Congratulate Bush on his upcoming coronation by signing this statement. Here is an excerpt:
George W. Bush is about to be inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States. Let it not be said that the people in the United States silently acquiesced in the face of this shameful coronation of war, greed, and intolerance. He does not speak for us. He does not represent us. He does not act in our name.
No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason....
Could we have imagined a few years ago that core principles such as the separation of church and state, due process, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, and habeas corpus would be discarded so easily? But under this government anyone can be declared an “enemy combatant” by Presidential decree with no meaningful redress or independent review, by a President whose rationale for concentrating power in the executive branch is “trust me.” Its choice for Attorney General is the legal architect of torture from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib.
As terrifying “trial balloons” are floated about invasions of Syria, or Iran, or North Korea, about leaving the United Nations, about new “lifetime detention” policies, there is no telling what further crimes this government will commit in our name against nations or individuals deemed to stand in the way of its goal of unquestioned world supremacy.
The Bush government seeks to impose a narrow, intolerant, and political form of Christian Fundamentalism as government policy. We must face the fact that this extremist movement is no longer on the margins of society. It aims to strip women of their reproductive rights, to drive gay people from public life back into the closet. It seeks to drive a wedge between spiritual experience and scientific truth, smugly denying thousands of years of human scientific achievement....
The movement against the war in Vietnam never won a presidential election. But it blocked troop trains, closed induction centers, marched, spoke to people door to door -- and it helped to stop a war. The Civil Rights Movement never tied its star to a presidential candidate; it sat in, freedom rode, fought legal battles, filled jailhouses -- and it changed the face of a nation.
We must change the political reality of this country by mobilizing the tens of millions who know in their heads and hearts that the Bush regime’s “reality” is nothing but a nightmare for humanity. This will require courage and creativity, mass actions and individual moments of courage. We must come together whenever we can, and we must act alone whenever we have to. This will require extraordinary acts from ordinary people.
We give our love and support to the soldiers who have refused to fight in this immoral war, and we pledge to create community that backs courageous acts of resistance. We applaud the librarians who have refused to turn over lists of our reading, the high school students who demand to be taught evolution, those who brought to light torture by the U.S. military, and the massive protests that voiced international opposition to the war on Iraq. We stand with the tens of millions of people throughout the world who fight every day for the right to create their own future.
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