“Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.”  (America the Fearful, Bob Herbert, NYT, May 15, 2006)
 
This Bus***e regime: 

•  condones and promotes torture;
• has not secured our ports since 9/11;
• has not secured our borders since 9/11; 
• has disdained our constitution as “just a piece of paper”; 
• thumbs its nose at the subservient Congress and the concept of “checks and balances”;   
• is using the NSA, in violation of its charter, to spy on American citizens;     
• eavesdrops on the phone calls and reads the e-mail of innocent Americans without
  warrants; 
• tracks your internet tracks to see what web sites and pages have been visited; 
• has built secret concentration camps in undisclosed locations to house tens of thousands of detainees;
• kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program;
• claims the right to incarcerate indefinitely, without the right to legal counsel, any American by declaring them to be  “an enemy combatant”; 
• incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them;
• allowed the C.I.A. to operate super-secret black holeprisons where God-only-knows-what is going on;

And on and on ad infinitum.
 
But the NeoCoNazi big bullet to finally dispense with civil liberties is loaded but not yet fired – Martial Law!
 
The only explanation that provides a coherent framework for the bullet points (no pun intended) above, and many more, is that this regime is hoping and preparing for a devastating coordinated terrorist attack within the United States.  That would put the American Public right in the tyrannical hands of King George and his corporate handlers.  How else can the nonchalance and extreme dereliction of duty at the federal level be explained?
 
“Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.
 
“The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.”
 
Many a population that thought itself secure and safe has awakened too late to the fact that it has come under the jackboot of tyranny.  The Germans of a generation past could tell you all about that, and the genuine fear that ensued.
 
Bob Herbert goes on to say “Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.”
 
Sound familiar?