These days, there appears to be growing support for the premature departure of the current administration. As towns and localities pass their own impeachment resolutions, public opinion polls show that substantial numbers of Americans are in favor of impeachment for Bush and Cheney. Call it impeachment, call it ouster, call it regime change, call it what you will. This is worst presidency in American history, and the damage this crowd has created will take years to repair.

Change in this country occurs only through movements. Frederick Douglass said that, "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." Similarly, John Pilger said that, "true democracy is never handed down by elites. It is always fought for and struggled for." Civil rights, voting rights for African Americans, women's suffrage and reproductive rights all came about because people were firm and resolute about their demands, and mobilized at the grassroots level in order to force the politicians to take action. New laws have been enacted and old ones eliminated in spite of, not because of, Washington.

For the impeachment movement to succeed, it too, must be clear about what it wants, and why it wants it. That the Democratic-led Congress, save a handful of members, seems unable or unwilling to make moves toward impeachment, is irrelevant. Most Democrats, like most Republicans, cannot see past the next election and care little beyond their political ambitions. But ultimately, they will be forced to proceed in the manner that the public demands.

Lessons from Dr. King

I suggest that this new burgeoning movement needs to learn the lessons of the civil rights movement. The public must decide that it is unable to cooperate with Bush, and it is unwilling to obey his unjust laws. This is not merely a matter of eliminating a president with whose policies many do not agree, but a matter of neutralizing the greatest threat to freedom in the United States and the world. It is a matter of building a movement that will bring a true form of democracy that this country has evaded from its inception. We cannot wait until the changing of the guard after the 2008 election, because there is too much time left for the Bush regime to further dismantle the Constitution and destroy the nation. And for all we know, they may try to cancel the election.

In his April 16, 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King spoke about breaking unjust laws: "You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust…. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'…. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal."

When fascism comes to America…

In present-day America, the will and wishes of the people are being thwarted by an executive branch that is assuming far more power than the law allows. The writer Sinclair Lewis once noted that "when Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Well, here it is.

The changes that the Bush administration has made - not unlike the Third Reich, which also started out as a democratically-elected government - suggest that they plan to be entrenched in power for a long time. It should be noted that Karl Rove, soon-to-be-former Bush advisor, Nixon protégé and Bush's brain, once spoke of the permanent Republican majority. The Posse Comitatus Act was recently changed to allow the president to unleash federal troops and state national guards inside the United States. The Democratic Congress has conspired with criminals in the White House by allowing the president to engage in illegal wiretapping. Your email can be searched without a warrant, and a terrorist is defined as anyone the president says is a terrorist, including citizens who disagree with his policies.

There is disrespect for the rule of law by this president, outright contempt, and the manipulation of the apparatus of government to break the law. Executive privilege would be asserted for the president's dog if it were possible. The vice president asserts that he is not a part of the executive branch and pretends to be above the law. Justice Department officials are using the legal system to break the law, to discriminate against those Justice Department employees who are not viewed as real Americans, to trample on the voting rights of African Americans in order to steal future elections and secure future G.O.P. victories.

It is an administration of war profiteers who rape and pillage other nations for personal gain. It is kleptocrats who treat the country as their personal treasure trove and preside over the largest transfer of wealth in the nation's history, a reverse "Robin Hood," if you will. It is hypocritical, self-righteous religious extremists who dare to tell the rest of us how to live.

Meanwhile, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the one administration official who was convicted of criminal wrongdoing, and could have shed light on the scope of the criminal enterprise that is the executive branch, received a commutation of his sentence by the president. So "Scooter" received a commutation for perjury and obstruction of justice surrounding the outing of a government agent, part of a propaganda campaign that facilitated the selling of a war in Iraq based on cooked-up intelligence. Bush showed mercy toward "Scooter," but shows no mercy toward "Pookie" and "Skeeter," and millions of average people caught up in a harsh criminal justice system. And what of the countless people who were kidnapped and are serving indefinite sentences and enduring torture in hidden gulags for crimes they did not commit? What of those who were never even charged with a crime?

The system of checks and balances in government has been eroded. The Congress is not stopping this president, but rather is enabling him. The Supreme Court, with the blessings of the Christian Right, is a rubber stamp on the policies of King George. Surely, the rulings of the Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas court would humble even the late Chief Judge William Rehnquist, who made his bones in 1964 by intimidating voters of color as a member of the Young Republicans. Brown v. Board of Education is history, and voluntary school integration, or "race mixing" as Justice Clarence Thomas describes it, is now illegal. This regressive court has eroded women's reproductive rights, and has made it harder for employees to sue for discrimination. It has overturned a century-old antitrust precedent which prohibited price-fixing collusion between manufacturers and retailers, and tossed out damages awarded to the widow of a smoker, against Philip Morris.

Further, the media, the so-called fourth estate, are embedded with the people in power. Much of the mainstream media have shirked their duty to monitor this government. They sold the Iraq war, which has cost thousands of lives and isolated America in the international community, and could wind up costing the nation as much as $1.5 trillion dollars.

A permanent Republican majority sounds a lot like a thousand year Reich. But then again, too many Americans have played the role of "good Germans" by sleeping on democracy, disengaging from government and civic life, and failing to follow current events, international affairs and the lessons of history.

Perhaps some may judge my talk about fascism as too harsh. But apparently, this is nothing new, as the Bush dynasty has a long history of war profiteering and antidemocratic tendencies.

We've been here before

The BBC reported on July 23, 2007 a right wing plot by a group of bankers and industrialists - including the owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea and Maxwell House, as well as Prescott Sheldon Bush, the current president's late grandfather and former U.S. senator - to overthrow the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist government. The alleged 1933 coup plot, which was to be carried out with the help of 500,000 World War I veterans, was pursued by the elder Bush and others who believed that adopting Hitler and Mussolini-style policies would help end the Great Depression.

As for Prescott Bush, he also apparently had business dealings with the Nazis and assisted the German war effort. Based on files from the National Archives, the Guardian Unlimited reported on September 25, 2004 that Prescott Bush was director of a firm involved with the financial architects of the Nazi regime. In 1942, his company's assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act, arguably, according to a former U.S. Nazi war crimes prosecutor, grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And a civil action for damages was brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz. So, as the current president would say, you're either with us or against us.

The person who blew the whistle on the coup plot against F.D.R. was Major-General Smedley Butler, two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor who served 33 years in the Marine Corps. Butler was selected for the plot to overthrow the government, which involved convincing F.D.R. to give up power and assassinating him if he resisted.

Butler referred to himself as a "high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." In what sounds more like a critique of President Bush and the Iraq war than anything else, Butler wrote in 1935 that "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

So, it would appear that the Decider has taken some lessons from his grandfather "Pappy" Bush, as he was called, and is taking care of some old, unfinished family business. The old adage that the fruit does not fall far from the tree never applied more than now. We can ask ourselves how people would have responded to a coup on U.S. soil three-quarters of a century ago, led by a Bush, or we can ask if anyone will act to thwart the coup taking place right now, led by his grandson.

Times like these were made for impeachment. The Constitution allows it for such a situation, and even demands it. The next step is to build a movement for democracy that truly turns its back on unjust laws, hypocrisy and the corruption of power. We need a revolution of values, and a government that shuns the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism that Dr. King so fervently condemned.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist David A. Love is an attorney based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention and Prisons (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Love is a former spokesperson for the Amnesty International UK National Speakers Tour, and organized the first national police brutality conference as a staff member with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. He served as a law clerk to two Black federal judges. Click here to contact Mr. Love.

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