Thursday, February 02, 2006
The President and the Congress
I’m going to explain something very carefully that may sound condescending but is apparently necessary to clarify. In the executive branch the buck stops at the president’s desk. He is the boss of the CIA, the Department of Defense, the military and their officers, the EPA, you name it. He signs their checks.
Asking any one of the above-mentioned people on the record what they think about the president’s policies, or how they think those policies are working out, is akin to asking a private what he thinks of his drill sergeant when the sergeant is within earshot. It’s like asking some mid-level manager in a company what he thinks of the CEO in the boardroom.
You will not get an honest response if the person values their career and if they hold critical beliefs, especially in an administration marked by its secrecy and obsession with loyalty.
The only cretins dim enough to think that polling a captive audience holds validity is the present administration, who can be excused for thinking that the U.S. electorate is so dense they might actually fall for it. Whether for Social Security or the War in Iraq, no previous administration has so reliably used Potemkin Villages populated by sock puppets worked by Karl Rove to show that they are “in touch” with the will of the people.
So I tire of hearing the present administration or their numerous, rabid, and extraordinarily stupid defenders talk about “doing what the military commanders want” in the War in Iraq. The military commanders do what they’re told, especially when Don Rumsfeld is on the master’s end of the leash. They also say what they’re told, if they value their career; this from Yahoo News on the appointment of General Myers to the Joint Chiefs: Even The National Review, a leading conservative mouthpiece that rarely disagrees with Bush, editorialized last September that Myers' appointment "smacks of cronyism."
Off the record, plenty of military and intelligence people lambaste the administration for its arrogance, corruption, and shortsightedness. But then the adminstration’s defenders just say “some random people off the record criticize the president and we don’t even know if these people were janitors or credible sources.”
Of course, several “credible” sources have come forward to criticize the administration, including Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, as well as former speechwriter Frum. O’Neill has publicly and repeatedly said the Bush Adminstration was hell-bent on invading Iraq from the get-go. Clarke has said the same things. Frum corroborated these accounts.
But, you know, all those people saying Bush was fixing the facts to fit the policy are waaaay off base. Just ridiculous.
The truth is this president’s web of deceptions was so clumsily woven, with so many gaps, glaring contradictions, and laughably false assertions it’s an offense to our collective intelligence that they thought they could get away with it.
One historian interviewed about Bush said “he lies constantly, seemingly without control.” This idea has been iterated and reiterated in many lefty news sites, and it translates to this: he is a bad liar.
So spare me the whole “CIA screwed up” story of the bogus justification for war in Iraq. The president is the head of the CIA. And 80% of this country’s intelligence apparatus is in the Department of Defense, not the CIA. The very same Department of Defense run by Donald Rumsfeld, the neocon #2 in the White House, right behind Dick Cheney. And, of course, Tenet got, in exchange for the biggest intelligence screw-up in American history, a Medal of Freedom.
There doesn’t need to be a congressional investigation for us to know that the intelligence was manipulated, that the president misquoted sources, that much of it was fabricated out of whole cloth by known liars.
This seems to have passed America by, like gauzy clouds in an azure summer sky. Americans seem to have ceded to the president the right to wage war in contravention of international law or for any reason whatsoever, one subject on which I am clearly out of the mainstream, like being able to find Iraq on a map and being able to recall how my representative voted on several key votes over the last two years. King George is happy to take that power and use it to lay waste to foreign countries, our treasury, and our international reputation. Iran may have realized that with such a government in America it would be a good idea to own a nuke or two, especially with all the rumors flying around Washington that Iran was next on the Axis of Evil hit list.
This all seems increasingly self-evident, as the totalitarian dreams of the current administration slowly become more apparent like little, sticky, poisonous flowers slowly opening under the gentle showers of love from their neocon masters. So in this setting it is no longer surprising that Porter Goss, the new CIA chief, wants a Gestapo in America. Iraq is a bloody disaster. U.S. hit squads range over Iraq assassinating resistance leaders like a bloody remake of the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program. The bad old days of Project MINARET and SHAMROCK and the NSA return as Bush again turns the ear of U.S. intelligence gathering inward.
Despite the fact that they have no idea where Osama bin Laden is, our law enforcement leaders have informed us that we can now all rest easy from the scourge of the ELF. Thank GOD COINTELPRO is still going strong.
What fucking decade am I living in, here? I’m having bad acid flashbacks to the early seventies. Have we made so little progress since Watergate that a primitive, illiterate version of Richard Nixon can rape the country in the exact same ways?
No. It’s worse. Nixon never had FOX News or Rush Limbaugh.
The regular business of the Congress gets underway now that Alito and such is behind us. Their first order of business should be hearings on the NSA program and Phase II of the Iraq Intelligence inquiry. Instead, we’re getting more delays.
I seem to recall a time when the president’s lie about consensual sex with an intern virtually shut government down. Now I see in the State of the Union Address the republican speakydroids giving resounding applause when the president mentions his illegal enterprise. He should have been booed by both sides of the House.
And spare me the caveat about how we don’t know it’s illegal. When you see a masked man running out of a bank with the alarm going off and a bag of loot it’s a safe bet he just robbed it. I and others have already addressed the flimsy defenses of the president’s administration.
As further evidence of the suppression of free speech under this administration, Capital Police arrested Cindy Sheehan for wearing a t-shirt that said “2,245 Dead, How Many More?” Although I don’t consider this a big deal, it was inappropriate to haul her off in handcuffs. Now she’s suing and I hope she wins. This administration might think twice about creating “free speech zones” if more people sued when their right to express their political views is infringed. Maintaining public order is one thing, but removing peaceful and orderly protestors from parade routs to where they aren’t even in sight of the road is Nixonian.
I’d like to add that while I was listening to Bill Bennett’s morning show I heard that Cindy Sheehan, in addition to wearing her shirt, was being disruptive and even unfurled a banner! Of course these are blatant lies. This is typical of the conservative commentary on the right. They just can’t stop lying even about the little things.
As further evidence of business as usual, republicans elected John Boehner as House Leader. The openly crooked Roy Blunt will remain as majority whip. Boehner gets low grades from relatively conservative people for his support for the Medicare Prescription Bill and his lack of leadership on immigration reform. The liberal side is far more critical. Liberals remember Boehner as the guy who handed out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the floor of the House in the mid nineties. He also happens to be intimately involved with the “K Street Project,” having more former staffers working on K Street than Blunt.
This is reform republican-style. I’d like to be the first to congratulate the majority for “cleaning house.”
The State of the Union Address had two high points, although it was mostly just warmed-over leftovers from 2003. The first was the democratic applause when Bush said congress failed to pass social security reform, the funniest moment in any State of the Union I can remember. The second was Bush’s refernce to “human-animal hybrids.” No one I talked to or listened to on the radio could figure out what he was talking about. Others speculated that he was referencing Rick Santorum’s “Man on beast” comments about marriage, a practice that must be averted at all costs. I think the Preznit wants to curtail the secret CIA program to make human-wolf mutant warriors, a program that the CIA refuses to come clean about.
When the hearings on wiretapping and war intelligence finally start I don’t want to hear any of the watered-down shit I’ve been hearing from some on the right. Congress’s job isn’t to respectfully remind the president to obey the law. Congress tried to impeach Clinton over perjury about an affair. Doing any less when the president flagrantly and unapologetically violates the law by spying on thousands (or, depending on the reports, millions) would be an abomination.
John Dean wrote an excellent examination of the topic here, the best I have read so far. This administration has sunk to levels of illegality that rival Nixon’s ugliest offenses. To talk of a reprimand at this point is ludicrous.
A Zogby Poll recently came out that says that a majority of people say congress should consider impeaching the president if he wiretapped people without a warrant. I’ve recently seen polls that say the opposite, but neither poll means anything. Popular presidents who violate the law must be held accountable, and polls skew one way or the other depending on subtle changes in the wording of the questions. Forget about the evenly divided electorate’s opinion of the situation: what matters is the legality or illegality of the action. Most of the electorate, frankly, isn’t even well informed enough on the legality of the situation and the precedents to have a very knowledgeable opinion.
Unfortunately, while democrats are eager to begin hearings and prosecute the president republicans will see the evenly divided electorate as an opportunity to minimize the illegal actions of the president. While I have come to expect nothing less from the party of Bill Frist and Tom DeLay I think they will be crossing a very broad line between ordinary partisanship to flagrant abetment of criminal behavior. I’m talking about open lawlessness never before seen in this nation since the Civil War. Nixon didn’t have a captive congress to forgive his crimes. If republicans whitewash Bush’s misbehavior they will sink to a level of ignominy never before seen in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, we can expect no help from spineless democrats like Hillary Clinton. Every time she speaks on anything I increasingly feel that she got what she deserved when Willy cheated on her. She shames her state and her nation when the strongest criticism she can level against the program is that it’s “far-fetched” and “kind of strange.”
That is not leadership, Mrs. Clinton, that’s triangulation again, just like trying to regulate violent video games or ban flag burning.
Senator Roberts, the most slovenly congressperson in recent American history, has scheduled a hearing on February 16th to “discuss” the NSA program before being briefed on it. Where’s Phase II of the intelligence report again? And so the machinery of justice turns sloooooowly….
If this legal precedent passes future presidents will have no problem wiretapping or searching anyone for “national security” reasons without a warrant. If executives can do that to dig up information there will be no end to the searches without any need for probable cause. That is the end of the fourth amendment. Period. Just erase an entire amendment from the constitution and the Bill of Rights.
But even more importantly than that: the president unambiguously broke the law here, and I’m not talking about jaywalking. Where’s the outrage? Need I dig back in history to find the quotes from republicans regarding the importance of the law when they impeached Bill Clinton? No, I don’t. Daily Kos did it for me. There’s more than that. Every repuglican took time to bloviate on the sacredness of the law, from McCain to DeLay. Ouch! Getting lectured on “the rule of law” and “the higher road” by Tom DeLay!
I would like to close with a quote from the Bard:
But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven As to make the angels weep
And weep they will, I predict. I’m calling on you, congresspeople, to defend the law you so piously preached about in 1998. I want you to “defend the rule of law” like you did so nobly eight years ago, Dick Armey. You too, James Sensenbrenner. Remember the way you so poetically reminded us that "The office of the president is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United State," Lamar Smith? I remember Charles Canady (R-FL), and his convincing oration about “we can't just rebuke the president and move on,” no, “We are here because we have a system of government based on the rule of law, a system of government in which no one -- no one -- is above the law.” Mr. Hyde, do you remember your particularly apt “The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door.” Indeed! The 3 a.m. knock on your door from the FBI who will not need a warrant or probable cause to search your home! Do you remember, Chuck Hagel, “How can the rule of law for every American be applied equally if we have two standards of justice in America--one for the powerful and the other for the rest of us?" I agree. Bill Frist, do you remember that “I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the President. He is not above the law.”
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 5:35 PM 
