Understanding why Anyone would vote for Bush and Co.

David Neiwert of Orcinus Has the first four parts of an excellent 6 part series on the rise of "PseudopFascism" in America today and how it is transforming and moving the United States toward a truly Fascist state. Reasding the whole thing is vastly worthwhile. Below is just a snippet from the first part of the series on the symptoms.

The final morph into Pseudo Fascism occurred under the dynamic under which the "conservative movement" operated after taking control of all three estates of American government in 2000. By seizing the presidency through means perceived by nearly half the nation at the time as illegitimate, conservative-movement ideologues were forced to govern without anything approaching a popular mandate. But rather than responding by moderating their approach to governance, the Bush administration instead acted as though it had won in a landslide, and proceeded to follow an openly radical course:

-- Instituting a massive transfer of the tax burden from the upper class to the middle, an approach that deepened the nation's economic malaise.

-- Appointing radical right-wingers to key positions in the nation's court system; shifting the emphasis in national security from terrorism to missile defense, a policy that left us vulnerable to the Sept. 11 attacks.

-- Instituting, in the wake of those attacks, the radical "Bush Doctrine" of unilateralist pre-emption.

-- Further using the attacks to undermine civil liberties under the Patriot Act and creating a policy of incarcerating citizens indefinitely as "enemy combatants".

-- Invading another nation by raising the false specter of the "imminent threat" of weapons of mass destruction.

-- Allowing intelligence officials to run amok, violating the Geneva Convention in interrogations at Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

-- Fighting, for clearly political reasons, every effort to have a thorough examination of the causes of the 9/11 security failures.

-- Moreover, at every step of nearly every policy it has pursued, the administration has erected obstacles to transparency, making clear it intends to operate in utter secrecy whenever possible.

The radical course followed by the Bush administration was, in fact, guaranteed to further divide the nation rather than unify it in a time of need. Moreover, the administration clearly proved itself wrong on so many major counts -- the economy, the pre-Sept. 11 handling of the terrorist threat, the rationale for war, the postwar occupation of Iraq -- that under normal circumstances, their competence above all should have come into serious question.