A Republican Government

To the Editors:

During the 2000 election campaign, Ralph Nader campaigned the Green party on the platform that a two -arty political system is corrupt and contrary to true democratic ideals. He told his followers that there was no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore and that voting for one was equivalent to voting for the other. Since the polls closed last Tuesday, we in the United States have born witness to the fact that we no longer live in the two-party system so detested by Nader and the Greens. It is now quite obvious that we live in a one-party system — a system dominated by the corruption of the Republican Party, a system where the Democrats have disappeared.
I am one of the 15 percent of my generation that showed up to the polls in 2000. After Bush won the election and went back on his campaign promises to reduce America’s carbon burden, ditching the Kyoto Protocol and proposing a climate policy that increases carbon dioxide emissions (the deadliest greenhouse gas) by 12 percent, I waited for the Democrats to create a storm. But the storm never came. When Cheney convened his energy task force of big oil players, most notably Enron whose name represents so much of the corporate scandal associated with this administration, I waited for the Democrats to bang open the doors. But the doors remained closed.
When John Ashcroft began his inquisition on our civil liberties, creating secret tribunals for captives related to the war on terrorism and initiating federal drug busts of clubs in California handing out medical marijuana after the state had passed Proposition 215, I waited for the Democrats to make a stink. But there was no stink. Nor has there been much stink (or even debate for that matter) about Bush’s unilateral exemption of the United Nations in his case for another Iraqi war. Where is the vocal opposition in Washington? Where are the Democrats hiding? Or for that matter, where are our leaders?
If climate change, poverty, AIDS and unemployment were to get half the amount of air time from the nightly news as did the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the GOP surely would have had a much tougher fight on Tuesday. The fact is that neither the Democrats nor the media have done a very good job of exposing the ills of the Bush administration. The President is able to hand the American public incoherent statements, labeled with incomprehensible jargon, like “the evil-doers” and “the bureaucracy” (reminds me of “fuzzy math” from the 2000 presidential debates) and nobody in Washington calls him on it. Why are the Democrats acting so well-behaved? Are we witnessing the fall of our democracy into bipartisan totalitarianism?
There is a saying that goes, “if the people will lead, the leaders will follow.” Two weeks ago 100,000 protesters, the most since the Vietnam War, showed up in Washington in objection to Bush’s War on Iraq. It was hard to look at that crowd and believe it when Bush said that “America speaks with one voice.” Now, with the Democrats hiding under the GOP’s bed and true leadership at its all time low, it seems that the rest of us in America are going to need to lead a much bigger storm.

–Mira Inbar
College senior