The great British parliamentarian had it right: a government with unlimited power, and without a body of effective dissent, quickly evolves to governance without a moral compass; inevitably becomes government of the many to the benefit of the few; exercises the tyranny of power without responsibility or accountability to anyone except itself.

As the day of the official ascension of George W. Bush to a re-occupation of the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, there is already ample evidence that Bush and his ultra-conservative cohorts are actively at work hacking new trails in the forest of governance without the guidance of that necessary moral compass.

The Bushites do not care a whit what the world thinks of their means or their ends. Indeed, it is now very clear that the Bushites regard international forums such as the United Nationsto be mere impediments to the idea of the American Empire, mere rivals to be ignored and discredited and kicked into the dust raised by the advance of American hegemony.

Lewis Lapham is one of the leading American dissenters to the ultra-conservative notion of governance held by Bush and his personal political guru, Karl Rove. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, he opens a blistering attack by quoting a headline from the London Daily Mirror which more or less reflects the feelings of people around the world.

“How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” bellowed the masthead of the British newspaper the day after the American election.

Good question! For it now appears that Georgie Boy may have pilfered yet another election victory with tactics that express nothing less than contempt for the basic precepts of the Jeffersonian version of the democratic process the Americans are so proud of as a model to impose on other sovereign states around the world — including the farcical attempt to impose it on Iraqis who have not seen democracy, ever, in their political history.

Lapham writes: “If we know nothing else about the government now returning to office in Washington, we know that it doesn’t hesitate to cheat and steal and lie. Its values are those of the Corleone and Soprano families…”

This is a fairly stinging evaluation of a government that supposedly was elected by Fundamentalist Christians to protect and preserve “family values” in the United States of America with anaccompanying moral mission to instill them in the populations of the world.

Some family!

Some values!

If it is true that we know each other and our values by the points of our moral compass, and by the company we keep, it is instructive to examine other compass points of a government with a moral base in what has been termed by some, “radical conservatism.”

There is every indication, even before the official ceremonies re-installing Bush in the White House, that Lapham’s evaluation is so close as to be frightening.

There was the Bush nomination of Rudy Giuliani’s buddy Bernard Kerik for Chief of Homeland Security who came with the personal recommendation of Mr. G and Bush on his resumé.

But it was the items not included on that resumé that caused the nominee’s downfall, even before the Senate hearings on his qualifications.

Among other things, there was a warrant out for his arrest: a nanny looking after his children had questionable immigration status; Kerik had remitted no taxes to the government as required by U.S. law; he held $6 million in stock options in a company that sold Tazer Stun Guns to the NYPD while Kerik was its chief; and it was revealed that he maintained a “love nest” at taxpayer expense.

Clearly, Kerik’s moral compass had slipped a point or two and Bush hadn’t noticed — or didn’t care to notice — because Bernie and George had become good buddies.

And now we have the case of another Bush Buddy, Judge Alberto R. Gonzales. He is the President’s former White House Counsel who Bush would like to elevate to his cabinet as Attorney-General, preparatory to appointment to the Supreme Court of the U.S.

Alberto’s claim to fame is a memorandum he prepared for Bush absolving the President as Commander-in-Chief from paying any attention to the niceties of the Geneva Conventions as they apply to the treatment of prisoners of war. The effect would be to remove Bush from any charges of war criminality for approving torture âe” or, as it is now called “aggressive interrogations” — of suspected terrorists currently being held without due process in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In plain language, Alberto’s memo justified the use of torture to extract information from anyone suspected by President Bush or his minions of being terrorists, or possessing information about terrorists. He used the words “quaint” and “obsolete” to describe the rules of treatment of prisoners by which, among other things, the international community determines whether war crimes have taken place.

Based on Gonzales’ advice, the Commander-in-Chief issued an order to his military forces which stated that he had the authority to ignore the Geneva accords in this or any future conflict. The tortures at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and in Afghanistan followed.

He also ‘fessed up at his confirmation hearings, that the White House wants to rewrite these international treaties to allow certain techniques to be applied, that now fall under the definition of torture.

Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times is equally as agitated as Lewis Lapham over the nomination of Gonzales.

“The administration that thumbed his nose at the Geneva Convention seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honour, justice, integrity, due process and the truth,” he thundered in a recent column. “But this is the Bush administration, where incompetence and outright failure are rewarded with the nation’s highest honours.

“The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States.”

Typically, the White House has refused to give Senators on the Judiciary Committee the documents they need to assess the advice given by Gonzales in justifying torture of detainees who may well be innocent of anything.

It is clear in the uproar over the potential appointment of Judge Alberto Gonzales to the post which determines the practice of the rule of law in the United States of America that there are only three necessary qualifications for invitation into the power élite: be a Bush Buddy; be an evangelical Christian; and be willing to subordinate any and all moral and ethical considerations in the service of your good buddy.

That, according to Ray R. McGovern, a former CIA analyst, “is just plain wrong.”

It is also evidence of a government become feral.

And if that is not enough, try this one: the Pentagon is now seriously discussing what it cutely calls the “Salvador option” — the formation of “death squads” to hunt down and kill suspected insurgents and their sympathizers in Iraq. The name comes from a similar operation launched against the rebel movement in El Salvador during the Ronald Reagan presidency.

These special murder squads would operate in total secrecy, outside any framework of responsibility or accountability, and certainly outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions or any other code of decency.

In other words, they would adopt the morality of the insurgency targets they seek to destroy — they become them, in order to destroy them.

But this is the era of the American Empire, an era wherein that country, and that country alone, determines what moral and ethical standards shall apply to it in the conduct of world affairs. That is an invitation into chaos. It is also the first step into dissolution, just as it has been for every other world empire through history.

America ascendant — but for how long?

History tells us collapse can come quickly, and most often from within — when the will of a people is sapped by the excesses of their rulers; by the madness of their exercise of power; by the inevitable corruptive nature of absolute power.

History tell us that empires begin their collapse when their élites (politicians) insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions and, as a corollary, from the expression of contrary opinion expressed from within and without — when they cast aside any moral anchor to their actions.

The United States of America has long been one of the most parochial societies on the face of the earth, made so by its constant repetition of the American mythology that whatever it does is the bestest there is.

We have seen that self-obsessed view expressed in the vastly superior technological superiority of the American military, to create what has been billed as…“the greatest military force in history” and we have seen that same technology brought to impotent obsolescence by guerilla fighters who refuse to present themselves as ready targets.

America ascendant? There is no more apt expression to apply than the dictum that, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”