Open Letter to President Bush

Open Letter to President Bush,

Dear Sir, for several years now we’ve watched you and your co-conspirators running through our fair republic like children throwing lighted matches in a dry forest.

Do you know that the world is laughing at you? You’ve done your best to frighten us, but it’s not working.

Often we wonder, given your repetitious blunderings and lies, we wonder how we’re able to get up each morning, go to work, tend our families and our gardens, meet our friends, volunteer in our various communities. Why, we ask ourselves, are we not marching in the streets, calling in sick, creating massed work stoppages, chaining our military-aged children in the basement?

It must be because we actually believe that stuff you say about democracy and freedom, that stuff you so clearly cannot grasp. Unlike yourself, Sir, many of us paid attention in school, in these public schools you try so hard to foul up utterly with your tonnages of paperwork. We studied the U.S. Constitution, we learned how a bill becomes a law—or used to, before The Corporate Age seriously muddied the waters—and we got the concept of the three prongs of government, none stronger than the other.

Despite the recent shamelessness of many of our Congress people, we continue to have faith in the principles of balanced government. We choose to believe that you and your fascistic cohorts are a bad, bad mistake that the machine of our republic will eventually correct.

Your latest outrages, the redefining of—may the world forgive us—torture, and the ending of habeas corpus, confirm to the world that you have lost the big IT. Now, as the world heaves a sigh of understanding, you demonstrate your true motives and delusions. You are cornered criminals, apt to do anything. You may bomb Teheran, you may imprison your fellow citizens in these domestic prisons that your friends continue to build. You may help your friends steal other elections. There is no telling now to what lengths you’ll go in your denials of how the world really is.

But Constitutional principles stand. Good ideas cannot be killed. And this republic may spring up again Or maybe its roots will develop elsewhere. So you do not frighten us. We pity you in your delusional state. And we continue to hold to the course set many years ago by people who knew right from wrong.

Maureen Sutton