Monthly Archives: December 2005

White Noise

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Rightie apologists for the Bush Administration today are churning out copious amounts of verbiage to cover Bush’s ass. Here’s a good example at The Volokh Conspiracy. The writer, Orrin Kerr, piles on nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, parenthetical citations — enough rhetorical fog to hide Cleveland — to present the appearance of an argument that spying on Americans without a warrant is perfectly legal.

This sort of argument by volume works nicely on righties, I’ve noticed. And they’ll all link to this shit and repeat it, even if they don’t quite understand it. There must be a pony in there somewhere.

And I say that if what Bush is doing is perfectly legal, then the Bill of Rights ain’t worth the paper it’s written on. As John Aravosis noted yesterday, if we applied the same hairsplitting analysis to the Second Amendment, some future President could arbitrarily cancel the Second Amendment and start confiscating firearms without due process of law. In the name of national security, of course.

End of argument. If you aren’t persuaded, several of the links below will lead you to more detailed explanations of the law.

Eugene Robinson, “Imperial Assumptions”

E.J. Dionne, “Their Own Patriot Act”

George Will, “Why Didn’t He Ask Congress?”

Richard Cohen, “Enough. Let’s Try ‘Accountability'”

WaPo editorial, “Unauthorized Snooping”

NY Times editorial, “The Fog of False Choices”

David Cole, “Bush’s Illegal Spying”

Boston Globe editorial, “Taking Liberties”

Charlie Savage, “Bush Bypassed Compliant Court on Wiretapping”

H.D.S. Greenway, “Fear Distorting the Rule of Law“

War Powers

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Jonathan Alter proves that there’s still a free press.

President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. …

… I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

Thirdparty at Kos has some questions about this meeting, here. Alter continues:

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference.

I heard several cable television commenters make this same point throughout the day … we have not been told how the NSA snooping is taking place, only that it is. And certainly terrorists communicating with people inside the U.S. must have realized the feds would likely monitor their emails and phone calls. So how in the world has national security been compromised?

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

Exactly.

The flip side of what Alter says can be found at Protein Wisdom, where Jeff Goldstein quotes Dr. Walid Phares:

The question is clear: Are we or are we not at war with the terrorists?

It’s not a declared war, nor a war of limited duration, which makes extraconstitutional “war powers” of the president problematic. Never before has Article II Section II been interpreted to mean that the President can grab more power for himself whenever he wants for as long as he wants because he thinks it’s necessary for national security. During times of invasion or other emergencies the president temporarily may act without consent of Congress. And, yes, Lincoln and FDR both took on expanded “war powers” during the Civil War and World War II. But the “war on terror” could last generations, and it’s so hazily defined that we cannot agree among ourselves who we are fighting or what “victory” will look like. For these reasons Bush must be held in tighter check than Lincoln or FDR, neither of whom overreached nearly as much as Bush has.

While jihadist cells are constantly spying to find chinks in America’s infrastructure, President Bush’s critics are concerned about how America is watching the terrorists. So far, I haven’t heard a critic asking who are we watching?

Actually, a lot of us have asked who the NSA is watching. And a lot of us suspect it isn’t just alleged terrorists.

And here comes the Big Daddy of straw men:

Or anyone requesting an update as to how many terrorists are within the U.S. So, in sum, they want the government to “catch” the terrorists but not to “watch” them. I must admit that if the 9/11 Commission was right on target regarding some fellow Americans; it is about “lack of imagination.” For till further notice, I am not able to figure out how the U.S. can catch the jihadist terrorists if it doesn’t monitor them.

See, nobody is saying we shouldn’t conduct surveillance. We are saying the surveillance must be conducted within constitutional parameters, and so far the President and his crew have not shown one good reason why they had to go outside FISA to snoop on Americans.

And how can the defense and security institutions monitor an enemy in a state of war, if it provides them with the knowledge and the technology it is using.


But that hasn’t happened. I haven’t seen a single news story that provides information about what technology is being used or how the surveillance is being conducted.

I think this story is going to be with us for a while. Fasten your seatbelts.

Strict Construction?

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Fred Barbash and Peter Baker of WaPo posted this story a short time ago:

President Bush today offered his most elaborate defense yet of his administration’s domestic eavesdropping program, saying he was legally and constitutionally authorized to implement it and obligated to do so in order to protect the country from a new kind of enemy.

In a wide-ranging news conference this morning, Bush said his authority to have the National Security Agency eavesdrop without judicial involvement derived from his inherent constitutional powers as commander in chief as well as from the authorization for the use of military force approved by Congress in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Congress gave me authority,” he said.

The “inherent powers” argument is nonsense, but I think it’s fascinating the “strict constructionists” could have found powers in the Constitution no one ever noticed before. The same people who can’t see, for example, a right to privacy in the 4th Amendment certainly have developed an expansive view of Article II Section II. And they say the Constitution is not a living document. Haw.

It is true that some presidents, notably Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, have claimed extraconstitutional “war powers.” But they did so publicly, not secretly, and they did not claim a right to flat-out ignore the Bill of Rights. I believe the closest example is Lincoln’s famous usurpation of the power of Congress to suspend habeas corpus. He argued that there was an emergency (a massive insurgency and widespread civic violence) and Congress was not in session at the time. He obtained consent of Congress after the fact. See further discussion at Findlaw. But what Lincoln did, agree or not, was very much in public view.

For more on “inherent powers,” see also Armando at Kos, here and here.

As far as the “Congress gave me authority,” argument goes, I can’t see how Congress can give authority to ignore the 4th Amendment, because that’s a power Congress doesn’t have, either. And members of Congress say they did no such thing. “The president has, I think, made up a law that we never passed,” Sen. Russell Feingold said. More here.

Barbash and Baker continue,

He expressed anger at the fact that someone revealed the secret program, saying he assumed the Department of Justice would launch an investigation to determine the source of the leak. “My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this program in a time of war. . . . The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said.

And he was visibly angered when a reporter asked him what limits there were on “unchecked” presidential authority during wartime. “I disagree with your assertion of unchecked power,” Bush said. “There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law for starters. There is oversight. We’re talking to Congress all the time. . . . To say ‘unchecked power’ is to ascribe dictatorial power to the president, to which I object.”

See, there’s what President Bush says, and then there’s what President Bush does. And I think this revelation of the President’s creative “construction” of his constitutional powers should tell the Senate to be very careful about Sam Alito and other Bush judicial appointees.

“President Bush’s acknowledgment that he unilaterally approved domestic spying is the latest piece of evidence supporting complaints that his White House operates essentially unchecked by the legislative and judicial branches,” says Dan Froomkin.

Update: More from Kos and from Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber.

Update update: Digby.

And the Battle Resumed at Dawn

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Georgia10 writes at Kos that on The Today Show this morning, Attorney General Alberto “torture is what I say it is” Gonzales told Katie Couric that the president was granted the power to authorize surveillance by the authorization for war.

Reuters reports,

President George W. Bush’s decision to eavesdrop on people within the United States was backed by the U.S. Congress’ authorization of military force after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Monday.

“There were many people, many lawyers, within the administration who advised the president that he had inherent authority as commander in chief under the Constitution to engage in this kind of signals intelligence of our enemy,” Gonzales said in an interview with CNN.

“We also believe that the authorization to use force which was passed by the Congress in the days following the attacks of September 11th constituted additional authorization for the president to engage in this kind of” electronic surveillance, he said.

Georgia10 shreds this claim nicely, so I don’t have to.

See also: Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Michael Bérubé.

Update: See Ezra K. at TAPPED and Atrios. Short version: What is the White House hiding?

Update update: John Aravosis speculates that the NSA was spying on journalists.

Who Knew?

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It’s hard to tell at the moment, but the righties may be retreating from the “what Bush did was within the FISA law” position. There’s one bitter ender here who is ignoring the point that the surveillance allegedly did involve private communications of American citizens. The “we were wrong” thing does come hard to some folks. But although they haven’t raised a white flag, this morning the righties seem to have redeployed to a new battlefield.

Which is: How many senators knew about the surveillance? And if they knew, why didn’t they speak up sooner?

Yesterday the Associated Press reported that Sen. Harry Reid was briefed on the extralegal surveillance “a couple of months ago,” and “whoever disclosed the existence of the surveillance program should be prosecuted.” This rightie blogger jumped in with “Which means that: (1) Reid ADMITS was informed as soon as he took over Dem Senate leadership from Daschle, (as we should expect); and (2) he accepts that the disclosure of this was a crime.”

Reid took over Dem Senate leadership from Daschle nearly a year ago, not a couple of months ago. Maybe the White House briefers were behind schedule. Should the “leaker” be prosecuted? As I understand the law, the liability falls only on people within the government who disclose classified information. I suspect that whoever let the New York Times know what was going on — “Nearly a dozen current and former officials,” according to Risen and Lichtblau — might be in violation of law regarding classified material, and Senator Reid would have been in violation of law had he disclosed it. The New York Times, however, would not be in violation for printing the story. And once the story was public Senator Reid was free to talk about it.

Please note that I don’t claim to be a lawyer. I could be mistaken.

Shakespeare’s Sister reports that some “media analyst” on Fox News said that senators who are now critical of the program were briefed about it before it started. But there seems to be disagreement on this point. Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer write in yesterday’s Washington Post that

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA’s new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

However,

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers “no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States” — and no mention of the president’s intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

So we’ve wandered into “he said, she said” territory. Dicey.

Risen and Lichtblau report today that

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defended President Bush’s decision to secretly authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking warrants, saying the program was carefully controlled and necessary to close gaps in the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

In Sunday talk show appearances, Ms. Rice said the program was intended to eliminate the “seam” between American intelligence operations overseas and law enforcement agencies at home.

“One of the most compelling outcomes of the 9/11 commission was that a seam had developed,” Ms. Rice said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “Our intelligence agencies looked out; our law enforcement agencies looked in. And people could – terrorists could – exploit the seam between them.”

The article goes on to quote a number of lawyers and security experts who say they have no idea what Rice was talking about. In an emergency, warrants can be obtained in minutes from the secret FISA court, and can even be obtained after surveillance has begun. Either the Bushies are hiding something, or they just don’t like to mess around with paperwork.

I Couldn’t Watch

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I sat through three of the four “pre-Iraqi-election” Bush speeches. I should get a medal for that. I can’t take any more, though.

Commentary can be found here: Ezra Klein, AMERICAblog, and firedoglake.

Here’s a post by Amanda at Pandagon that’s not about the speech, but read it anyway.

Update: Steve Gilliard has two speech posts, here and here. That second one is gonna really piss off the wankers.

Update update: Oliver Willis asks, “Can anyone tell me why he looked like he was directing airline traffic?” I didn’t watch, but other recent Bush TV appearances made me wonder if they’ve adjusted his meds.

Lilies of the Field

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I’ve lost track of how many billions of dollars have been spent on Hurricane Katrina. But because the world is what it is, it’s a certainty that some people are getting rich. And some people aren’t.

Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote in today’s Washington Post,

The come-on was irresistible: Hop in the truck. Go to New Orleans. Make a pile of cash.

Arturo jumped at it. Since that day when he left Houston, more than two months ago, he has slept on the floors of moldy houses, idled endlessly at day-laborer pickup stops and second-guessed himself nearly every minute. …

… Arturo, a dour Mexican from Michoacan who did not want to disclose his last name for fear of deportation, stands at the nexus of the post-Hurricane Katrina labor crisis in New Orleans. A city desperate for workers is filling with desperate workers who either cannot find jobs or whose conditions are so miserable, and whose salaries are so low, that they become discouraged and leave.

Why would this be true? There’s a bunch of money, there’s work that needs to be done, there’s a whole mess of people — legal workers — who are out of work and need paychecks. Why are these elements not coming together harmoniously?

Part of the equation, we are told, is that the illegals are willing to take jobs that the native-born are unwilling to do. But let’s look:

At a New Orleans town hall meeting in Atlanta, displaced black civil rights activist Carl Galmon complained: “They’re bringing in foreign workers from South America, Central America and Mexico, paying them $5 an hour sometimes for 80 hours a week. They are undercutting the American labor force in New Orleans.”…

…For those who find work, conditions can be abominable, with laborers such as Rico Barrios and his wife, Guadalupe Garcia, slashing through the cough-inducing mold on walls in flooded Lakeview with only thin masks to shield their lungs, even though she is pregnant. “It’s hard,” said Barrios, who is from Mexico City, his face glistening with sweat.

Call me crazy, but seems to me that if some contractor offered a living wage and safer working conditions — proper masks come to mind — and helped workers find housing, then I bet they’d get plenty of applications. These contractors are getting billions in federal contracts. It’s not like these are startup companies operating at a loss until they get products on the shelves. They’re being paid to provide a service.

Seems to me the law of supply and demand would push those paychecks up a little higher. Why would anybody in America be expected to ruin their health for $5 an hour?

Roig-Franzia interviewed a number of bureaucrats and contractors who called for a change in the law so that “guest workers” like Arturo could be brought into the country legally. But I keep thinking that if the goal is to bring New Orleans back to life — which may not be the goal the Bush Administration has in mind, but let’s pretend — wouldn’t it make sense to be sure some of those billions of federal dollars were used to pay decent wages to a whole lot of American citizens who need jobs? Who would then turn around and use their wages to buy groceries and shoes and toasters and thereby help retail businesses get back on their feet?

Whenever you hear some well-manicured white guy say “our people won’t take the hard jobs, so we have to bring in foreign workers,” what he’s really saying is that “our people” aren’t desperate enough to be exploited like slaves.

In fact, according to this article in last week’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a whole lot of native-born Americans are hard at work cleaning up after Katrina:

Drivers from across the country have come to cash in on the cleanup.

“We ain’t getting rich, but we’re working seven days a week,” said Tommy Whitley, who arrived from St. Augustine, Fla., three months ago. “They’re supposed to let us go home a couple of days before Christmas.” …

… A subculture of entrepreneurs has sprung up in response.

Hundreds of homemade signs advertising cleanup and “home gutting” services are nailed to power poles, bearing phone numbers like “1-888-AID-MOLD.”

Some of these workers are working for contractors. But one suspects a lot of enterprising Americans went into business for themselves because they wouldn’t take $5 an hour.

I know the big shots are always going to try to maximize their personal profits by getting labor as cheaply as they can. But I can’t believe we’re even talking about bringing in foreign workers to work for $5 an hour. This is insane.

They Hate Our Freedoms

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Mouthpieces for the VRWC are warning darkly that challenges to the President’s powers will not be tolerated. They are calling for an investigation … of the New York Times. It is legal for the executive branch to secretly authorize spying on citizens, because the White House says so.

Bottom line: Righties hate our freedoms.

Today’s Self-Parody Award goes to the blog Let Freedom Ring, which proudly displays the blurb “The blog where pursuing liberty is everything.” You guessed it — the blogger declares that Bush has the power to wiretap without oversight, and the “leakers” at the New York Times need to be investigated.

I’m listening to the Usual Bobbleheads on ABC’s This Week, however, and even Cokie, Sam, George, and George et al. understand that Bush is engaging in a dangerous usurpation of power. They are assuming Bush meant well by it but is in the wrong nonetheless. When these boneheads get a clue, you know the Right is experiencing a massive talking point failure.

What’s more interesting to me is that the wiretap story has sucked all the air out of the Iraqi election story. We’ve not been reduced to absolute despotism, yet. So do your bit and write your representative and senators to let them know you believe the Constitution still applies.

Today the argument turns on whether the president acted legally or illegally. Bloggers across the spectrum are becoming “expert” in all manner of statutes they probably never heard of before yesterday. And some have resorted to, um, revising the statutes to be sure Dear Leader’s acts remain within legal bounds. Blogger Glenn Greenwald writes,

Defenders of the Bush Administration are resorting to outright distortions and deliberate falsehoods about the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) in order to argue that the Administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens complies with the mandates of that statute. To do so, they are simply lying — and that term is used advisedly — about what FISA says by misquoting the statute in order to make it appear that the Administration’s clearly illegal behavior conforms to the statute.

This is a real case study in how total falsehoods are disseminated by a single right-wing blogger who is then linked to and approvingly cited by large, highly partisan bloggers, which then cause the outright falsehoods to be bestowed with credibility and take on the status of a conventionally accepted talking point in defense of the Administration.

A blogger named Al Maviva wrote a staggeringly dishonest post which he said was based upon what he called a “little legal research” concerning FISA. He then proceeded to deliberately mis-quote the statute in order to reach the patently false conclusion that “the President probably does have the power to order NSA to monitor suspects, without a warrant, in terrorism cases.”

This post was then cited and linked to, in some cases with approval, by several large conservative bloggers, and thereafter wormed its way up to the conservative motherload of Internet traffic, Instapundit, who approvingly linked to it. I have no doubt that — thanks to law professor Instapundit and these others Administration defenders — tens of thousands of people (at least) have now read this “legal analysis” defending the legality of the Administration’s conduct which is based on a glaringly unethical distortion of the language of FISA.

Wow, righties lied. That’s like, so, what they always do.

[Update: John Cole of Balloon Juice, who ran a correction to the Al Maviva link, says I called him a “liar.” Well, not specifically, but I can see why he might have taken offense. I apologize to John Cole. We have all been duped from time to time. I don’t apologize to Al Maviva, however. And this blog has long chronicled the pattern of misdirection and misinformation that typifies rightie “political discussion.”]

Greenwald, an attorney, continues to explain what the statute actually does say. Put simply, “the Administration engaged in surveillance in clear and deliberate violation of FISA.” See also Laura R.

The question is, why? From an editorial in today’s Washington Post:

Mr. Bush said yesterday said that the program helped address the problem of “terrorists inside the United States . . . communicating with terrorists abroad.” Intelligence officials, the Times reported, grew concerned that going to the FISA court was too cumbersome for the volume of cases cropping up all at once as major al Qaeda figures — and their computers and files — were captured. But FISA has a number of emergency procedures for exigent circumstances. If these were somehow inadequate, why did the administration not go to Congress and seek adjustments to the law, rather than contriving to defy it? And why in any event should the NSA — rather than the FBI, the intelligence component responsible for domestic matters — be doing whatever domestic surveillance needs be done?

The obvious answer is that the NSA surveillance served some political agenda. I strongly suspect (i.e., am damn sure) that if all the facts were known, we’d find out that some surveillance was conducted on Bush critics and political opponents, not enemies of the U.S.A.

A few quick points:

First, several rightie bloggers are comparing the New York Times “leak” of the FISA violations with the Bush Administration leak of Valerie Plame’s classified status. If the latter was wrong, so is the former, they say. But the morality of the acts depend on whose interests are served — the powerful, or the people? When the powerful use “leaks” to manipulate the news and mislead the people, that’s wrong. But when a newspaper uncovers illegal activity by the powerful, that’s why there is a First Amendment.

Second, no one is saying that the government should not conduct surveillance on possible terrorists. That’s not the issue. The issue is that Bush usurpsed a power that law and the Constitution do not give him.

Third, Democrats should use this episode to remind voters that conservatives don’t believe in a right to privacy.

See Doctor Who at Kos, Avedon, and Billmon for more.

Heck of a Job

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A story to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times says that a study of more than 260 Louisianans who died during Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath “found that almost all survived the height of the storm but died in the chaos and flooding that followed.”

The results are not necessarily representative of the 1,100 people who died in the storm-ravaged part of the state. The 268 deaths examined by The Times were not chosen through a scientific or random sample, but rather were selected on the basis of which family members could be reached, and which names had been released by state officials.

Nonetheless, the study represents the most comprehensive picture to date of the Louisiana victims of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failures. The Times conducted more than 200 interviews with relatives, neighbors and friends of the victims, and culled information from local coroners and medical examiners, census data, obituaries, and news articles.

It’s a heartbreaking thing to read. One suspects some of those people could have been saved had there been halfway adequate response.

Looking the Other Way

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Be sure to read Harold Bloom’s essay in The Guardian — “Reflections on an Evening Land.” Although in places it reminds me why I didn’t major in English lit, the essay makes vital points —

At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold the presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not sanguine, because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida (twice) and in Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the Supreme Court. The economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed that the Republicans dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress or the White House, because subsequent investigations could disclose dark matters indeed. Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers of our Iraq crusade are big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud), Halliburton (the vice-president), Bechtel (a nest of mighty Republicans) and so forth.

All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a president who shares their limitations.

This made me think of yesterday’s Risen-Lichtblau article in the New York Times:

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. “People just looked the other way because they didn’t want to know what was going on,” he said.

That’s pretty much our situation in a nutshell. We look the other way. We don’t want to know what’s going on.

This past week news media made a Big Bleeping Deal out of the fact that President Bush uttered the words “As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” as if this marked some new era of presidential candor. But look at the context — the paragraph in which the fleeting moment of candor appeared —

When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq — and I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that. At the same time, we must remember that an investigation after the war by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that Saddam was using the U.N. oil-for-food program to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting his weapons programs once the sanctions collapsed and the world looked the other way. Given Saddam’s history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat — and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power. (Applause.) We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.

— he’s still not admitting to a mistake. He’s still claiming he did the right thing. And he’s still pretending the world at large agreed with his decision, when it most definitely did not.

The fact that Bush could have (somehow) obtained a second term, even after it was obvious he had taken us into a costly and unnecessary war that could easily have been avoided, is an obscenity. It’s obscene that so many people in the media and in politics continue to cover his ass and treat him with respect. And it’s obscene that Americans accept him as president. I sincerely believe that earlier generations would have stormed the White House bearing buckets of hot tar and bags of feathers, never mind sit quietly by and watch him be inaugurated for another term.

Earlier Americans would have been outraged. Today’s Americans sit placidly and watch as their betrayal is televised.

And, constitutionally speaking, it is not the President’s responsibility to decide to invade another country. That’s Congress’s responsibility. But who reads the Constitution any more? That’s so, like, pre-9/11.

“What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a parody of the Roman empire?” Bloom asks. I think he’s giving us too much credit; we’re too prudish to parody the Roman empire. I think we’ve become only a parody of ourselves, which is far more pathetic. Just cruise around the Right Blogosphere and notice the imagery — fierce bald eagles, the Liberty Bell, minutemen — and then look at the opinions presented: The president was right to authorize wiretaps of citizens in secret. If you aren’t doing anything illegal you should have nothing to worry about.

How is it that a rich, spoiled, pampered frat boy with an affected Texas accent, who never worked a day in his life and used family connections to avoid service in Vietnam, became the heir to Andy Jackson? If that’s not parody, I don’t know what is.

Although we might yet go the way of the Romans. Historians tell us that as Rome fell, the Romans themselves scarcely noticed it was happening. Even as the barbarians were literally at the gates, individual Romans went ahead with their personal business with no concern that their way of life was about to end. They didn’t see it coming. And they didn’t see it because of end of Rome was unthinkable. Today the true believers in American exceptionalism cling to the idea that the virtues of our American republic are so unassailable as to justify any depravity done in America’s name. The notion that America could be in the wrong, much less fall from grace as The Land of the Free, is unthinkable.

Beware of what is unthinkable. Just because something is outside your imagination doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The exceptionalists are in power, and those of us who see the fall coming are dismissed as “looney lefties.” I sometimes feel as if I’m watching a train wreck that I’m powerless to stop.

“Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy,” Bloom writes. Today in the New York Times, Scott Shane writes that “A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration’s war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.” Does that make Bush our Julius Caesar? Ol’ Julius would be insulted, I believe.

Of course, in Caesar’s case, the Senate eventually took matters into their own hands and, um, deposed him. With extreme prejudice. I wouldn’t look to our current lot in Congress to be quite so principled. The question is, is it too late for a strong and unified opposition to Bush to arise? Is it too late for Congress to take back its proper authoritiy and demote the Emperor back to being a republican (small R) president? If not (even better) a citizen?

Also commenting on the Bloom essay, Stirling Newberry writes “I do not believe there is an American decline that is inevitable.” However,

I believe that catastrophe is inevitable, that is we will not change direction until checks bounce and people can’t get gasoline. But we are nearer to that than people know. I saw my first gas lines in America in 30 years recently, the shadow of shortage is held at bay by European recession and the strategic reserve. The rich and powerful are pumping oil as fast as they can, because they feel the noose tightening around them. They can feel that if there is an economic tumble now, then who knows where the rebellions will lead.

America has been very foolish indeed, and it has suffered in its arts and letters as it has suffered politically – for the same reason. We are corrupt, and everything is about being attached to the revenue stream. Being attached to the stream of money is the only sign of success we care about, because it is the only one that matters. Read any composer biography, it will be a list of “who cut the check” and how many checks have been cut. As if composers were whores, known for who they serviced.

This reality is passing, because of the many problems of a prostitute society, a certain emptiness that comes with the first light of day is among them. People who could be successful in the world of fighting to get to the teat have given up on it. Yes, I can understand those much older than I being disappointed, there was so much more possible than seems to have occured. It was that very fear of disaster which kept the older generation on the straight and narrow. It was the loss of that fear that allowed the Republicans to raid the savings accounts and produce a generation of fat falsity.

Yet “The whole modern world is running out of value,” Stirling continues, and there is no reason we can’t make a course correction and adjust to new realities.

Perhaps the Democratic Party is not yet ready to take power, but this weakness is a paradoxical strength: when a leader comes who is capable of taking the White House, and governing the nation, with a following to match his vision – the rest of the party will fall into rank and file, because there will be no other alternative. Parties, as Wilson reminded us in his first inaugural, are instruments of the greater purpose of the nation.

So it will be now, when America has finally lost hope in false promises, and finally reaches the moment where the river of oil and corruption can no longer provide enough affluence for enough Americans, we will change, and move in a new direction.

Personally, I think we’re tottering on the edge. Fall one way, and we’ll become a corrupt and bloated plutocracy of exploitation, limited opportunity, and abased civil liberties. Fall the other way, and maybe we’ll no longer be the World’s Only Superpower, or the Richest Sumbitches on the Planet, but we’ll still have the Constitution and civil liberties, and (eventually) our self-respect. Certainly we’re leaning toward the former, but I don’t think the latter is yet lost to us.