The Republican convention and the specter of dictatorship

By Bill Van Auken, SEP presidential candidate

George W. Bush’s closing speech Thursday night at the Republican National Convention should serve as a warning of what is being prepared by his administration in its pursuit of the interests of America’s ruling elite.

The festival of fear, intimidation and hatred staged inside Madison Square Garden carried with it the implicit threat of escalating war abroad and dictatorship at home. It expressed the perplexity of a ruling elite that perceives itself as besieged by economic and social contradictions that are spinning out of control.

The speech was delivered in an atmosphere dominated by police repression of demonstrators in the streets of New York City, and grotesque attempts inside the Garden to cast the sadist in the White House as a divinely chosen leader of the people.

Bush strode onto the stage through a pair of Corinthian columns and climbed up terraced steps to a raised circular platform to deliver his address. He stood above the crowd on a blue rug bearing the presidential seal, reading nervously from his TelePrompTer. The production suggested something out of the Roman Empire.
The message sent by the elaborate facade constructed in Madison Square Garden is best summed up in the famous words of France’s Louis XIV, “L’etat c’est moi”: I am the state.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/bush-s04.shtml

and repressed. Commodious was betrayed and killed by his own people, righteousness always finds a way.