The news show turns back to their studio. A new pair of talking heads square off across the anchor’s desk.
“God help us,” the atheist congressman says to himself.
23:19:21
President William Jennings O’Neill is looking forward to catching a little shut eye on his flight home to Ohio. It has been a long day of meetings with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, various and sundry experts, advisors and journalists. The next five days will be a welcome respite from the White House grind. He knows of course that he can be summoned back at a moment’s notice if any of the dozen or so situations unfolding worldwide suddenly turns catastrophic. He hopes not. He and his staff need the rest before they add the stress of managing a reelection campaign to the trials of running the free world. And mostly, he is really looking forward to his wife’s roasted lamb dinner with the extended family tomorrow. The White House’s four-star chef is a good one, but he can’t hold a spatula to his wife of twenty-seven years.
The President is in the Oval Office preparing to address the nation. A middle-aged black woman with plaited hair dabs a small sponge in a jar of foundation and rubs the make-up into the creases around his eyes and mouth. Nothing short of a face-to-face with the Almighty ages a man as quickly as the Presidency of the United States. New wrinkles and the retreating line of thinning and graying hair on his broad head tell the tale. O’Neill knew it going into the job. One had to be a little crazy, he muses, to even want the gig in the first place. The Office piled responsibility atop responsibility ceaselessly, every hour of every day. He cannot remember the last night of unencumbered sleep that he has been able to enjoy. The world always intrudes into his dreams. Yes, he tells himself, the presidency is certainly taking its toll on him as it did to all who sat in its chair. It has robbed him of his boyish good looks to all but his adoring wife. As the makeup lady rubs foundation into his skin in soft, gentle circles, the President of the United States of America rounds the globe in his mind, visiting all the hot spots that sap him of sleep and serenity.
Half way around the planet the Sunnis and the Shiites are at each other’s throats again. The third, UN brokered cease-fire in a decade has recently broken down in Iraq. New waves of slaughter are sweeping across Mesopotamia. Elsewhere in the Middle East, after clearing away the rubble into which the Israelis bombed their nuclear program, Iran has managed to muscle its way back into the nuclear club. The Mullahs will be parading their warheads through the streets of Tehran on New Year’s Day. The Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, not to be outdone by their Shia rivals, have created a nuclear program of their own which many fear will start producing bombs in a few months. The two are embroiled in a dangerous arms race and an on again-off again proxy war over Iraq.
On the North African coast, the Ikhwan Caliphate is the newest player on the Arab block. After a decade of uprisings, revolutions and civil war, the Muslim Brotherhood has come out on top and they are busy consolidating their command of the vast region stretching from Morocco to the Sudan. The Brotherhood’s fledgling empire is the largest caliphate since the Ottomans. They are eagerly flexing their new found strength, primarily through control of the Mediterranean choke points at Gibraltar and the Suez Canal.
All three of the Muslim powers are ratcheting up their anti-Zionist rhetoric and the Jewish State is naturally responding with saber-rattling of its own. Israeli strikes against Iran and Saudi Arabia seem likely, threatening another all-out regional war that could escalate into a nuclear confrontation in short order. The President has pleaded with the Jewish State, offering to renew the flow of foreign aid to the Israelis if they refrain from launching another preemptive strike. He is less than optimistic about their accepting his offer. The pessimism is born of the unintended consequences of a decade old policy decision, the landmark action of the Department of Peace during his tenure as Director which cut off aid to Israel. It was done in response to their pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and in the interest of ending the war in Iraq. While the cutting of aid to the Jewish State did appease Iran into a cease-fire agreement, the move irreparably damaged the relationship between America and Israel. Ten years of struggling through emergency austerity measures has weaned the Jews off their dependency on America, and with it, whittled away whatever leverage the United States once had with them.
Farther to the east, the Pacific Union, with a nuclear Japan at its head, is at odds with China. The two sides are getting ever more belligerent in their dispute over the Senkaku Islands, access to sea lanes and offshore drilling in their crowded waters. Each side is alternately wooing and warning the Koreans, gumming up their re-unification efforts. Russia’s new President has yet to weigh into the regional jockeying. She has everyone guessing, and that is in itself troubling.
Closer to home, Cuba is a powder keg ready to explode off the coast. Since the death of the Castro brothers, the island nation has been making slight but steady progress towards democratization and modernization. All the while, elements of the old order appeal to Venezuela for aid and assistance in holding on to power as Cuban ex-patriots in America fund and stoke the fires of the opposition. Many fear that Cuba is on the brink of civil war. Shots have not yet been fired, but the language between factions is growing hotter and nastier by the day.
South America is not in much better shape. Venezuela, taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the 2012 nuclear explosion that killed most of the heads of states of the western hemisphere, is intent on becoming first among equals in the newly formed South American Union. There is a real danger of blood spilling before the ink on the South American Union Constitution dries. Directly south of the border, the new Mexican government is beefing up its military while its president speaks entirely too much about recovering the lands stolen by Yankee aggressors.
As always, there are various scenarios developing that could draw America and any portion of the rest of the world into a war that everyone would regret. The President has teams on the ground working around the clock to avert crisis. They are all good people; most of them worked with him during his tenure at the Department of Peace. They are all smart people, hand chosen by the President himself. O’Neill is determined not to make the great mistake of past administrations. He promised the nation and himself that he would not become just another ‘war president.’ His opposition never lets up on their criticism of his position and his pledge to go through his administration ‘without spending a dime on or spilling a drop of blood in war.’ They daily dismiss the peace he won from Mexico as a surrender of the border. They deride his efforts to improve America’s international image as pandering. Conservative talking heads persistently call for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities but he is resolved not to go there. He argues in turn that it would be seen as rank hypocrisy on the Arab street after America raised only the most formal objections when Japan decided to go nuclear five years ago. His reasoning does not dissuade them from branding him a coward.
The deplorable state of the economy however, is the biggest thief of the President’s sleep. O’Neill’s chief campaign promise to the American people was to affect a ‘real and substantive recovery’ for the country’s economy. Fixing the economy, the President feels, would go a long way to alleviating much of what ails the nation. He is three years into his term and things have not yet begun to turn around. When the reporter from the Washington Times suggested his failure to deliver on his economic promises might make another ‘one-termer’ of him, O’Neill insisted that the economy was stuck in a holding pattern because, “Do-nothing Republicans are obstructing my every effort to enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada. The Union, they so strenuously object to, would pool the resources of the entire continent for the betterment of all its inhabitants. Creating The North American Union will allow us re-entry into the World Bank, giving us even more resources to draw from, rebooting our economy overnight. Republicans however, are refusing to work with our neighbors simply because they are loath to drop the Dollar for the
Amero.”
“They say such a union will cost the country its independence,” the reporter countered.
“The depression the nation suffers from is a global one,” The President responded. “A world-wide depression, so long a time in the making, cannot be recovered from in short order without a revolutionary change in the way business is done. That begins with abandoning the myth of independence. Republicans need to stop living in the past and realize that the twenty-first century is all about interdependence.”
The President inherited a shattered economy and the Herculean task of saving it. Like many in his generation, O’Neill watched the crash of the once great financial empire in the slow motion time tunnel of day-to-day life. The long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strained the economy, weakened it so that it was unable to absorb the shocks of the credit and housing markets collapse. Those markets then dragged others down the sink hole with them. Heavy stimulus spending, first to bail out companies, then whole industries, half the states of The Union and even half of Europe depleted the last of the country’s capital reserves. The dollar tanked after so much deficit spending in so little time, losing its long held position as the world’s reserve currency. With the dollar dead, America went bankrupt and she became just another domino to fall in the globe-sweeping collapse of one world market after another in the great crash of 2013.
It was a nightmare for everyone everywhere. In Europe the fires were lit in Athens and spread, from the cradle of democracy, across the continent. Before too long they were flaring up in America. People everywhere fought along every demographic line. At home, the country came precipitously close to another civil war. Hostilities broke out, first on the southern border between Minutemen and Mexican drug cartels. With weakened central governments on both sides of the border, frontline state governors in America and their Mexican counterparts soon joined in, committing the troops under their commands into the fray. Beyond the border, unions and conservatives battled on city streets across the country. Terrorists and nihilists reveled in the chaos, upping the ante at every opportunity.
Things were just beginning to stabilize. It was only because he and a few others were willing to work with and through the United Nations that the war on the border was ended and something resembling order was reestablished across the land and in Europe. The President had no illusions about it though; the order was a tenuous one. Ideologues, demagogues and agitators everywhere where chomping on their bits to go at each other and at him. Half the states are threatening to secede if they don’t get bailed out of their latest fiscal holes and the other half threaten secession if yet another stimulus package is passed. But in the very tenuousness of things, William Jennings O’Neill sees the opportunity to create a new America, a country more compatible with twenty-first century thinking; in short, a true socialist nation.
It is the ideal O’Neill pursued throughout his entire political career, though he was always careful never to state it openly. That is a lesson he learned early in college while studying the life of Norman Thomas, Ohio’s three-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party during the first heady decades of the twentieth century.
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism,” Thomas once told his comrades. “But under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
O’Neill’s home State hero proved to be eminently prescient. America is finally, for all intents and purposes, a socialist nation.
The President considers himself Thomas’ ideological heir. Just as Norman Thomas was there at the birth of Progressivism, William O’Neill will be there at its final triumph. All that remains to seal the deal is to make the recent changes to the government permanent. Towards that end, President O’Neill feels that a new constitution is needed. A draft of a revised constitution already exists, in fact. It is being circulated quietly among a few select individuals in Congress, the Senate, academia, the media and a handful of representatives from certain international organizations. The initial responses are all favorable, most people feeling that it addresses all the deficiencies of the original.
The President agrees.
The original Constitution, based as it is on limited rights, promotes an individualism which hobbles the state and stunts its reach. In contrast, the new draft of the constitution articulates a great many more rights. It will free up the government, expand its powers so that it can insure the amended list of rights. The ruthless excesses of the rugged individualism that defined America for too long would finally be curbed by the new, more expansive constitution. The President is confident that the concern over what government is allowed to do will be, at last, replaced by the imperative of what it must do. William O’Neill sees the revised constitution as the only means to both secure the gains that Progressivism has thus far won and lay down the legal groundwork for any further advancement.
Before he can introduce the nation to a new constitution, the President needs to win a new term. He needs to break the recent run of one term presidencies and secure himself the elbow room and the expanded license that comes with a second term. O’Neill can use the clout that comes with another term to push for a new constitutional convention. It might take him the whole four years to do it, but he is confident that it can be done. The convention will produce a new constitution for the country using the existing draft as the template. It is the only way to insure that everything which has been so hard fought over for a century can be passed on. A great many of the gains he wants to protect were only recently won by Congressional Acts and Executive Orders and are thus vulnerable to being undone by the very same means. Universal health-care, free higher education, the government’s new and enhanced stewardship roles in energy, industry, housing and finance, it could all be undone with a single Republican victory. In fact, every Republican who has run against them since 2008 promised just that, to undo twenty years of the most progressive legislation in the nation’s history with strokes of their pens. They have been beaten back each time by only the slimmest of margins, and; that is too close for the President. William Jennings O’Neill does not want to leave office just to have some future administration take back the ground Progressivism now holds.
O’Neill believes he stands a better than fair chance of retaking the White House. He looks forward to the debates. The President even relishes the whole traveling side-show aspect of campaigning. He enjoys mixing it up with Republicans. And he is good at it. After all it was he, his team and their vision that pulled the Democrats out of the downward spiral they found themselves in at the beginning of the century. It was he who used the Republican’s own values rhetoric against them. Not that it was difficult, as they never failed to provide him with enough scandals with which to undo them. The Republicans were no less forthcoming with the rope necessary to hang them on fiscal policy either. O’Neill loves contrasting their laissez faire talk against their corporate welfare walk.
The Republicans do not worry him. William O’Neill is eager to go at them again. He already has the October surprise in his pocket. No, it is not the loyal opposition that stands in the President’s way; it is, sadly, his own left flank that is making re-election problematic for him. William O’Neill knows that he is less likely to get his wish of winning a second term if the streets of DC erupt into riot on his watch. There is enough tension between the quarter of a million Christians and the thirty thousand or so counter demonstrators who taunt them by burning bibles and desecrating crosses to ignite a holy war. It behooves the governments, Federal and local, to tread carefully. The situation is volatile and everyone rightly fears a repeat of the tragedy that befell the ill-fated Tea Party.
In a perverse anticipation of midnight, the media has been playing every inch of footage they possess of that decade-old, tragic, clash between citizen and soldier. The President doesn’t need to see any of the clips. He has his own vivid memories of the riots to
remind him of what could happen on the streets tonight. O’Neill watched it all through the window of his office when he served as the first Director General of the Department of Peace. Beyond the millions of dollars’ worth of damages and the one hundred and eight deaths that resulted from the confrontation, the real tragedy, for President O’Neill, was the failure of leadership that caused the whole needless mess and further hardened the hearts of a whole generation against the government.
While there was plenty of blame that could be heaped on both sides, he had to place ultimate responsibility on the White House. The administration at the time refused to engage the Tea Party on principles and instead opted, with the help of their cohorts in the media, to vilify them. They were denounced as sexists and mere reactionaries who balked at the fact that America had progressed far enough to elect a woman president. They were called many other things besides, but the epithets only seemed to swell their ranks. When the congresswoman from California claimed that she was spat on and called a derogatory name by a ‘mob of Tea Party militants’, President Pelosi branded the demonstrators terrorists and ordered the National Guard to disperse the crowd of nearly two hundred thousand.
DC became a war zone overnight.
To keep that from happening, O’Neill insisted that no one in his administration stoop to name-calling and personal attacks when talking of the latest demonstrators. The protestors were never referred to by anything harsher than, ‘dissident Americans’ by his people. It is not enough however; the President also needs to have a little chat with the Mayor of DC, Barry Marion.
The very name of the man makes the President reach for his Rolaids.
The two men shared similar goals, but O’Neill detested Marion’s methods. The mayor was a socialist of the old school whose splenetic demagoguery and too easy resort to violence was antithetical to the President’s preferred soft-sell. In O’Neill’s opinion, socialists of Marion’s ilk ultimately undermined the cause. Mayor Marion however, was a rising and formidable star for the Left. He first rose to prominence during the Public Sector Labor Movement that swept across the states from 2011 through 2014. Marion was among the handful of union organizers credited with winning concessions from states with recalcitrant republican legislatures through their use of what the Mayor dubbed, ‘enhanced democracy’, and his opponents saw as plain, criminal intimidation. His use of social media to organize the ‘flash riots’ that defined the movement was deft enough that he escaped any litigable connection to the abuses and violence they caused.
The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE Page 7