Anyhow, several things bear commenting on, in no particular order. I'll warn you: as this gets on, I touch on things that are generally not mentioned in polite company by "respectable" political analysts. So be it. I'm out to understand the world, not pander to what any herd proclaims to be the bounds of respectability.
First, Michael Meacher's accusations that Bush knew in advance of the 9/11 attacks and let them happen anyhow because they were politically useful. I don't see anything in the way of hard evidence in his article; just lots of circumstantial evidence. While this doesn't prove Bush's innocence, it hardly proves his guilt, either.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And, as Bertrand Russell once observed, "Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it."
And there's plenty bad to say about the Bush Administration without going out on a limb and making accusations that may later leave one with egg on one's face.
Second, a comment on the sorry state of affairs that allows most Americans to believe such blatantly false things like there being any hard evidence for a connection between Saddam and 9/11, and to let our government get away with persecuting such a blatantly illegal and unnecessary war as the attack on Iraq.
I don't think the comparison can be avoided: there's just an undeniable parallel between many Americans willingness to believe what their leaders and media tell them, no matter how outrageous, as there was between Italians in the 1920s and Germans in the 1930s. The evidence for a statement matters less for its adaptation as a belief than the emotions it instills and how loudly and frequently is parroted.
This is precisely the fascist concept of the importance of "myth" for motivating a population, the "big lie" propaganda tactic, and the whole "don't think, feel". It matches too closely to be anything but.
Yes, compared to Hitler, Bush's grasp for power has been doddering, slow, and weak, at least domestically. But not all fascists impose dictatorship equally forcefully and rapidly: Mussolini, for example, went at it slower than Hitler did. What matters is the overall nature of the regime rather than one key measure.
Most people are too squeamish to say it in as many words, but a key feature of fascism has been that it tends to appear when a bourgeois democracy fails to continue to uphold a capitalist economic structure. Italy prior to Mussolini had experienced an outpouring of radical politics, and Germany after the First World War also experienced many social upheavals, including an aborted socialist revolution in 1919. Then there's the more recent example of what happened to Chile when they elected a Marxist president in 1970.
In other words, capitalism puts up with democracy only as long as democracy puts up with capitalism.
But there has been no such movement threatening capitalism in the USA. Apparently pure avarice has been enough to get our ruling class to play with fascism in the name of getting more for themselves (and the Bush regime has been a big gravy train for the rich and well-connected). In other words, playing it "safe" and avoiding serious confrontation with the ruling class and its interests isn't enough to stop fascism: sometimes they'll go fascist out of greed alone.
There's actually a precedent (of sorts) for this. In the decades surrounding the turn of the last century, many more American workers apparently lost their lives in labor struggles than European workers, despite America being in many ways more democratic than Europe was at the time. The American capitalist elite appears to be unusually amoral, Machiavellian, and rapacious as such elites go.
In fact, the only thing that really made the ruling class be willing to lose some of its power to reform measures has been the threat of losing all of its power to a social revolution. The Progressive Era reforms happened to the backdrop of large votes for the Socialist Party and labor agitation by radical unions like the IWW. The New Deal of the thirties happened at the same time record numbers of Americans were joining the Communist Party after having lost faith in capitalism as a result of the Depression. The civil rights laws of the sixties were accompanied by a huge undercurrent of radicalism.
And the moment the radical, revolutionary pressure goes away is the moment the system redefines the reforms as the bleeding left edge of the political spectrum and starts attacking them as such.
It all ends up sounding a lot like a variation on the "capitalism cannot be reformed" theme many radical leftists spout. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it is indeed a variation of such a theme. Such an admission puts me firmly outside the bounds of any "respectable" political opinion so far as the mainstream is concerned. But such "respectable" politics has brought such death and suffering to the world that I really can't feel that awful about being outside its norms.
So be it. To close with another quote from the same document of Bertrand Russell's that I quoted earlier: "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."