paranoid

Since finding out about Bush's private mercenary army, far better paid and better equipped than our U.S. soldiers, I have been nervous. I bat away the nervousness by telling myself "never here, not in the US, never would we have a dictator who would simply usurp the Constitution and take over the country." I continue to be anxious about Blackwater, and today I find this from Chris Hedges of the Philadelphia Enquirer.. Read, then toss and turn all night.

"Erik Prince, who founded and runs Blackwater, is a man who appears to have little time for the niceties of democracy. He has close ties with the radical Christian Right and the Bush White House. He champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is dishonest, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. But what he and his allies have built is a mercenary army, paid for with government money, which operates outside the law and without constitutional constraint. . .

If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown that triggers social unrest, or a series of environmental disasters, such paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could ruthlessly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to corporations, and to right-wing interests such as the Christian Right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets."

I have said before that I think the neocons and their puppet George Bush will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, and Blackwater, one of the babies of Donald Rumsfeld, is a handy tool. Most days I think I'm paranoid, and other days I imagine the death of the republic in my lifetime, something inconceivable five years ago.