American Democracy: R.I.P?

What has happened to American democracy and moral values? Since the terror attacks on 9/11, the media, congress, and the average American has turned its back on what once made this country so great. Accountability, transparency, and truth have fallen to the wayside.
The Bush Administration was able to engage the U.S. in a war based on fiction rather than fact. They spun a tale of weapons of mass destruction to a Congress that was shamefully more concerned about being perceived as unpatriotic rather than judicious. Over 2,000 American servicemen and women and over 26,000 Iraqi civilians have paid the price for the lies. Billions of dollars have been spent on building Iraqi democracy why American democracy slowly implodes at home from one scandal after another.
From torture in Abu Gharib, to the burning of Taliban bodies in Afghanistan, to CIA covert prisons, to Dick Cheney actively campaigning for the legalization of the use of torture by the CIA (even though we ratified the Convention Against Torture in 1994), our moral high ground is quickly eroding. If we continue down this route, we will be no better than the terrorists that we are supposed to be protecting America from. This is simply un-American.
As much as the Bush administration would like to spin the current scandals regarding the outing of the CIA agent into a partisan-motivated witch-hunt, it has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican. It has to do with being American and being fed up with being lied to.
The media has also failed the American population. The press is supposed to serve as a gadfly to ensure that governments cannot pull the proverbial wool over the eyes of the public. But unfortunately, the American media has catered more to missing teenagers in Aruba, and the pathways of hurricanes than it has to the erosion of American civil liberties through the Patriot Act, and the injustices occurring in America’s name abroad.
But it would be too simple to put all the blame on the government or the media. After all, we are a democracy, not a dictatorship. Americans did vote Bush into the Presidency a second time. Perhaps Americans are too comfortable with the notion that things always work themselves out – our forefathers created as perfect a democracy as possible. But unfortunately, democracy does not work very well when apathy and ignorance are the defining characteristics of a population, and when Americans are too trusting of their leaders. Americans have to become more engaged in their democracy.
American democracy did not happen by accident, nor will it be destroyed by accident. Unless our Congress stops acting as a rubberstamp to the White House’s directives, unless the media becomes more courageous in questioning our lawmakers and the motives of the Bush administration, and unless the average American becomes more of a citizen than a subject, the things that we as Americans hold dear to our hearts: liberty, equality and justice for all, will be a mere epithet on the tombstone of American democracy.
Perhaps there still is hope for our system of checks and balances -- a form of government that has endured multiple challenges in its 229 years. The Senate sent a clear message to the President on Tuesday that they plan to get to the bottom of the White House use of pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Additionally, a recent Zogby International poll found that 53 percent of Americans support an impeachment of President Bush if he lied about Iraq.
As Edmund Burke so famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing”.

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