WHY AMERICA NEEDS A PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT – NOW

I don’t think you’d get any real opposition from intelligent Americans if you said we desperately need the mechanism to remove a loose cannon from the White House, if we realize we have one. It was widely suggested 200 years ago that the experiment in government being embarked upon by those in the New World – the were calling it Democracy – was fraught with problems. Among the problems with Democracy is the realization that, with this system, sooner or later the citizens will elect an idiot to the highest office.

We have now reached that miserable and untenable position – we have allowed an idiot to occupy the most powerful position on Planet Earth. And this situation is now in its eighth miserable year. True, his party machine stole the first election, the first 4 years, and their fingerprints for a similar theft in 2004 are everywhere. It is therefore abundantly clear, based on the performance of this presently serving idiot, that we need an improved set of guidelines for executive removal.

We – the millions of us in America who defiitely did NOT vote to elect this idiot to the highest office, still have to live (and suffer) with the results of his will. So as not to interrupt the flow of thought with a reading of his crimes at this point, I have listed just some of them at the end. Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University has listed 143 felonies perpetrated by this idiot and his minions, since he took office.

These facts are unacceptable. Aren’t they? They are. They’re unacceptable to all of us, and quite frankly, surely they’re unacceptable even to the most ardent, most loyal Republican, those having passed a sanity exam. The founding fathers, with their base of 18th Century values, obviously never suspected that the power of money would intrude so thoroughly into the recipe for good government. If you told Jefferson or Hamilton that candidates would raise and spend over $500 million in a campaign for President, they would declare you daft. They never imagined that the Press would be – or could be – completely transposed from a simple reporting of plain truth, to a very efficient mechanism for thought control. Franklin and Washington never gave so much as a passing thought to using war as the world’s most efficient generator of money. They would have soundly scolded, and just as soundly rejected, anyone who even suggested starting a war unilaterally, and would have swiftly thrown out and incarcerated anyone who did so based on lies.

Yet our present idiot has done just that, and much more, and the idiot-in-waiting is eagerly planning another military “adventure”, his own.

SO – how does a parliamentary form of government differ with what we have? In a presidential system, (what we have) all executive power is concentrated in the president. In a parliamentary system, with a collegial executive, power is more divided. One of the huge stumbling blocks in Washington is gridlock– that phenomenon of the Congress being unable to get any laws passed, due to the different agendas, and members of opposing parties. This is one of the most egregious of all sins for the Congress to subject the citizenry to. It’s obvious it is easier to pass legislation within a parliamentary system. This is because the executive branch is dependent upon the direct or indirect support of the legislative branch and often includes members of the legislature.

This alone is a great incentive for corruption-weary Americans to adopt the superior system of Parliamentary government. However, by far the most pressing reason for America to adopt the parliamentary system of government is its capacity to issue a vote of no confidence - remove an idiot in mid-term - instead of having to suffer with his or her continued gaffes and misdeeds and wars and recessions, and generation of hatred for us by the rest of the world, for a number of years more. As everyone knows by now, Bush sees everything as “good” or “evil,” nothing in between. He has remarked on more than one occasion that he sees himself as being a modern day Abe Lincoln, with the divided country, the war, etc. He would do well to read Lincoln’s take on good and evil, although we know he won’t:

“The true rule in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it has any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; thus our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” Abe Lincoln, June 1848.

Here are just some of the excesses this person has inflicted on the good people of America, and by extension those of the world, since America’s power is so far reaching. While pondering these outrages, it’s my humble opinion that we should bear firmly in mind how many surrogates it took to assist him in carrying them out, even if the ideas were originally his. All of tho$e individual$ no doubt had a ve$ted intere$t in doing so.


Manipulation of the free press – if they ask tough, he simply eliminates them
Subjugation of the press – prohibiting photos of dead soldiers in caskets
The myth of polls – questions manipulated to achieve predictable outcome
The dishonesty of polls – 1000 people does not a majority position make
Money in politics – a cancer that at present appears forever incurable
Newspeople as rock stars – selected for beauty, paid outrageously, controlled
Forced the world to wait until he’s gone, to fight the imminent perils of climate change
Repeatedly violated the FISA Act – enacted primarily to prevent Bush’s abuses
Detainee abuse at G’TO – some held over 2 years without charges(!)
Abuse of War Crimes Act of 1996 –
Abusing, ignoring Geneva Convention
Trampled on and effectively gutted habeas corpus – the cornerstone of Law
Illegally diverted congressionally-voted funds for Afghanistan over to Iraq
Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum, apparently.

It is therefore easily seen that if the United States converted to the Parliamentary system we could have prevented all the never-before-dreamed-of excesses of our present-day “Éxecutive Idiot”. There will be those who will ferret out some element in the Parliamentary system that will not set well with ordinary Americans, and that’s fine. But we have the power to adopt the one thing in the parliamentary system that will really work perfectly for us – the power to have a Vote of No Confidence on a ruling idiot, before he or she takes us any further down the slippery slope. We can do that – no one would doubt that we can do that much. After all, America is 219 years old, with Democracy, and Britain is what, 2000 years old, with a Parliamentary government. Any argument that takes issue with the efficacy or fairness of Parliamentarism is thus still born.

Finally, I will close this with the strongest possible reasoning to rid ourselves of this dangerous idiot at the helm of our ship of state. Allow me to pass along the summary rendering of a protracted psychiatric evaluation of George W Bush, by the celebrated team of John P Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D. John Briggs MD recently completed 40 years of psychiatric practice in Westchester County NY.


When the Defenses Become the Reality
We have noted in previous articles other prominent defenses Bush employs to cover his feelings of inadequacy: He is a classic emotional bully. Bullies disguise sensations of their own weakness by splitting the weakness off and casting it out of their own conscious awareness - projecting it - onto the consciousness of others. They generate a stream of signals and behaviors that keep others on guard and seek to enfeeble them. Bush's signing statements where he reserves the right not to abide by the law he's just adopted, his foreign policy asserting his right to preemptive strikes, his denial of Habeas Corpus, his fixation on retaining the torture option, his rejection of subpoenas from Congress, his demeaning of people by giving them nicknames - these are all emotional bullying tactics. Friends from his younger days remember that in basketball and tennis games Bush would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until he had worn down their will so he could beat them. Bush emotionally bullies his White House staff, making them afraid to tell him any news that doesn't fit his "optimistic" expectations. It’s known that Sr. Staffer Josh Bolton greets Bush each morning with: "Thank you for the privilege of serving."

John P Briggs MD and JPBriggs II PhD 18 January 2007.

Faithfully, in the interest of the American people - Swungnotes