Several years ago, someone suggested to me that George W. Bush was the worst president ever.
“Nah,” sez I, “you’re forgetting Nixon. Bush is terrible, it’s true. But Nixon was much worse.” (Remember, this was several years ago.)
“Then what would Bush have to do to make you say he’s worse than Nixon?”
“I dunno — maybe try to cancel the elections or something like that,” I said. “Heh heh.”
A few months later, a Bush appointee was talking about postponing the election in the event of terrorist attacks, and icy chills ran up and down my spine.
I tend to be fairly pessimistic. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want a Plan B if a foreseeable disaster interferes with normal voting. But I always see the negative side when people talk about postponing elections and stuff like that.
It doesn’t help that five years of Bush and Cheney have convinced me that you can never be too pessimistic or too paranoid. The torture debate, military tribunals, martial law, open-ended detention without charges or access to a lawyer, scrapping habeas corpus, bugging phones and now, opening mail without a warrant — maybe they’ll never, ever misuse the absolute power they’ve arrogated unto themselves, and maybe they’ll never, ever make a mistake. But they’ve certainly gone to a lot of trouble to make sure no court gets to check their work.
Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe it was strictly in a spirit of historical preservation that Bush signed a bill to preserve some sites from the World War II era. But the headline — “Bush signs bill to preserve internment camps” — I have to confess, that gave me a chill.
The Fountain of Youth continues to elude us, but there’s plenty of stuff available for my second childhood. Via Boing Boing: the complete run of MAD magazine in PDF form, on DVD-ROM.