voice of the country. We do not elect someone to come in and try to take us over. Fortunately, Guantanamo Bay is now closed and we have a President who, while he loves to spend money, is becoming increasingly transparent. Perhaps that’s change we can believe in.