Author: phronesis

Having lived in Louisiana for almost 9 years from ’97 to ’05, I was thrilled to learn that David Vitter, Republican Senator from LA, has to explain to his wife and children why he is such a shitty husband.  And I am thrilled to apply to this asshole of a husband the same criterion I applied to another asshole of a husband Bill Clinton.  He shouldn’t be impeached.  He should, however, be made to march in next year’s Mardi Gras parade dressed as a penis.

Here’s how Vitter pontificated about Clinton in the Times Picayune.

Some current polls may suggest that people are turned off by the whole Clinton mess and don’t care — because the stock market is good, the Clinton spin machine is even better or other reasons. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office because he is morally unfit to govern.

The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers (No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

Regardless of what I think Vitter should do, the more important question is how can Vitter not resign after his grosteque moral failure?  How can Vitter not live up to his own representation of the Founders and act “in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness?”

C’mon Dave.  Tuck it in your pants and go home.  It’s time for you to leave the Senate.  In your own terms, you have no moral fitness to lead or to govern.  It’s time for you to quit.  

But Dave, I know you are so mired in hypocrisy and moral relativism that you won’t be able to disentangle your own desires from your professed principles.  

I’ve got your costume for next year’s Mardi Gras right here.

I know this is probably old news, but David Corn’s review of Michael Moore’s latest movie Sicko is …..well, you just gotta read it.

http://www.alternet.org/movies/55049/?page=3

Promoted by Steven D with minor edits to links (not content)

Today the U.S. Supreme Court made it crystal clear that it is the court for corporate power and wealth in opposition to free speech.

LINK

The New York Times’s article on SCOTUS decisions tells how one will allow corporations and unions to pour “issue ad” money into campaigns while the other denies high school students right to free speech. Onething about Republicans whether legislator, executive, or justice when you put stick your money up their nether end you get what you want to hear coming out of the other.

With absolutely no clue about the hypocrisy of these two decisions,

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that, when regulating what can be said in a campaign and when it may be said, “the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.”

The other case was an actual case of political speech not moeny masquerading as speech.  In Alaska a student held up a sign that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” accross the street from his school when the Olympic torch went by.  He was punished by the school, a punishment SCOTUS upheld.

the court found that a high school principal and school board did not violate a student’s rights by punishing him for displaying the words “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” on a banner across the street from the school as the 2002 Olympic torch parade went by.

When the case was argued on March 19, Kenneth W. Starr argued — successfully, as it turned out — on behalf of the school authorities that, whatever rights students may have to express themselves, thumbing their noses at school officials’ anti-drug messages is not one of them.

If that isn’t in your face fuck-you fascism, well hell, I ran out of F’s.  When the Supreme Court under the new Court-meister Roberts makes it so clear where it stands, one can only wonder why any Democrat voted for, let’s see, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, the fuck-you fascist four.

With this court I had better watch out. I can’t actually say they are the in your face, fuck-you, fascist four.  But I can pay someone to say it on TV.

I was listening to NPR about noon central and caught an interview with a guy (didn’t catch the name) who had been held in Guantanamo Bay by the President and Vice-President of Torture.  I didn’t catch how or if this guy described his treatment.  Suffice it to say that being detained for who knows what for who knows how long, without access to a lawyer or any  means of letting one’s family know one’s condition would be, well, like how Senator McCain spent seven years of his life in a North Vietnamese camp.  Or, like the American embassy staff held hostage by the lunatic right wing Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.

This detainee, who is now out, wrote several poems while in captivity.  Human, touching poems, one of which was written in repsonse to a poem written by this man’s female jailer who was a reservist from Alabama.  She was also plucked out of her life and stuck in Guantanamo for who knows how long.  At least she knew the why and had access to her family.  Her poem was about how much she had in common with this prisoner.  His poem was the same.  

It’s humbling and emotionally and spiritually overpowering to me that human beings can dig through the shit and find common meaning.  A twentieth century political philsopher said that we bear our citizenship as a burden in actualizing our humanity.  At least one Alabama reservist has made it through the shit to make a human contact with an “enemy.”

So my questions for Senator McCain are asked with heartfelt, genuine human interest, not for any “gotcha” attempt or to make a political point.  Senator, don’t you feel a connection to this prisoner? Can’t you understand his anger and bewilderment? Do you feel as badly as I do that we both must bear this systematic mistreatment of our fellow human beings, ostensibly done in our names, as a condition of actualizing our own humanity? How can you not speak out against this?

George Bush says he going on offense rather than defense, he’s going to use the military rather than the police to deal with terrorists whom he has defined as enemy combatants rather than criminals, he says he will use any and all methods including the most anti-American and inhumane tools of torture to fight the enemy, that it isn’t important to determine who did what to whom but it’s important to just kick somebody’s …anybody’s….. ass, and the American people said, “Cool.”  How can this be?  

Because Americans believe the message of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies; that violence committed by the pre-defined hero against the pre-defined enemy is redemptive.  That the murder committed by the Clint Eastwood character is different from the murder committed by the Eli Wallach character.  (Apparently with Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has become aware of the lies about violence which he told for most of his career; that violence is not redemptive or heroic, it is just sad, pathetic and de-humanizing.)  

These twentieth century American movie versions of the myth of regeneration through violence are built upon the predominant strain of American self-definition. Where did that myth come from?  It came from the attempts by the Europeans who invaded North America to make sense of the lives they created here.  The European universe of the mind which they carted over to North America with them didn’t explain life here.  On one level, our forebears created a Constitution to fit part of that new life.  They also created a new self-definition of what a Frenchman named Crevecoeur who came to America called, “this new man, this American.”  

In a nutshell, Europeans who came to America discovered that the European symbolic universe they brought with them didn’t work so well in North America.  

John Winthrop described their invasion of America as an enterprise that would be “a city upon a hill,” a beacon that would shine from New England back to the Old England about how to build a perfect society.  The Puritans didn’t emigrate to find the freedom to practice their religion.  They emigrated to form a utopian society based upon the exclusive practice of their religion.  (The lunatic, religious right in America has a tradition as long as any other.)   Puritans wanted to replicate the journey into the wilderness by the Israelites who, according to the founding myth of Israel, escaped from bondage in Egypt to freedom in Canaan.  In both instances, this was not a peaceful emigration into a wilderness but an invasion and conquering of previously established societies.  Canaan was not empty.  Neither was America

It is wrong to think that the Puritans (and this goes for the Spanish in Central and South America) didn’t know anyone lived in America.  Of course they knew.  Europeans had incorporated the existence of the “new world” into their symbolic universe ever since Columbus’s “discovery” of what he thought was the Indies.  Hence the invention of a new “race” of people that Europeans called “Indians.”  

(Parenthetically, this is precisely when Europeans invented racism.  The symbols Indian and Negro were created to deny the humanity of the people thus defined.  Indians and Negroes were not part of human civilization.  They were defined to be part of nature.  This is what makes the European symbols of “Indian” and “Negro” different from that of, for example, the Greek symbol of “barbaros.”  For the Greeks, barbarians were simply people from other human societies.  Our connotations of barbarians as rustic, uncouth, classless, well “barbaric,” are equivalent in that the humanity of those who are different is never in doubt.  Europeans who invented racism looked back into their past to find justifications that did not exist.  Racism denies a shared humanity.  But this is a whole other diary.)

In order for America to be the wilderness that Puritans were to immigrate into, the people already populating America had to be redefined as simply aspects of the wilderness, as parts of nature rather than of a shared humanity.   As such, the Pequot, Narragansett, Mohican, Lakota, Arapaho, Apache, Hopi, Nez Perce, (and many others) were all redefined in the European/American symbolic universe as “Indians,” as creatures of the wilderness who could then be conquered in the same manner as one felled the trees to create farmland, without remorse as part of creating one’s own civilization.  The humanity of the indigenous people was denied through their re-creation as denizens of the wilderness, as demons, as inhuman.  This could lead a well respected Puritan cleric, Cotton Mather, to gleefully equate the murderous arson of a Narragansett city which burned women and children in their homes as having the aroma of roasting “Westphalian gammons.”  

Imagine the impact on the Puritan symbolic universe when they discovered that they could not survive in their utopian, new world without incorporating aspects of the societies which already existed here and whose very existence as human societies the Puritans denied.   This discovery manifested itself in the Salem witchcraft hysteria.   How else could they explain that those living on the edges, on the frontier, were incorporating “Indian” ways to not only survive but to live well.  To the Puritan, they were becoming, by definition, demonic.  

This transformation from demonic to “this new man, this American” was the beginning of the new American myth of regeneration through violence.  The re-definition left the Puritan symbolic universe in ruins because they could only define those who were not themselves as demonic, but it created the new American mythical self-understanding.  As Europeans became Americans, as they incorporated more and more of “Indian” ways of living and surviving in the “new world” they had to somehow redefine themselves from being demons and denizens of the wilderness in the European symbolic universe to being “Americans.” Violence against the “Indians” was the means of this transformation.  

More in Part Three.

In a comment to NLinStPaul’s excellent diary “Something Elections Can’t Change” I said

A people are their myths.  America’s predominant myth was best defined by Richard Slotkin some thirty years ago as  Regeneration Through Violence.  It’s our oldest and most enduring self-definition.  We redeem our society through killing the “bad guy.”  Bush and Fox Television’s “24” have added torture to the mix.  Every movie from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that ends in a shootout or other orgy of violence and then cuts to the heroes standing arm in arm looking at the sunrise is an expression of this myth.  Every cop show from some cheezy episode of Miami Vice to “art” like L.A. Confidential is an expression of the same redemptive quality of violence.  So is Star Wars.  It is the violent act that is regenerative and it doesn’t matter who gets whacked.  It is who Americans are, and that’s why it was so easy for Bush to get to the beast after 9/11.  The myth says we can regenerate ourselves through violence.  The myth is a Big Lie.  The Narragansetts were not redeemed, nor the Lakota, nor all the other native people who were exterminated; nor the Mandinka, or Masai who were kidnapped and brought here.  But the majority myth is one of regeneration.  We may feel superior to the Aztec who sacrificed 80,000 human beings in one continuous orgy of religious fervor.  We too have our own pyramids of sacrifice.

To which NLinStPaul replied.  And no, I can’t be manipulated through blatant flattery.

I’d love to see a whole diary on this topic – and I think we know just the person who could do that (hint…hint).

Well, I guess I can. So here goes.  A meditation on why Americans define themselves through violence: in several parts, in deference to my readers, in order to limit the “my god, when is he going to end this stuff” thoughts.
Myths are how societies identify themselves to themselves.  The myth of American self-identification that Richard Slotkin identified as Regeneration Through Violence is the primordial American myth.  This is how the Europeans who came to North America first came to define themselves as residents of America rather than Europe. It remains how Americans self-define themselves at the deepest level.  

Why is this so? This first diary is about how human beings create the universe of the mind in which we live together.

Aristotle said that human beings are “by nature” political animals.  This was a commonplace to Greek political philosophers who thought that human beings could not fully actualize their humanity outside of the polis, outside of a shared community.  We are so because we possess logos, language or the ability to create meaning not just make noise.  We can create through logos the just and unjust, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly, the enhancing and the limiting, the good and the evil.  Logos is the capacity or power to create symbols.  It is the creation of meaning or of what sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman have called a symbolic universe.

The origins of a symbolic universe have their roots in the constitution (the nature) of man.  If man in soceity is a world-constructor, this is made possible by his constitutionally given world-openess, which already implies the conflict between order and chaos.  Human existence is ab initio an ongoing externalization.  As man externalizes, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself.  In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality.  Symbolic universes, which proclaim that all reality is humanly meaningful and call upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence, constitute the farthest reaches of this projection.

Even though Berger and Luckman wrote at a less gender bias aware time and use the term “man” for human being, their insight is still profound.  They assert that human beings “in society” not simply as human beings are “world constructors.”  The world constructed is a symbolic world, a universe of meaning.  It must be public, shareable among others.  It must give itself to the possiblity of re-enactment  by future generations.  A symbolic universe is not a privatized world defined by gender, race, class or any of those private things that also define humans.  It is not a hiding place, a place of refuge from the vissicitudes of existence.  

Eric Voegelin, a 20th century political philosopher, reaches the same point, beginning empirically with simply the fact of human existence on the planet, what he calls “participation in being.”  Participation in being is simply life itself.  It is not a “partial involvment,” it is “existence itself.” For human beings there is no “vantage point,” no “blessed island” outside of our existence that we can retire to to contemplate our navel, to get away from ourselves in order to find ourselves, or from which to view existence as a whole from the outside.  There is no nunc stans for us.  Human existence can be symbolized as a play in which the actor, the role, the director, and the play’s meaning are all uncertain and unknown and in which we are all forced to play a part.  Nevertheless, Voegelin asserts that “man’s participation in being is not blind but is illuminated by consciousness.”  We experience ourselves participating in something we call existence.  Voegelin urges caution, because as he puts it “there is no such thing” as a human being who participates in existence.  Our language can obscure as well as illuminate reality, and if we assume that “human being” and “existence” are objects in time and space which we relate to one another in language and if we assume that “existence” is an undertaking similar to writing a diary (an activity we can choose to do or not do) then our language is obscuring the point.  Existence is not “an enterprise (we) could as well leave alone.”  As Voegelin puts it

there is, rather, a “something,” a part of being, capable of experiencing itself as such, and futhermore capable of using language and calling this experiencing consciousness by the name of “man.”

This act of evocation is a creation of a symbolic universe of meaning which becomes home.  By this act of evocation human beings articulate an experience of consubstantiality with, but no longer an exact identity with, the larger community of being.  The act of self-expression identifies the human as an autonomous part of being but it does not separate human being out of being iself.  Rather “it calls upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence.”  

The symbol “human being” represents a universe of meaning that is existentially open, it is shareable by all human beings.  It symbolizes a community of all human beings based upon a common experiential identity as an autonomous part of the All.  Its openness proclaims that “all reality is humanly meaningful.”

The capacity to engender symbols is the only means with which human beings are possessed enabling them to share experiences, to make what is invisible–our own epxeriences–public and visible and open to others.  It is this capacity which Aristotle described as our communal nature as human beings.  What makes us communal beings (what Aristotle called “political” or “of the polis) by nature is the ability to create symbolic realities–communities engendered by symbolic expressions of common experiences–within which meaning is given to both indivudal and communal existence.

That the creation of symbolic universes is a societal as well as individual phenomenon does not imply that societies create them.  Only individual human beings are capable of experiencing reality and expressing that through language.  Consciousness enables us to re-enact the symbolic expressions of others as well as generate our own.  By compellingly symbolzing common experience, one’s personal expression of experience becomes representatively meaningful for one’s society and illuminates that soceity with meaning from within.  It becomes a symbolic reality within which others live and gain meaning.  Richard Slotkin has described mythology as

a complex of naratives that dramatizes the world-vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors.

 
Slotkin’s definition of myth implies that it is representative of a culture or society because it gives a shareable meaning to the private experiences (the expectations, memories, anxieties and hopes) of its individual members.  A society is therefore not an “objective fact” nor is it an entity that can only be described using social scientific quantifications.  A society is not only an external event in history that exists in space and time, it is fundamentally an event in consciousness.  

Certainly societies are material things.  Buildings, institutions, people who are born and die and leave hints of themselves, are all the material stuff of society.  But these things did not create the society.  In terms of existential meaning, society is a datum of experience, not materiality.  It is a unverse of meaning generated by the symbolic expressions of experience by the human beings living within it.  Society cannot be grasped or expressed from without: “it is” as Voegelin puts it “a whole little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-actualization.”

The self-illumination of society through symbols is an integral part of social reality, and one may even say its essential part, for through such symbolization the members of society experience it as more than an accident or a convenience; they experience it as of their human essence.

Existential representation is therefore an ephemeral thing.  Human experience in soceity must continually be re-interpreted through the lens of the existing symbolic universe of meaning.  When that symbolic unvierse becomes old and creaky, when as Socrates or Plato put it “when the gods themselves become unseemly,” then existential meaning has to re-defined.  The formulation and re-formulation of the exisential meaing of society is politics.  We are living at a time in need of such a re-definition.  In order to redefine how Americans represent themselves to themselves and others we need to understand the current manifestation.

Whether we define society as an “event of consciousness” or as Voegelin’s “mode and condition” of actualizing our humanity or as Berger and Luckman’s world into which humans externalize themselves, we can see that all of these definitions share one common feature.  Human beings are world creators in that we create symbolic realities within which to find a shareable meaning for our private experiences.  But there are a multitude of symbolic realities, each claiming to make all of reality humanly meaningful, each truthfully claiming that their own “mode and condition” makes the actualization of their American-nes, Lakota-ness, Christian-ness, Muslim-ness, equivalent to the actualization of their humanity.

This multiplicty should not lead us to attempt to rank them on some kind of vertical, hierarchical scale (with our own on the top or the bottom depending on how we’re feeling about it).  This will result in the kind of ideological deformation of reality that we see in the variety of fundamentatlisms currently infecting the world whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic or atheisitc that compels one to exclusively claim the ownerhsip of what is human.  However, we don’t have to become relativists either and say that all symbolic realities are equal.  They’re not.

The existential openness of the symbol “human being” is paradigmatic, it is the model by which to compare and judge and the openness and existential authenticity of particular symbolic representations of the world into which humans beings in society externalize themselves.  For example, in God Is Red Vine Deloria, Jr. lists the names of twenty-seven tribes of American Indians, twenty-three of which represent themselves by the name of “people” in one form or another.  The experience of membership in tribal soceity is seen as equivalent to being human.  The humanity of indivudal human beings can only be actualized with the tribe-polis.  Even given the intensity of the experience of coincidence of ones’s tribal membership with one’s humanity for the Lakota, for example, the “people” was not an exclusive community defined by race.  The symbolic universe of meaning embraced by the Lakota was existentially open.  A sign of this openness is the absence of proselytization.  The Lakota did not seek to convert the rest of humanity to their view of reality.  They did, howevever, accept into their society anyone who desired inclusion.  The Lakota believe that one is most human when living within their tribal symbolic universe of meaning, but not solely so.  The Puritans who emigrated to America and to whom we owe one of the first expressions of the symbolic universe defined as regeneration through violence, believed that one is only human when living within their symbolic reality.

When a symbolic reality and its languages of expression and legitimation is based upon the denial of the humanity of those not included within it, it ceases to be a symbolic reality and becomes a crusading ideology, a substitute reality not capable of being shared beyond that described by a Spanish Conquistador who claimed to be spreading Christianity by putting his faith onto his sword and his sword into the “Indian.”

I’ve made you suffer enough.  More to come that is specifically related to our inauthentic yet incredibly resilient myth of Regeneration Through Violence.

Promoted by Steven D.

A wise 20th century political philospher said that human beings bear their citizenship in their particular society as a condition of actualizing their humanity.  Keep that in mind as you read further.  

Booman’s diary on Seymour Hersh’s outstanding article led me to this short one.  While reading Hersh’s New Yorker article, I only got to this comment by General Taguba:

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects–`We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’–is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

before I had to stop and write this.

Taguba’s statement is the definitive description of the Bush adminstration.  Bush was going nowhere prior to the attacks of 9/11, he gleefully used those attacks to deceitfully redefine himself with the collusion of non-thinking members of Congress, the press and the public (except for a lot of us writing in the frog pond….go back and read the diaries), he used those attacks to settle a personal score with a fellow dictator, and he wrapped it all up in a pathetic patina of patriotism.  Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, Wolfowitz, Pace, Powell, Rove, (believe me the fucking list is endless) have so dishonored our country that America is now referred to in other countries in words that we ourselves used to describe the Nazis in the 1940s.  Thanks George, you recidivistic drunken drug addict.  And thanks corporate media for being the handmaidens of fascism.

So, why is it that our Democratic leaders in Congress can’t bring themselves to refer to this adminstration in the harshest of all possible words to condemn their lying, their corruption and their depravity?  Why is it that our Democratic leaders in Congress can’t bring themselves to do all they can to block, impede, and derail every single effort of this fascistic, liberty stealing adminstration?  I can only refer them to a fine movie, Misissippi Burning in which Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe portray FBI agents trying to solve the murder of three civil rights workers.  During a confrontation between the two of them about how to proceed with the investigation, the Hackman character says “These people crawled out of the sewer” and that is where they will have to be fought.  How apropo to Bush and his cronies:  these people have crawled out of the sewer, they have dragged our country and our honor down into the sewer, and have sullied the honor of true patriots like General Taguba, Joe and Valerie Wilson, Richard Clark, Cindy Sheehan, (this list is endless as well).

It’s time for Congress to send these denizens of the sewer back home.  Impeach Cheney Bush Gonzales and 5/9ths of the Supreme Court.  If the Founders didn’t mean this remedy to be used for precisely this kind of attack on our Constitution, our nation’s honor, and our civic liberty, then they simply didn’t mean it at all.  

Congress, it’s time to get us the fuck out of the sewer.  Do something, or God willing, the citizens of this nation will do something in 2008 to eliminate those who go along to get along, who however reluctantly allow their honor to be filthyfied (sorry I couldn’t find a better real word) by Bush or by their own Presidential aspirations.  

Leaders lead.  Leaders define a moral vision for a country, a business, a homeowners association.  It doesn’t matter what the group is, leaders lead.  It means they’re out in front, they’ll upset people who are afraid or benefitting from the status quo.  But leaders have the fortitude to lead and compel us to follow because their vision is, well, compelling.  So Pelosi, fucking lead dammit.  

And I think you’ll have to do it yourself.  Cuz Harry ain’t up to it.  Are Clinton? Obama? Don’t know about them right now.  But I do know that Pelosi could be the moral leader of our sick country right now if she could only find the balls that many of her colleagues seem to have misplaced.

As we all know, the overarching mission of the Bush Administration has been the continual usurpation of federal government power by the Executive branch.  

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2006/6/19/153634/825

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/5/31/202718/252

http://www.alternet.org/story/52801/?page=2

Majorie Cohn of AlterNet writes that on May 9th, Bush signed “The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive.”  In this directive, Bush assigns all functions of the federal government to himself.  If there were a terror attack or Rovian incident, or natural disaster…

The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.

In other words, “fuck the Congress and the Supreme Court, I, Chimpus Maximus, will run everything.  Because God says so; because I’ve done so well on everything else.”

Every thing Bush has done has been done in the name of the “unitary executive.”  This idea was first propounded by John Yoo, former deputy ass’t AG.

The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch

 This is simpy and straight-forwardly a call for monarchy or worse, tyranny, dressed up in right wing lawyer-ese.  Not surprisingly, after this Bush started using the idea in his cowardly signing statements.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2006/6/6/164120/5736

Bush’s appointees to the Supreme Court are part of this purpose.  

In a November 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, then Judge Samuel Alito said the Constitution “makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.”

Or, as the other fascist lackey on the Supreme Court, stated…

In his lone dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Clarence Thomas cited “the structural advantages of a unitary Executive.” He disagreed with the Court that due process demands an American citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker. Thomas wrote, “Congress, to be sure, has a substantial and essential role in both foreign affairs and national security. But it is crucial to recognize that judicial interference in these domains destroys the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in a unitary Executive.”

Bush aims to dissolve all federal regulatory agencies, even those created by Congress and part of that co-equal branch of government.

These “unitarians” claim that all federal agencies, even those constitutionally created by Congress, are beholden to the Chief Executive, that is, the President. This means that Bush could disband agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Reserve Board, etc., if they weren’t to his liking.
Indeed, Bush signed an executive order stating that each federal agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee. Consumer advocates were concerned that this directive was aimed at weakening the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The unitary executive dogma represents audacious presidential overreaching into the constitutional province of the other two branches of government.

I will let Marjorie Cohn state the obvious.

One wonders what Bush & Co. are setting up with the new Presidential Directive. What if, heaven forbid, some sort of catastrophic event were to occur just before the 2008 election? Bush could use this directive to suspend the election. This administration has gone to great lengths to remain in Iraq. It has built huge permanent military bases and pushed to privatize Iraq’s oil. Bush and Cheney may be unwilling to relinquish power to a successor administration.

Ms Cohn uses the terms “wonders” and “may” to describe Bush and Cheney unwillingness to leave office.  She’s being generous.  Anyone who predicts a Karl Rove incident in 2008 to allow Bush to usurp complete federal power has a great chance to be correct.  This way the Bush Administration will be bookended by two cooked up events allowing the tyrannical theft of our liberty.

The title of this diary should be the day’s first thought (well for me it will be second after “damn, my wife still has a great ass”) for all American citizens.  All of us who hop around the frog pond and read one another’s ideas and opinions know the reasons to impeach the current occupier of the Presidency: lying us into a war, incompetence and negligence in the failure to protect a major American city, advocating and carrying out torture, illegally and immorally detaining thousand of innocent people in Guantanamo, illegally outing a covert CIA operative, etc., etc. etc. ;The list is enormous.  

However, the most important impeachable offense is the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.  It is blatantly against the law.  No matter how much Bush wants American citizens to buy his bullshit that the law is what he says it is whether in chicken-shit- behind-the-back signing statements or just in executive pronouncements, the plain fact is that we have a Constitution and a set of laws and Bush is subject to those laws as are we all.  Impeaching Bush is simply holdling him accountable to the Constitution.  The question of whether there are any people in the House with the courage to follow the lead of Dennis Kucinich (I can’t believe I have no idea how to spell the name of a Presidential candidate) and pass Articles of Impeachment.

The editors of The Nation wrote an editorial called Sick Justice in the current issue.   The story of the sick AG courageously standing up to the carnivorous pair of Card and Gonzales, the so called ethical stands of Comey and Mueller and the revelation that Gonzales’s attempt to politicize the Justice Department, is a wonderful story but one which obscures as much as it illuminates.  

The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey’s foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller’s startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens’s being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.

The histrionics of that night, recounted by Comey to the Senate Judiciary Committee after three years, further erode Alberto Gonzales’s already fatally compromised capacity to run the Justice Department. And they expose an internal Administration conflict between hyper-politicized operatives like Card, Gonzales and Karl Rove and Justice professionals like Comey–Bush appointees who nonetheless understood that their oath was to the Constitution. But there is also a risk that the drama of this good guys/bad guys confrontation–with Comey protecting his boss the way Michael Corleone took it on the chin for the Don at that lonely, dark hospital in The Godfather–is obscuring the real story: just how many ways the Bush Administration was finding to break the law, and just how high the chain of complicity ran:

Just how criminal is the Bush Administration.  Well, it is at least this criminal.

1.  After senior Justice Department officials had reviewed Bush’s illegal wiretapping scheme and determined that it was a blatant violation of the surveillance law,

Card, Gonzales and Bush himself all indicated their intention to go forward anyhow.  In plain English, that is a conspiracy.

2.  For two years Bush endorsed secret NSA wiretaps without a warrant under FISA.

In other words, for two years the NSA and telephone companies had been commiting a federal crime with the full endorsement of the White House.

3.  The editors charge Bush with fraud.  According to Comey’s testimony

the President himself called the wife of the critically ill Ashcroft and asked her to let Gonzales and Card visit his bedside.  When they arrived they tried to persuade the sedated Ashcroft to approve the illegal taps.  But Ashcroft had already signed over his AG authority to Comey, who consequently carried carried the title Acting Attorney General

Why is the statement I highlighted important?  Because, according to Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman, quoted by The Nation

this means that Bush, Gonzo, and Card were seeking the signature of Ashcroft, “who was not only incapacitated but not even acting in an official capacity.

This can only mean that Bush, Gonzales and Card had one purpose, what the editors call “a chilling motive:”   As Lederman puts it,

Obviously, they did so in order that they could present a fraudulent certification, of soneone who was not at the time acting as AG, to the NSA and/or to the telecom companies.”,/blockquote>
In other words, Bush tried to get the signature to authorize his wiretapping program from somone who was not authorized to give it.

All of this illuminates the length to which the current occupier of the White House will go to destroy traditional American freedom.  It’s time for him to leave, to not pass Go, to not kill one more American soldier or Marine, to leave so that we can begin to recover our moral standing in the world.  It’s time for George to clear brush.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/52290/?page=1

While the Democrats caved on setting a timetable to end Bush’s murder of our military in Iraq and of our capability to defend ourselves against real terrorist threats, the Republicans are floating trial balloons on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.  They are doing this, not out of any concern for our troops but for their own asses in the 2008 election.  What is so pathetic for the spineless Democratic leadership is the fact that when timetables are adopted, the Republicans will take credit for it.  The Republicans depend on a citizenry with the attention span of a 4 year old and a spineless Democratic leadership.

Jim Hightower’s article in AlterNet is an already constructed spine for Nancy and Harry.  We, the democratic base and the American people, may have to shove this spine up their ass to get them to actually have a spine, but this is a good start.

Hightower’s piece called Can You Believe This War is Still Going On? is long but well worth the effort.  Maybe Pelosi and Reid can each have an intern read it.  Here’s a few points to remember.

1.  This is Bush’s War
2.  He lied us into his war.
3.  He has continually demonstrated that he is incompetent to win this war.

And how has this made our country worse off? Hightower says this way better than I.

Asked in January 2003 what the price tag was for the Bushites’ upcoming Iraq attack and occupation, Donny Rumsfeld said that the budget office forecast “a number that’s something under $50 billion.”

Not quite right. Iraq is now costing us $6 billion a month (the surge will be extra), and total direct costs through this year will top $500 billion. Included in that is $12 billion that was airlifted in 2003 to the interim Iraqi government in shrinkwrapped stacks of $100 bills (the load weighed 363 tons) and promptly disappeared. Poof…gone!

Add in such indirect costs as veterans’ long-term health care and replacement of the military hardware consumed by the war, and the tab runs to $1.2 trillion or more. David Leonhardt, a New York Times economic analyst, has itemized some other things we could’ve bought with that sum instead of the mess in Iraq. His list includes:

TEN YEARS of universal health care, covering every American who is now without it.
DOUBLING the cancer research budget.
GLOBAL IMMUNIZATION of the world’s children against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, TB, polio, and diptheria.
UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL for every 3- and 4-year-old child in America.
RECONSTRUCTION of New Orleans.
IMPLEMENTATION of all of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.

But even given these facts, Pelosi and Reid couldn’t summon the leadership stones to stick to their stated principle of getting us out of Iraq.  No wonder the electorate think Democrats are weak.  We are led by two who are.

But maybe we can hope that Hightower might be able to give them some backbone.

In a tragi-comic bit of presidential posturing, Bush assembled a dozen or so veterans, soldiers, and family members in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House for a media show on March 23. With these human “stage props” lined up behind him, George lashed out at congressional Democrats for passing a bill requiring withdrawal from Iraq next year. Without even a smile of irony, Bush called the Democrats’ effort “an act of political theater.”

Well, this particular withdrawal bill won’t get the job done, but it’s a reflection of the broad public demand to stop this horrible folly. Roughly two thirds of Americans want out of Iraq by next year, and 54% support a cutoff of funds for Bush’s surge. Even the troops in Iraq want a withdrawal, for only 35% of those polled by Military Timeslast December said that they approve of George W’s handling of the war.

Still, some progressives despair. They say that last year’s elections were a clear mandate for withdrawal, but the Democrats have been weak and the killing continues, so what’s the use? That’s right on the facts, but totally wrong on the attitude. We made great strides last year, and we’ve changed the national debate on the war. Yes, Bush and Cheney are boneheads, and the Democratic leadership has Jello in its spine, but what did you expect? Popular movements have always had to muster the tenacity to overcome disappointments– and ours is no different. Come on–we’ve got ’em on the run! Far from being down, take energy from the gains we’ve made–and keep pushing on. No one is going to stop the war but us.

Apparently, like the war of my youth, this one will only be stopped by massive unrest.  As Jefferson put it when confronted with tyrannical executive power, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

There is apparently no political party in America that cherishes this founding principle of our government, so it’s up to We The People.