Outside the Spectrum

  
   Recently I was reminded of why I like the Hammer so much.

   Of all the goose-stepping, flag-waving conservatives out there, the Hammer is among the most honest. You will not find the brazen lies of a Sean Hannity here, nor the psychotic break from reality that characterizes the writings of Victor Davis Hanson, nor the wheedling deceptions of Ken Mehlman.

   No, the Hammer isn’t so warped. He is a republican hack, but he is also a screaming, pounding-the-table imperialist who dreams of an American hegemony that would make the Roman Empire pale by comparison. I have the same warped affection for him that I have for the late Richard Nixon and for the mostly fictional Richard III: these men are villains whose lust for power, not subservience to corporate overlords, propelled them in their megalomaniacal conquests.

   The Hammer actually musters a weak defense of the Preznit’s wiretapping in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. It is weak, but it is cogent and doesn’t involve making things up from whole cloth, and I respect that. His argument, amusingly enough, is that the FISA statutes that govern this sort of thing aren’t really legal, because the president and a few legal scholars don’t think they should be.

   Think about that for a second, before we go on.

   This reeks of Watergate, of the Iran-Contra Affair, of a succession of reprobatecan presidents who didn’t really feel that congress had the powers to make laws they didn’t like.

   We’ve seen this before. The republican president feels congress has passed a law that impinges on his powers, as Krauthammer argues, and he defies that law.

   I should note this rarely ends well for the president. Nixon was ultimately forced to resign for a number of reasons, among them his use of the CIA. Reagan was spared the axe by claiming ignorance, apologizing, and then firing the people involved.

   Reagan’s example seems the closest. He defied the Boland Amendment by funneling money to the Contras. On display at the congressional hearings were a collection of criminals that stood in front of congress and revealed an open contempt for congressional oversight, public disclosure, and the workings of democracy in general. Who felt they had a right to defy laws passed by congress if, in their opinion, these laws weren’t constitutional.

   This is illegality in its most unambiguous form. This is an imperial presidency gone wild.

   I shudder to think of what a president might do if he or she actually had the power to authorize wiretaps without oversight on any individual he claimed might be working with terrorists, or engaged in some related criminal activity. What would stop the president from wiretapping the phones of political enemies or dissidents, his own sense of decency? When the president abuses this power how will we, the American people, discover it if it is secret? No Freedom of Information Act request could unearth these records when the executive refuses the request on grounds of national security, as this administration has done many times.

   The Hammer brings himself to acknowledge that, for purposes of “comity,” the president should have brought the matter before congress if he felt the existing law was unconstitutional.

   Actually, it’s not a matter of comity. It’s the law. Period. And this president broke it.

   The president, under FISA, already has the power to wiretap anyone and get a warrant from the secret court up to 72 hours after the wiretap has already been placed. The court is virtually a rubber stamp as it has only declined a handful of requests out of thousands over the past decade.

   So why would the president circumvent this imperceptibly mild restriction? Unbridled arrogance, or a desire for there not to be any record of the wiretaps. The only people who would know about the wiretaps would be him, a few administration members, and a few people at the NSA.

   He could have wiretapped John Kerry’s campaign, or a MoveOn committee meeting. Not to make an argument to ignorance of the same kind this administration used to justify the War in Iraq, but we don’t know who he wiretapped. We just know that, if he did decide to do that, there was no one to stop him who didn’t work for him.

   This is so transparently abusive that even the cowed and amazingly loyal politicobots of the Republican Machine in congress have voiced, for lack of a better word, consternation. There will be an investigation, they say.

   Returning to the Hammer, I must say I enjoyed his jab at George Tenet saying there was a “slam dunk” case for WMDs in Iraq. Didn’t the president you’re defending give Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom after his amazing miscalculation, Hammer?

   Some people’s opinion of a law doesn’t make it optional. The president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws he thinks are constitutional and which are unconstitutional.

   This should not be a surprise, moderate republicans. Your brazen leaders have flaunted the law for decades. Reagan’s administration did this same thing and you cheered. Eliot Abrams got a job working for this administration, as did John Poindexter. Oliver North is a darling of the right and a correspondent for FOX. Limbaugh still brays the Boland Amendment was unconstitutional and Reagan was right in what he did. Ann Coulter agrees, even going so far as to say the Iran-Contra Affair was a “brilliant” plan. Just today I heard Limbaugh’s replacement host on his radio show agree with a caller in echoing the above sentiments.

   These are the stewards of your party, the rhetorical leaders of your movement. Criminals. This is part of what they mean when they reverently refer to themselves as “Reagan Republicans.”

   Lawlessness. Contempt for the workings of our government. It is reflected in every little thing this administration has been doing quite openly for five years, every lie this administration uttered and their media puppets echoed. Every disinformation campaign: “Clear Skies,” Terry Schiavo, WMDs in Iraq, Elaine Chau as Secretary of Labor, ID as “science.”

   This administration has been thumbing its nose at every governmental institution it considered inconvenient and the people of the US, collectively, for years. Their tool has been bald-faced lies, and their motivation has been contempt.

   Contempt for science. Contempt for labor, the FDA, and the EPA. Contempt for the will of the international community. Contempt for the freedom to dissent. Contempt for the workings of the courts (especially in Florida). And now, contempt for congress. Contempt for democracy.

   You voted these felons into office, not once, but twice. Remember that.