What Would Happen?

I've been thinking a lot recently about the power grabs, or the grabs for continuing power, on the part of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, and about Dick Cheney's black heart, so secretly located no one knows where it is.


I wonder: What if BushCo canceled the election in 2008? I know the election is a year away, and it's frustrating to me to see so many Senators not doing their jobs because they are running for president. It's also hard for me to tell who's going to wind up with the nomination, but I'm still not used to seeing so many contenders, either.


All of that could go away if Bush declared himself President for The Course of the War on Terror, which in its Orwellian way is endless.


Would college students stare down the National Guard? Would lawyers smash police cars? Would fourth grade teachers sing Three Ring Government in their classrooms? What about a general strike? Would just the usual cities host mass marches, or would there be protest in the smaller communities in both blue and red states?


Would people just put their heads down and pay the mortgage, the power bill, the credit card balances?

Trust

Gerald Ford died earlier this week. I was too young to have a polittical conciousness when he was president (my first political memory, in fact, is voting for John Anderson in my school's election in 1980) but I've always known who he was in relation to Richard Nixon.

I've been listening to NPR most of most weekdays for months now, "All Things Considered" and "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," among other programs I really like, such as "Fresh Air," "The World," and "Marketplace." I find myself pretty attached to Jim Lehrer's voice, though I like Ray Suarez and Margaret Warner as well, who seem to have been doing a lot of the anchoring recently (well, Jim's 72, he can take as many breaks as he likes). The News Hour had excellent coverage on Ford and Nixon and Watergate.

Everything that I heard - I believe it was Wednesday - sounded like President Ford was a decent man. Over and over it was said that he was honest and straightforward, forthright, and courageous, and that with him the "imperial presidency" of Nixon was over. Many of the things said on both programs were sort of compare/contrast essays about Ford's and Nixon's administrations.

When I heard all this, I thought, "When they're describing what Ford wasn't, they are describing what Nixon was, and that sounds a lot like the current administration." "Secretive," "imperial presidency," "evasive" (though I have never heard Nixon described as "stupid"). And an unpopular war to boot.

I don't trust the president.

http://www.npr.org/search.php?text=gerald+ford&sort=DREDATE%3Anumberdecreasing&aggId=0&prgId=2&topicId=1012&how_long_ago=7
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/july-dec06/ford_12-27.html