In terms of individuals, good people do weird stuff on occasion: run off, or inexplicably go on a bender, or visit purveyors of easy virtue, or get addicted, or use hate-speech in extremis and so on. Stuff happens.

Nations, too, often take leave of their senses. Crises occur. Citizens get frightened by something and don’t know how to respond. A strong leader comes along and channels that fright, usually aiming it at perceived enemies, real or invented, or at least highly exaggerated.

The powers-that-be love crises and catastrophes; at such nodal points, the public is more malleable, more easily rolled. (See Naomi Klein’s brilliant book “The Shock Doctrine.”)

And when these power-hungry rulers or elites grossly abuse their granted authority, the result often is social chaos, police-state laws, warped or broken economies, and often hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dead and maimed in ill-advised wars of choice.

AUTHORITARIAN RULERS

History is replete with examples of nations, even democratic ones, that go crazy like this for awhile, head off into authoritarian rule, and sometimes even totalitarian control. And it isn’t easy to turn that ship around. Sometimes that reversal can be accomplished by the populace, who wake up to what atrocities are being carried out in their name and throw the bums out at the next election, or by a coup. Sometimes natural death intervenes, making intervention moot. Other times, it takes a village, so to speak: The regional or world community has to act in concert to force a change in behavior by removing the ruling elite from the country in question.

You know what I’m talking about. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Amin, George W. Bush.

You may think it’s unfair to throw Dubya into that line-up of political monsters, and I agree that not all miscreants are equal. George W. is no Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin.

But it’s fair to acknowledge that Bush does deserve to be in that continuum of grossly awful leaders who used and then abused their power and, by so doing, brought their countries to wrack and ruin and to worldwide condemnation and shame. Because Bush was in charge of the world’s most powerful nation on earth, his crimes were magnified in their consequences and in their regional and global social impact, so his place in the pantheon of shame is correct.

WHY BUSH IS STILL A DANGER

So why am I bringing up Bush now, after a democratic election has, as it were, thrown out the bums? Am I being mean-spirited, just beating a dead horse?

Two reasons:

1. Bush will still be president for the next two months. Out of failed ideology and thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence, he has left his successor with an ungodly mess to deal with. But he ain’t through yet. He has concocted, so to speak, a scorched-earth welcome-to-the-White-House for Barack Obama, along with burrowing key political-appointed Bushies into civil-service positions of power in order to gum up the works even more for the incoming administration.

By executive order in the past several months, Bush, for example, has bent all sorts of environmental rules and regulations to give the exploiters and polluters even more leeway to take what they want, including permitting cutting some of the last old-growth forests in Oregon and oil/gas drilling in public lands and immediately adjacent to key National Parks, in particular in Utah. The idea is to get these projects started, with money in the federal pipeline, before Bush leaves office, making it more difficult for the Obama Administration to execute an immediate U-turn.

In addition, Bush has taken many of his mid-level political appointees and placed them under the civil-service umbrella in jobs overseeing energy and science experiments for which they are not trained or have no experience. Being civil service employees makes it virtually impossible for the new president to get rid of them. In effect, they would be moles inside the new government in key positions to harm or hamstring Obama’s environmental policies. Among many others complaining about this last-minute tactic by Bush are scientists, angry that political ideologues with no scientific training will have important input on scientific policy.

AUTHORITARIAN-TYPE RULES

2. Many of the authoritarian rules and precedents established during the CheneyBush years are still in place, and could be abused by Obama or presidents who follow him. True, Obama’s transition team has listed 200 of Bush’s executive orders that they will rescind quickly with the stroke of a pen. But some of the larger issues are still hanging out there:

* The overuse of presidential “signing statements” to nullify aspects of laws passed by the Congress, as part of the “unitary executive” theory of government, which theory basically turns the president into a near-dictator;

* The policy of “pre-emptive war,” attacking a country that is not an actual imminent threat to the U.S.;

* The use of torture as official state policy;

* The nullification of the legal concept of habeas corpus from American law, whereby a judge has to certify the legitimacy of an arrest;

* The employment of massive domestic spying on and data mining of American citizens, including eavesdropping without a court warrant on phone conversations, snooping into mail, examining personal computer files without the knowledge of the citizen, etc;

* The throwing of citizens into jail as suspected “terrorists” or “enemy combatants,” with no access to lawyers; etc. etc.

All of these violations of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, in the Patriot Act and elsewhere, have been enacted on a regular basis during the past eight years of CheneyBush. How much of this will be quickly and aggressively reversed by Obama and how much will he keep some of these police-state tactics still in place, just in case he wants to use them?

TRUST OBAMA TO DO RIGHT THING?

Which brings us to a key dilemma facing the progressive base of the Democratic Party: After eight years under CheneyBush, during which the U.S. was lost in a dark ideological/corrupt shadow world, President-Elect Obama promises us, finally, the return of light in our politics so that we can find our way back to some higher level of moral/spiritual/social health. He probably won’t take the country as far in that regard as many of us might wish, but his landslide victory did break the back of the CheneyBush HardRight as an all-powerful movement and offers us, yes, hope for significant change and progress in righting many of the wrongs of the past eight years.

As many of us have been saying for months now, if you believe Obama will do, or even can do, all of the many things he’s promised, you’re in for a rude surprise. Obama is not a radical or progressive in how he operates; he’s a pragmatic centrist, with liberal leanings but beholden to many of the same economic and political forces that have great influence in contemporary politics. But he’s an unusually intelligent politician, open to argument and persuasion. That’s why we on the progressive left must speak out forcefully when we see him straying from positions that we think can be most useful in repairing the damage of the past eight years.

So here’s the nub of our current dilemma, much talked about in liberal/progressive circles: How much should we trust Obama to do the right thing and thus hold back our criticisms of his actions and policies during this interregnum before he actually is inaugurated as President and during the first few-months “honeymoon” period? And how much should we start criticizing him now for his sins of omission and commission, especially with regard to his somewhat more hawkish foreign/military policies? (See Jeremy Scahill’s “This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House.”)

SLACK VS. PRESSURE

My inclination, given the enormity of the problems facing the new president, is to cut Obama some slack, at least until he takes office and starts messing up. On the other hand, he’s making key decisions now, especially as he fills out his Cabinet and operational staff, and unless progressives take a stand now, it may be too late later.

For instance, as far as we can tell, most of his national-security appointments seem to come from the middle to the middle-right; there is not one true progressive who can balance out the arguments that will be made inside the Cabinet. Not a good sign.

I’ll be interested to hear where you come down on this dilemma. How we act in the next few months may have much to do with how President Obama begins his Administration post-January 20. Join the debate and help “change the world.”

Yes, I know that you and other European friends are, as you put it, “totally confused” by what’s happening here in the U.S. right now. Welcome to the club. I wish I could answer all your questions about America’s current political/economic crisis with definitive certainty. But the situation is moving real fast, with one disaster after another, and with politicians flip-flopping all over the place.

As a result, it’s difficult to know precisely what’s going on, but I’ll do the best I can. Here are my responses to your italicized questions about McCain, Obama, the financial crisis and bailout, and electoral corruption:

1. BEYOND THE “CRAZY” FACTOR

“Bush, with his policies and wars, has nearly wrecked the U.S. Constitution and economy and America’s moral standing abroad. We don’t understand why your John McCain, so closely associated with the Bush policies that brought these disasters upon your country and the world, should be nearly even in the polls with Obama. Have you guys gone crazy?”

Short answer: Everyone goes “crazy” for awhile now and again. European history is also replete with such examples. In the American TV age, celebrity trumps experience: We feel we “know” these candidates, since we’ve seen them on the big screen or had them in our living-rooms nearly every night. In recent years, don’t forget, we elected a Grade-B movie actor as president (Ronald Reagan). We elected a professional wrestler and a professional bodybuilder as governors (Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger). We elected a song-and-dance man a U.S. Senator (George Murphy). By and large, those experiments didn’t turn out well and did great damage to the body politic, but the fascination with celebrity is still there.

As to why McCain is nearly even with Obama in the polls, part of the explanation is that racism is alive and well in the U.S. A healthy chunk of the electorate, maybe 10% (and much higher in some states, especially in the South), simply will not vote for a black man. Sometimes, they’re quite open about their reason for not supporting Obama; mostly they hide their racism by citing other supposed rationales: “elitist,” “not one of us,” “doesn’t share our values,” etc.

Then there’s the mask element. McCain, for purposes of gaining the presidency, saw that Obama’s change&hope mantra had captured the mood of the public. So, since his own issues weren’t catching on, McCain is now Mr. Change, has re-donned the mask of “maverick reformer,” and is running against the disreputable Republican record of the past eight years.

McCain apparently is hoping that voters will forget he was a major ultra-conservative part of that record — he voted for Bush policies 90% of the time, for example, including approval of torture as state policy. But that chameleon trick seems to fool a good many voters. Plus, he added the younger, attractive Sarah Palin to the ticket and she joined him in the charade about “reform” and “change,” saying she and McCain “will shake things up in Washington.” But she’s silent about the extreme, rightwing nature of the “change” she has in mind.

As many wise men have said, you can’t go wrong underestimating the intelligence of the American voter. On the other hand, the more the public sees and hears the one-note Alaska governor, and learns more about her lack of qualifications and about the abuse-of-power way she governs, the less attractive she looks as a VP and potential president.

2. FREE-MARKET SOCIALISM

“America in general, and your Republican party in particular, is big on free-market capitalism, keeping the government out of the hair of business. Now the Republican government, supported also by Democrats, is making a 180-degree turn and urging regulation of corporations, and using billions in tax dollars to prop up failing big businesses, even going so far as to buy huge shares of these corporations. What the hell is happening? To us in Europe, who have seen similar alliances between government and business turn into authoritarian control, we can’t understand why the U.S. citizens are not revolting.”

The corporate elites who control the political system here just want to make profits. Most of the time, they do this best when they keep government at arms’-length from them. But in times of crisis, they go eagerly to Washington for help.

In short, in good times they’re capitalists, in bad times socialists — but only for the rich. Middle-class and poor folks recently got the foot of a burdensome new bankruptcy law placed on their necks. But the upper classes are provided privileged ways to avoid going under. It is ever thus, but it’s gone to extreme lengths in the organized looting system for the wealthy arranged by the CheneyBush Administration.

What’s been almost laughable is watching McCain, who has been a deregulationist all his political life, on Monday talking about the necessity for not letting government get involved in bailing out failing businesses, and on Tuesday he’s proposing that the government start regulating these banks and corporations and get into the private business of selling insurance and mortgages. From deregulator to proponent of nationalizing giant corporations — that’s how fast the economic-disaster quicksand sucked McCain into the vortex.

And Obama came along quickly as well, even though he has important caveats of opposition. Though the Democrats are plugging for ways to aid the middle-class in this economic bailout, neither party or candidate wants to risk being held responsible for a full-scale financial meltdown and collapse of the U.S. economy. So, at least for the moment, everyone’s theoretically on board.

“Too big to be allowed to fail”

The rationale for the federal bailout plan is that these companies are too huge, too intertwined in so many areas of the economy, to risk them going under. It’s like the Italian government saying that the Mafia is too big and thus too important to the Italian economy (read: jobs, contribution$) to let them fail, so we’ll just prop them up, look the other way while the looting and violence takes place, and roll along on our merry way.

Yes, of course, these corporations are huge, sprawling, multi-headed behemoths, but the politicians never want to examine how they got to the point of untouchability. How many times have we seen how deregulating industry has resulted in economic and/or social disaster? Anybody remember Enron? The S&L collapse of the ’80s (in which a compromised McCain was right in the middle, by the way)? And now Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? And Lehman Brothers? And AIG? And Morgan Stanley? Et al.

The ghost of the 1930s Great Depression is hovering over the present crisis. Indeed, so fast is the house of cards tumbling down, with more major corporations expected to follow, that the politicians, regardless of party, are falling all over themselves to create an institutional feather cushion to catch these failing enterprises as they crash toward insolvency. These are socialism-like measures, as was true in FDR’s New Deal days as well, designed to forestall another Great Depression and maybe even revolution. Except these socialist-seeming solutions are not designed to aid the bulk of the population, the middle-class and poor, but to provide aid and sustenance to the wealthy titans of industry. The rest of us will be expected to pay the bill, probably more than a trillion dollars when all is said and done, since the plan also may include bailing out troubled foreign banks who dived into the giant profit-making machine in the U.S. (This massive federal bailout is being considered at the same time when the cost for America’s current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is approaching the trillion-dollar mark.)

The proposed federal bailout of the failing corporations is the ultimate crime caper, well understood by those who have read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Few in their right mind would agree to any of this in normal times, especially expressing a willingness to trust this same President and Administration who have proven themselves reckless, incompetent, secretive, lying power-mongers. But under leaked provisons of the plan, Congress would turn over virtually full control of the trillion-plus dollars for this new program to the Executive Branch (via the Treasury Secretary), with no outside oversight permitted, not by Congress and not by the courts. Here’s the wording in the original plan: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Given the massive effects on the body/social politic, it really doesn’t matter if the use of “shock-doctrine” tactics happens as a conscious elitist plot to foment the crisis or follows a genuine crisis that, willy nilly, provides the plutocrats with their opportunity to use the catastrophe to their own economic and power benefit. The result is the same: Ordinary citizens, especially in the middle-class, take it in the neck — and wallet — and constitutional government is damaged badly.

The Inevitable Fallout From Greed

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told an anxious public the other day that things should get better now that the government is dealing with the “heart of the matter.” He seems to think the “heart of the matter” has to do with moving cash around to keep the house of cards propped up, at least in the public mind.

But the “heart of the matter” has to do with the promulgation of greed as the operating principle in American economic (and social and political) life. It’s been that way openly for the past 30 years, at least since Reagan’s presidency. We profess shock, shock!, when after a few years that principle leads inexorably to disaster. When those crises develop, invariably the elites arrange themselves massive bailouts, the corporate executives suffer nary a wit, the taxpayers (and their children and grandchildren) are expected to meekly pony up, and then, there being no accountability for bad management, these ethically-challenged magnates feel free to go out and do the same thing again until the next major crisis.

In fact, the moral lesson many CEOs might derive from this experience is: If you’re going to engage in high-stakes over-leveraging and gambling on derivatives, don’t do it in a small-scale way. Make your corporations so very huge and so important to the system that nobody will want to risk upsetting the social/financial apple cart. So be sure to put at risk as much investor-money as you possibly can and that way, if something goes wrong (and inevitably it will), you’ll get bailed out by the government. Small scams will get you nothing and might even lead to you getting arrested; but humongous unwise schemes, the bigger the better, will give you a free ride at taxpayers’ expense. Which mostly means by us small-fry.

It IS crazy. And angering. And not just to liberals; many conservatives also are horrified by the ramifications of the governmental bailout. (As I write this, it’s still not clear if and when the much-amended bailout plan might be voted on and whether it will pass in anything close to its original outline.)

3. OBAMA CAN’T/WON’T DO IT ALL

“Will Obama really make a difference? Can he? Didn’t Bush and Cheney and their cronies mess things up so badly that nobody will be able to do much?”

Short answer: Yes, even if Obama wanted to institute major changes, he would have to face the unenviable task of trying to undo all the damage done by this Administration. To do so successfully might take a decade or two, especially because HardRightists have been placed into key positions in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and mass-media outlets. Even if McCain loses, Obama will face a constant, nasty battle to get anything decent done. (And if the Democrats in November don’t pick up enough seats in the Senate to block Republican filibusters, the job will be even more difficult.)

Many progressives/liberals have chosen to believe that Obama is one of them and is willing, indeed eager, to shake up the system in a radical way. Don’t count on it. I am enthusiastically working for and donating money to his campaign, but I have lowered my expectations. Obama is a centrist with some liberal leanings, but beholden to many of the same elitist forces that dominate most power-centers in this country. And his foreign-policy views, while more cautious and realistic, rest on the dangerous exceptionalist premise that the U.S. should be the military policeman in the world.

Obama certainly is bright, thoughtful, and full of good ideas, but the best we can expect would be something like Bill Clinton. Given how far right the country has moved in the past several decades — the center is now regarded as “left” — we on the progressive end of the spectrum will have to spend a lot of time and effort pressuring a President Obama to do what’s right, given the other forces operating on him. I continue to believe that Obama has within him the possibility of being a dynamic, transformational president, but we shouldn’t expect him to be a progressive superman. That’s not who he is.

4. THE ROLE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

“Is there any kind of party loyalty and discipline in your presidential elections? Or do voters in America make their decision purely on personal, rather than policy, matters.”

Short answers: No and yes. Americans have a disconnect when voting for president. What the parties stand for hardly matters anymore. How the candidates have voted and behaved in the past tends not to count for all that much either. Sad to say, what seems of most importance is biography and how “comfortable” citizens feel with a candidate rather than with the issues and party. Voting from this perspective makes no rational, or even political, sense — especially since citizens are often voting against their own economic and social interests. Which helps explain why there’s such “buyer-remorse” several years later when they see what they got and their rational mind kicks in.

5. THE CORRUPT ELECTION SYSTEM

“Your election systems seem so easily corruptible. Has nothing been done to change that?”

Short answer: Not much. A few states have reacted to the unreliable, easily-hackable touch-screen computers by going to optical-scanning machines that leave a paper record. But about one-third of the voting public in November will still cast ballots on touch-screen machines, many in key battleground states. The more pressing scandal is that vote-tabulation for all forms of voting remains outsourced to Republican-supporting corporations using secret software. Those voting totals, it has been publicly demonstrated, can be altered by a technician or hacker in less than a minute, leaving no indication of tampering. (The puzzling additional scandal is that the Democratic Party has shown no interest in publicizing these vulnerabilities, and the corporate media is complicit as well by its silence.)

In short, Americans have no real certainty that their votes have been, or will be in November, accurately recorded. Rove and his minions are trying to keep the polling-gap between the two candidates to just a few percentage points so that whatever illegal manipulations take place will not be so noticeable. In addition, hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters are being purged from the voting lists in key states, or are being victimized by GOP scams of one sort or another, especially with regard to absentee ballots. Once again, in a close election, electoral theft is a real possibility, as happened in the past two presidential contests, judging from the available evidence.

Well, Jacqueline and Wolfgang, let’s stop there and deal with your other questions at another time. I wish you good luck in your own home countries, as they suffer “tsunami”-like effects on their economies and political structures because of what’s happening here in the States. Good luck and stay in touch.

All best,

Bernie

But you’re savvy about how influence-molding works and you know that with the right kind of massive publicity and P.R. campaigns, you probably can “spin” public perception in your direction.

So, on a foundation of lies and deception, you decide to launch your project, careful to keep absolutely secret the most controversial aspects. And then, under the table, you hire (a.k.a. “bribe”) numerous journalists, opinion pundits and respected “consultants” to speak on behalf of your product.

It works! The public is snowed by the P.R. momentum and by the overwhelming consensus of the “experts,” and your project takes off. This is how such things are done every day in the business and advertising world. What’s the big deal?

THE LIES & DECEPTIONS

Well, as you’ve probably figured out, I’m talking about the way the CheneyBush Administration sold the Iraq War/Occupation to us citizens.

We’ve known for a long time about the various lies and deceptions that took America to war — the supposed “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam was supposed to possess but didn’t, his alleged ties to al-Qaida that didn’t really exist, his supposed but non-existent complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and so on. Eventually, even the Administration was forced to concede there were no WMD, no ties to 9/11, no relationship to Al Qaida, though it vowed never to let those inconvenient facts get in the way of continuing its occupation of Iraq. (And Cheney and his minions still continue to this day to hint at the old deceptions.)

Also revealed some years back was that the Administration secretly put various conservative TV/radio/print journalists on the payroll to write/speak favorably about various programs and policies emanating from the Executive Branch.

THOSE PENTAGON “EXPERTS”

What we didn’t know about until the New York Times broke the story a few weeks ago was that the CheneyBush Administration, to help sell the pending Iraq war to members of Congress and the citizenry at large, marshaled a huge phalanx of retired military officers and sent them out disguised as private, independent “experts” and “consultants” to deliver the pro-war spin the Administration wanted. The author of the story, David Barstow, used the term “media Trojan horse” to describe the impact of this deception.

Because the media, always eager to curry favor with the Administration, did not vet the bona fides of these “private consultants,” the public had no knowledge of the retired officers’ deep and abiding connection to the Pentagon. These ex-military officers received special briefings, including by Rumsfeld himself, on the Administration’s daily spin points, and they either had or would soon be receiving high-paying jobs with various defense contractors.

What the public now knows is that the daily commentary and advice by the “military experts” — supposedly independent analysts, free of any conflicts of interest — helped “catapult the propaganda” (to borrow Bush’s own term) in favor of war with Iraq.

And it worked: CheneyBush and their neo-con ideologues inside the Administration got U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq, controlled the oil flowing out of that country, created chaos and catastrophe from which their huge private-corporation sponsors could make huge pots of money, built the world’s largest new embassy in Baghdad, and constructed permanent military bases inside that country from where the U.S. will help control the geopolitics of the greater Middle East for generations to come, etc. etc. All this presents a perfect illustration of Naomi Klein’s thesis of “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism.”

This use of hired guns — all those prestigious, smart-looking ex-generals and such — to do their propaganda work for them is further confirmation of the mendacity, duplicity and illegality Bush&Co. employ to get their way.

LITTLE OR NO COVERAGE

True to form, of course, the corporate mainstream media have paid scant, if any, attention to this story of how dozens of retired officers helped shape American military policy while secretly still attached to the Administration teat. See here, here, and here.

In this instance, and many more that could be named, the mainstream press, by not mentioning or following up on such CheneyBush scandals, does democracy a dangerous disservice.

Our political system depends on citizens receiving accurate information about what’s being done in their names so that they can make intelligent decisions when voting for those who represent them.

LIES & DECEPTIONS

If they respond at all, Busheviks tend to say that even if these stories are true, how we wound up in Iraq is “old news,” it’s history, we’re there, let’s just make the best of it, “finish the job” and then go home.

However, if your original reasons for invading a sovereign country were based on lies and deceptions, and a lot of incorrect assumptions and ignorance, then your occupation policies will never work and you will have alienated and angered the local population to the point of violent resistance against you. The result: You will be stuck in a quagmire of your own devising, where the most you can hope for is endless stalemate. This was the case of the U.S. screwup in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, and it’s the case today with the its five-years-and-counting occupation of Iraq.

Now, it can be argued that endless stalemate is of no great concern to the shock-doctrine practitioners of Bush&Co.; indeed, it may be the desired result as it guarantees prolonged chaos and thus more need for companies like Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton, KBR, et al. to help keep the broken society together. The US and Iraqi dead and maimed are but the inevitable “collateral damage.”

But, as CheneyBush have learned, domestically you can push the US military, and American citizens, only so far before both begin to push back and call for a new, more rational approach to political and foreign-policy adventuring.

Key military officers within the Joint Chiefs of Staff (even, to some extent, Defense Secretary Gates) are watching their armed forces stretched much too thin around the globe. Because there is no military draft, the Pentagon is forced to use and abuse its existing troops to the point of near-rebellion, resulting in lower morale and increased psychological damage, including 300,000 Iraq veterans returning home with mental problems and a rising rate of suicides.

‘08 VOTE A REFERENDUM ON WAR

This abuse includes overuse of the stop-loss policy of refusing to let soldiers go home after they’ve completed their Iraq rotation, constantly recalling troops who have been sent home after completing their extended service, lowering the army’s physical, intellectual, psychological and moral standards in order to fill the recruiting gap when the services can’t meet their enlistment quotas, returning physically or psychologically wounded soldiers to battle despite their doctors’ recommendations, etc. etc.

Moreover, the citizens appear to have had enough. Since two-thirds of polled Americans believe the Iraq invasion and occupation are outrageously expensive follies and it’s time to start bringing the troops back home, the opposition party is about to nominate as its presidential candidate someone who aims to get the troops out within 16 months. The Republican Party is set to nominate someone who wants to continue the CheneyBush war even if it means keeping US troops in Iraq for a hundred years or more, and probably starting more conflagrations in the Greater Middle East.

In a fair and open election, the Democratic candidate should win that contest easily. However, there is compelling evidence that in the past eight years, US elections have been corrupted through the use of hackable, unverifiable, paperless “touch-screen” machines, and vote-tabulating computers, which utilize secret software, manufactured and programmed by companies with Republican affiliations.

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB IRAN

All this isn’t just “old history.” CheneyBush are itching to bomb Iran’s military installations and scientific laboratories while they are still in control of the Executive Branch, and are “catapulting the propaganda” for such an attack in ways eerily similar to how they deceived Congress and the American people into bombing and invading Iraq.

There are reports that Secretary Gates has been trying to stop such attack-Iran moves, or at least to greatly reduce the scale of the operation. But other reports suggest that the decision to bomb already has been made, and the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to take over at Central Command is a key sign that all the ducks are just about lined up in a row.

(The former head of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, said there would be no attack on Iran on his watch; he was forced out, and CheneyBush lackey Petraeus was moved over from Iraq.)

BURMESE MILITARY’S “OPPORTUNITY”

“The shock doctrine” is not employed solely by American governments and multi-national corporations. In Burma (Myanmar), the military junta ruling that country, having just put down a potential revolt led by Buddhist monks, clearly is terrified that a coup might be organized by individuals or organizations who want to bring aid into the country to help the residents in the wake of the cyclone disaster. And so they’re keeping those aid workers out of the country, thus putting at risk the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Rangoon and elsewhere in search of medical care, food, shelter.

The effect of the disaster and the Burmese government’s insufficient response to it means that a good share of the junta’s political opposition is now dead or dealing with the aftermath of the huge, rampaging storm. In other words, the disaster offers a great “opportunity” for the ruling elite to settle old scores by continuing to repress the opposition and to remake the affected areas as they wish. (There have been reports, unconfirmed, of bodies of monks being found in the cyclone rubble — burned in a suspicious manner — mixed in with the tens of thousands of other corpses found floating in the rice fields and ditches and rivers.)

The long time-delay in getting food, water and shelter to the hundreds of thousands of displaced survivors of the cyclone is reminiscent of the way the Bush Administration dilly-dallied with regard to the post-Katrina period in New Orleans and Mississippi. In her book, Klein used the Katrina experience as a perfect example of “disaster capitalism” in the US: A government watches a natural catastrophe wipe out an entire population sector, and lets the catastrophe play out over days and weeks and months — with large numbers of citizens abandoning their homes, forced to go elsewhere for adequate assistance — and then giving no-bid contracts to Blackwater and Halliburton and KBR for the reconstruction phase, in accord with social planning as laid out by the ideologues in the White House.

In Burma, the government may not be operating out of an exactly similar motivation, but the result appears to be much the same: using a natural calamity to reshape the economic, political and social future of the affected region for their own political and economic aims.

NATURAL RESOURCE SHORTAGES

As for the huge worldwide “run” on commodities — especially important staples such as wheat, rice, oil — already local greed-merchants and multi-national companies are salivating at the prospect of selling, at exorbitant rates, food and shelter and clothing and oil and the like. They will be literally “making a killing” on the backs of the starving, the poor, the dispossessed.

In so doing, in line with Klein’s “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” theses, these elite forces will be re-shaping the politics, economies and social arrangements of these countries for generations, both to consolidate and expand their reigns of power and to benefit themselves and their rapacious, greedy supporters.

In short, when catastrophes are being dealt with, it doesn’t seem to matter what the operating governmental system is, be it fascist, communist, dictatorial, democratic, etc. By and large, the power/economic/political elites see the unfolding tragedies of their citizens as “opportunities” for expansion of control, for ways to eliminate or dilute their opposition, for fattening the bank accounts of their large-corporation supporters in rebuilding and reconstructing these devastated societies, in line with their own greed agendas.

This is the world that only will change when these elites and systems are systematically confronted, changed, or overthrown by citizens operating under a different moral system, who decide they’ve finally had enough.

It would be more effective, of course, if a strong progressive movement were to develop overnight in America to affect such wide-sweeping reforms in this country. However, removing Republicans from the White House in 2008 at least would be a significant sign of the beginnings of the public’s strong desire for significant changes.

Domestically, they’re no longer even trying to hide their aversion to democracy and the Constitution. With his new Executive Order on “executive privilege,” for example, Bush openly proclaims that he is untouchable by the rule of law; now there are only two branches of government — the Legislative Branch is ignored as irrelevant — and CheneyBush more or less control them both. More on this issue below.

Abroad, the CheneyBush Administration is preparing in the Fall to escalate the Iraq War yet again, at the same time the propaganda machine is being revved-up in preparation for a coming attack on Iran. Both actions will help jihadi-recruiting and thus put at risk even more U.S. troops abroad and citizens at home. Plus, an attack on Iran will have far-reaching consequences with regard to Russia, China, the availability of oil, the rise of the Euro in international trade and the concomitant fall of the dollar, the impact on the U.S. economy, etc. etc. has Bush&Co. given serious thought to any of these, and other, ramifications?

So, once again, I pose the question to previous Bush voters, to centrists, and independents, and traditionally conservative Republicans: Do you finally get it? Do you understand now why the HardRight CheneyBush Administration has sunk so low in the polls and has little hope of ever getting out, thus taking the Republican Party (and, if you’re an elected official, you) down the drain with them in 2008? Do you understand why, since CheneyBush will not resign, impeachment is the only constitutional way to pry their corrupt, itchy fingers from the levers of power?

Some examples here of why we’re near the impeachment tipping-point, and why more and true conservative Republicans (among them many elite movers and shakers) are abandoning this sinking ship in record numbers and coming to understand that it’s too risky to permit Cheney and Bush to stay in power through January 2009.

Founding Fathers and Impeachment

Though they tried for the longest time to hide it, the Bush Administration is operating on the discredited claim that the President is above the law — nay, IS the law. (Nixon tried the same assertion when he was President — “If the President does it, it is not illegal” — and the Supreme Court shot him down quickly.) Cheney and Alberto Gonzales devised a theory of governance that claims the President can do whatever he wants, violate whatever laws he wants, when he’s acting as “Commander-in-Chief” during “wartime.”

Since the self-proclaimed “war” is an open-ended, permanent “war on terror,” this theory effectively turns the presidency into a 17th-century monarchy. (Further evidence of how far into the cult of personality we’ve come: According to former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, his press releases had to mention Bush “three times per page“).

The Founding Fathers came to this country because they’d been maltreated by despotic rulers and then, as colonists, fought a war to establish their independence from a tyrannical king. There was no way to legitimately overthrow a dictatorial monarch, but they noted six times in the Constitution the one way it could be done in the new United States of America: impeachment. If an elected leader went way beyond the constitutional limits and thus was endangering the country — in short, was involved in high crimes and misdemeanors — he could be, he should be, impeached before the House and tried in the Senate.

Impeachment of the president has happened only three times in our nation’s history, most recently when the Republicans went after Bill Clinton for sexual behavior that most Americans agreed did not rise to the level of a high crime affecting the state.

But the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors of Cheney and Bush are directly tied to authoritarian behavior that led to, and continues to result in, death and destruction of our soldiers abroad and the mangling and shredding of our Constitutional protections and the rule of law.

Evidence of Crimes is Secret

This week, pursuant to Congressional committee subpoenas for documents with which to investigate various White House scandals, Bush upped the Constitutional crisis. He is preparing to assert in an Executive Order that the Legislative Branch could pass all the contempt citations it wants, but U.S. Attorneys would be instructed not to pursue these criminal charges when the President says that documents are off-limits because of “executive privilege.” In short, the Legislative Branch would be receiving no documents, nada, zilch.

Cheney, several weeks earlier, refused to produce documents demanded under law by the National Archives since, he claimed, he was not part of the Executive Branch. Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers likewise refused for the second time to abide by a subpoena to appear before a House investigatory panel examining the politicized firing of U.S. Attorneys. Yep, “executive privilege” again.

What Bush and Cheney are saying, clearly and arrogantly, is: You’ll never get the evidentiary documents or testimony you’re looking for. If you want ‘em, you’ll have to take us to court, and we can stall and appeal forever until one of our hand-picked courts backs our position. Or you can put impeachment back “on the table” and try to get us in front of your House panel, and that ain’t gonna happen either. Just lie back and enjoy it.

Bush: “L’etat c’est moi”

In the CheneyBush Administration, there will be no oversight of the Executive Branch. Ever. We are honest public servants in the White House; you must trust us when we say that we are not engaged in wrongdoing. L’etat c’est moi. Just move along, nothing to see here.

Since there is no way to vote this corrupted crew out of power until the next general election 15 months from now, the only Constitutional method for some restoration of our representative democracy is, indeed, impeachment and removal upon conviction.

Only then might we return to the Founders’ brilliant checks-and-balances system, where no one branch of government would be able to exercise too much power over the others.

Shutting Down Dissent

Bush also issued two other ambiguous, problematic executive orders this past week. Each seems to be one thing but the ramifications may make them something else again.

The first executive order deals with cracking down on those organizations and individuals that, in the Administration’s eyes, “threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq”; but the wording is so vague as to leave open the possibility that legitimate dissenters and peace organizations might have their property seized and/or will be arrested for opposing the war. In other words, this executive order gives the Executive Branch yet another weapon with which to deal with its political enemies, should it choose to do so. It already has the power, approved by the Congress, to enter your computer and read your mail and spy on your phone calls, and also the power to declare a national emergency and rule by martial law. Can anyone spell the F-word?

The second executive order last week seemed to be bowing to public pressure to end the Administration’s fascination with torture and humiliation of “unlawful combatants” in its care. But a closer reading of this ambiguous document reveals that it never really goes into what forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques” are still permitted. “Waterboarding” (nearly drowning a prisoner), for example, may or may not be on the approved list. But without Congress insisting on carrying out its mandated oversight responsibilities, we may never find out.

Abusing the Power to Make War

Another compelling reason for moving quickly now to bring Cheney and Bush before an impeachment panel of the House is their reckless, dangerous behavior in having started one war and their movement towards starting another.

The first war, on Iraq, was based on lies and deceptions. CheneyBush’s continual escalation, and their current “do-over” war, demonstrate that no amount of “surging” and draconian occupation can bring peace to a land wracked by major civil/sectarian divisions.

The war they are planning, probably in coordination with Israel, is aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear installations and scientific infrastructure, thus setting back by at least a decade or two Iran’s military ambitions and growing political influence in the Middle East.

The Bush Administration’s neo-conservatives — of which Cheney is the most ideological and bloodthirsty adherent — are working like crazy to foment that war against Iran.

Iran War Would be Lunatic

These guys never learn. They gave up on the one war they might possibly have won — the one in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al-Qaida — and moved their troops precipitately to Iraq, which was no danger to the U.S.; now the Afghanistan war has flared up again, with the Taliban re-energized. Based on lies and deceits, the CheneyBush Administration invaded and occupied Iraq with no real understanding of that society and with no Plan B in case they ran into trouble; now they’re in deep, deep trouble and won’t change course.

The CheneyBush desire to start a third war in Iran is absolutely nuts, and will further damage America’s military and political position in the region and around the world, and will lead to even more terrorist activity directed at the U.S.

This analysis does not even go into the likelihood that Turkey might well invade Iraq to keep the Kurds from gaining enough military and political strength to move on Kurdistan statehood. Or that the U.S. might unilaterally attack the resurgent Al-Qaida forces in the northwest tribal areas of Pakistan, or force the Musharaff government to do so, in either instance leading to the fall of that government to Islamist extremists who would then have their hands on deliverable nuclear weaponry. Or that Russia, anxious to slow down the further deterioration of its old empire and influence, including in the Greater Middle East, is starting to take on Western Europe and the U.S.

CheneyBush policy is all of reckless piece. Stick an iron pipe into the Greater Middle East bees’ nest, move it around agitatingly, and see if you can extract the honey. Little or no thought about what horrific stinging and chaos might follow. Just keep sticking more pipes into more bees’ nests all around the region. Then, a year or two later, wonder about how this mess happened and whom to scapegoat for all the death and destruction.

Short summary: America, the world, can’t take much more of the CheneyBush Administration. It’s long since time to rein in their extreme assumption and exercise of power, and to bring them into accountability for the high crimes and misdemeanors they’ve committed. The only Constitutional way of doing that is to institute impeachment hearings in the House. The sooner the better.

Pelosi and Conyers have given some indication they might be willing to reconsider the “i” word, given the public acceptance of the idea, so one can expect that the public pressure on this issue will continue. As it should if we are to have any hope at all for America’s future.

Even on vacation, the dark shadow of this guy intrudes. This time, amidst all the gorgeous natural surroundings, I was thinking of Cheney’s mysterious Energy Task Force in mid-2001 — the oil and gas and coal moguls who set the Administration’s environmental (and very likely some of the war) policies that have turned out to be so ruinous to the air and water and a wide variety of species, including humans.

But Cheney is at the heart of most of the disastrous decisions that have substituted for well-thought-out policy over the past six years, so I would have been led back to him no matter what I was thinking about.

The Iraq War disaster? Cheney. Scooter Libby’s perjury/obstruction of justice to protect his boss? Cheney. Corporate domination of energy and environmental policy? Cheney. The authorization of torture as state policy? Cheney. A near-dictatorial Chief Executive? Cheney. Etc. Etc.

Of course, I was also reading a book about the Administration that fingers Cheney as the eminence grise, the puppetmaster behind the White House curtain. In the wake of Cheney’s recent declaration that he is not part of the Executive Branch, thus beholden to nobody, I dipped again into The One Percent Doctrine, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind. The book, based on interviews with more than 100 officials inside the government, is an eye-opening history of the Administration’s so-called “war on terror” as seen from the inside, and it’s Cheney, of course, who is the locus of the whole shebang.

KEEPING INFO FROM AN INCURIOUS BUSH

By 2006, when Suskind’s book was published, it had long been apparent that Dim Son was off on the White House sidelines most of the time while Cheney essentially ran the place, especially foreign and military policy. On occasion, Cheney would even tell Bush what he was doing.

But often he wouldn’t, even when vitally important matters were at stake. Such as when Saudi Arabia’s all-powerful Prince Abdullah came to Crawford to meet with Bush; this meeting was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach an agreement that would have long-lasting consequences for the region, for the Iraq War, for the Saudi-U.S. relationship, for Israel-Palestine. Here’s how Suskind describes what happened:

[The Saudis] went down the items. Sometimes the President nodded, as though something sounded reasonable, but he offered little response.

And, after almost an hour of this, the Saudis, looking a bit perplexed, got up to go. It was as though Bush had never read the packet they sent over to the White House in preparation for this meeting: a terse, lean document, just a few pages, listing the Saudis’ demands and an array of options that the President might consider. After the meeting, a few attendees on the American team wondered why the President seemed to have no idea what the Saudis were after, and why he didn’t bother to answer their concerns or get any concessions from them, either, on the ‘war on terror.’ There was not a more important conversation in the ‘war on terror’ than a sit-down with Saudi Arabia. Several of the attendees checked into what had happened.

The Saudi packet, they found, had been diverted to Dick Cheney’s office. The President never got it, never read it. In what may have been the most important, and contentious, foreign policy meeting of his presidency, George W. Bush was unaware of what the Saudis hoped to achieve in traveling to Crawford.

OILING THE TRACKS TO WAR

Or here’s an even more egregious example, because it greased the tracks leading directly to the disastrous Iraq invasion and occupation. The CIA was tasked at the last minute in 2003 to come up with a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) laying out the evidence for going to war. Suskind writes about the 90-page document and what parts Bush was permitted to read:

Cheney, as far back as the Ford presidency, had experimented with the concept of keeping certain issues away from the chief executive. … Cheney’s view, according to officeholders from several Republican administrations, is that presidents, in essence, needed a failsafe if they were publically challenged with an importunate disclosure about the activities of the U.S. government. They needed to be able to say they had no knowledge of the incident, and not be caught in a lie.

With this new George W. Bush presidency, however, Cheney was able to shape his protective strategy in a particularly proactive way. Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the President, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be ‘deniable’ about his own statements. … Under this strategic model, reading the entire NIE would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the President’s rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.

If somehow the contents of the NIE were revealed, the White House could say that the report was too cumbersome and that Bush had only read the one-page NIE summary.

But the brief NIE summary provided to Bush did not contain the host of caveats and demurrers and doubts about whether Iraq had WMD or whether Saddam had tried to buy “yellowcake” uranium in Africa or whether Mohammed Atta had really met with Iraqis in Prague. In short, Cheney, who had been gung-ho for years about attacking Iraq, kept Bush in the dark about the various intelligence agencies’ doubts about the reasons for going to war.

However, Suskind makes clear that Bush — perhaps the most incurious and intellectually vacuous president in recent American history — chose to not know too much; he was content to follow Cheney’s lead. If Bush were to be fully informed — in other words, if realistic facts were to be presented to him — such “information might undercut the confidence he has in certain sweeping convictions.” How delicately put.

THE DISASTROUS “ONE PERCENT” DOCTRINE”

Cheney is equally devious and tenacious when it comes to domestic policy, with his fingers in all the power pies, usually through his then-chief of staff (and now convicted felon) Scooter Libby, another dedicated neo-conservative who loves pulling strings behind the scenes.

Cheney long has been a true believer in unrestricted executive power. Even more so during the current reign of Bush the Younger, since Cheney is the one who effectively exercises the decision-making and action-prerogatives of the Chief Executive, especially in foreign and military matters. (And yet he has the gall to tell the American people he’s not part of the Executive Branch!)

It was Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” that underlay virtually every option taken in the U.S., and outside as well, in the “war on terror.” Cheney’s philosophy in that doctrine rested on his belief, that “a one percent chance of catastrophe must be treated ‘as a certainty’ where firm evidence, of either intent or capability, is too high a threshold; where the doctrine is, in essence, prevention based on suspicion.”

Since there always is some slight chance of catastrophe in any undertaking, Cheney’s doctrine — which has become the ruling prism through which all Administration action is viewed — effectively translates to autocratic rule. That doctrine guarantees that the all-powerful Executive Branch can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, under the one-percent “war on terror” umbrella, turning the Constitution into a “quaint,” useless document. Those who oppose
Cheney and his doctrine are, ipso facto, supporters of the catastrophe trying to be averted — traitors at worst, dupes at best.

THE “REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY”

No wonder Democrats and others have such trouble finding an opening to effectively attack Cheney and Bush. Those guys have created a tautological, self-justifying circular philosophy that operates off their own sense of justified action.

Thus, we get the notorious assertion by a White House official to Suskind:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality’.”

When Cheney says that there’s a one percent chance of catastrophe that needs to be treated “as a certainty, not in our analysis or the preponderance of evidence but in our response,” Suskind writes, he “officially separates analysis from action, allows for an evidence-free model to move forward, and says suspicion may be all we have to use the awesome powers of the United States.”

This defines events, episodes, incidents all the way to now, moving forward from that point — Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terror. What’s fascinating about it is that people have different names for it inside of the upper reaches of the government — the 1% rule, the Cheney doctrine — but it allowed the United States to essentially operate in an evidence-free realm, using the extraordinary forces at our disposal. And we all know the countless outcomes of that, which the U.S. now is embarrassed by.

ABSENCE OF POLICY APPARATUS

There has been no effective Congressional oversight of the highly secretive Executive Branch, nor has there been any effective counterbalancing going on inside the White House when it comes to the creation and evaluation of policy.

Normally an administration has two active arms: operations and policy. One group debates and comes up with the policy, the operational guys execute the policy. But, from day one of the Bush Administration, there was virtually no White House policy apparatus to speak of. Operations were most often ad hoc, flowing from the tightest circles around Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld, but especially from Cheney. (The State Department did have a bone fide policy apparatus, but Rumsfeld and Cheney ignored Secretary Powell and State whenever possible.)

Insiders have complained previously of this absence of a policy component at the White House, especially with regard to domestic matters, but in Suskind’s book, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage verified that the same problems hampered foreign and military policy as well:

[Bush] met America’s foreign challenges with decisiveness born of a brand of preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty. The policy process never changed much. Issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the President’s desk; and, if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his ‘instinct’ or
‘gut.’ Later, after Armitage and Powell left office, Armitage — in his blunt manner — put it succinctly: ‘There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else. There was never one from the start. Bush didn’t want one, for whatever reasons. One was never started’.

CHENEY NEEDS TO BE IMPEACHED

Since Cheney has carried out most of his high crimes and misdemeanors in deep secret, way back behind the public curtain, and since most of his decisions have resulted in disaster abroad and a kind of police-state rule at home — thus endangering the national-security of the U.S. and mangling the Constitution — it seems clear that he cannot be permitted to continue exercising his vast, destructive policies for the next year and a half.

The House should begin impeachment hearings ASAP to put Cheney’s nefarious activities under the microscope of public exposure, and get that guy away from the levers of power. More than half of Americans, according to a new poll, favor impeaching Cheney.

Ideally, of course, it should be both Bush and Cheney at the same time testifying before the House impeachment panel, but if that can’t happen, let’s at least get the ball rolling by impeaching President Cheney first.

Bernard Weiner: Why don’t we start with the title of the book? Why “Restoration”?

Isadora Tribe: George Bush the Younger, as many may remember, was, in historical terms, a kind of usurper of the crown. Not only was he installed into power and “re-elected” by fraudulent means, but he was, how shall we say, a bit over his head in the job. He knew nothing, he didn’t want to know anything, he ignored those who did know something. In short, he surrounded himself mainly with incompetents and mean-spirited ideologues like himself, and tried to keep all his administration’s outrageous behaviors totally secret from any meaningful oversight.

The reason why Bush was adjudged widely as “the worst president ever,” even during his tenure, was a direct result of his years of unnecessary wars and chaos, bungling on a monstrous scale, the mangling of the Constitution, ideological extremism, and out-and-out corruption and larceny. In other words, he and his cronies laid waste to the institutions of our democratic republic.

When he was finally gone, nothing less than a thoroughgoing cleansing of the foul-smelling stable was in order. That was “The Restoration” era, years of undoing the great damage his administration has foisted on the country. Restoring our country’s commitment to Constitutional rule and to sanity and realism in our foreign policy — that was the Herculean job of his successors.

THE GOOD, BAD & UGLY

BW: That sounds so harsh. Don’t you have anything good to say about the man and his administration?

IS: One shouldn’t ignore the possibility that Bush sincerely believed himself to be, or at least convinced himself that he was, operating for the “good of the country.” But even if one accepts that possibility, rather than out-and-out moral corruption and hunger for power, Bush’s definitions of “good” and “country” flowed so narrowly out of such a circumscribed class-stratum, education, and limited experiences, that they bore little relevance to how almost everyone else interpreted those terms.

So the short answer to your question is no. History and his own contemporaries judged him to be so reckless and incompetent with the power at his command that he brought the United States into severe disrepute around the globe. He nearly wrecked the economy in the process, laying humongous debts on succeeding generations. Even his own party’s leaders and members of Congress deserted him in his final years in office, feeling he did great damage to the country’s vital interests. History has rendered its judgment: His administration was an ugly stain on our country’s garment of decency.

BW: I seem to recall that even in his worst times toward the end, he still maintained the support of about one out of four citizens in various polls.

IS: Yes, there was a die-hard faction of the population, mainly centered around religious fundamentalists, who stuck with him, since they believed, as did he himself, that he had been anointed by God to lead this country into righteous rule. But that means that 75% had lost faith in him and just wanted him to depart the scene as quickly and quietly as possible. They felt even more negatively about his Vice President, Dick Cheney, who presided over a shadow government within the Bush Administration.

In other words, the citizenry longed for a Restoration of the rule of law and calm, orderly, competent, open government, operating not from the extremes but from the middle outwards, sometimes more to the right, sometimes more to the left.

ALWAYS RE-LEARNING FROM HISTORY

One would have thought that the country had learned its history lesson from the lawless behavior of Richard Nixon three decades earlier, but it would take the Bush catastrophe to convince Americans never to permit a president to amass so much power and control.

Still, even with those Restoration laws in place, here we are 25 years after a disgraced Bush left office and we still have to remind ourselves that there always are demagogues who try to cut corners with the Constitution and the rule of law, and who try to frighten the population into wars of choice. The lesson is that the fight to preserve democracy inside America has to be waged every day, every generation, lest the forces of authoritarian self-righteousness once again rise to power.

And, since even the best-intentioned politicians find themselves abusing the power they possess — as Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — we must be alert to the necessity of cleaning out our political parties at regular intervals.

When appropriate, we also must be open to the founding of new alliances and parties, as happened in the final years of the Bush Administration when liberals and progressives from the Democratic and Green Parties, and traditional conservatives and business executives and military brass from the Republican Party, united to set the Restoration in motion and to return to the checks-and-balances system of government established by our founders and which had worked so well for several hundred years.

PEEKING BEHIND POWER’S CURTAIN

BW: How do you explain why true conservatives and corporate leaders and military officers deserted their leader in such great numbers?

IS: The historical record shows that there were practical reasons for doing so: While a few huge companies reaped windfall profits from CheneyBush policies, the overall economy really couldn’t return to real health with the debt-anchors dragging it down as a result of the trillions of dollars spent on unnecessary wars of choice. The troops were stretched so thin fighting all these wars of imperial aggression against native guerrillas that the military leaders rebelled in order to protect their troops and their services from more such adventuring abroad. The pre-eminent position that America had enjoyed for so long on the world stage began to deteriorate rapidly, with its negative impact on our exports, the health of the dollar, our economic stability, our lack of respect abroad, and the concomitant rise of other major countries such as China and India and the South Asia-Russia Alliance in general.

But the Restoration also can be explained this way: The powers that be in American society, those corporate and political forces that truly control the economy and parties, have freedom to carry out their agendas so powerfully because their goals and strategies are essentially hidden. But Bush and Cheney and their cronies, with their bumbling policies and their arrogant in-your-face tactics, tore away the veils and revealed all too clearly the faces of those powers-that-be and what was really going on: the corporate theft on a massive scale, the rapacious imperialism abroad, the manipulation of the mass-media in hiding the truth, the ignoring of the rule of law and the Constitution, etc. Therefore, it was to the advantage of the elites to dump this incompetent, reckless crew and replace them with the usual type of smarter, more malleable leaders.

OPPOSING POLITICAL THUGGERY

BW: Can you help us understand why it took so long for that momentum to build in the body politic?

IS: Part can be understood by the laws of inertia and entropy, part to how skillfully the CheneyBush Administration and the corporate mass-media that supported them bamboozled the public, part to how the citizenry accepted this misinformation for a long, long time, out of fear and confusion. But deeper than that, I think a key factor was that the opposition was incapable of dealing with the kind of smashmouth tactics practiced by Bush and Cheney and their politics-guru Karl Rove.

Throughout most of American political life, the various parties had fought each other long and hard but generally with a certain respect for the other side, and with a tendency to come together eventually somewhere in the middle in order to get things done. But the Roveians decided to play a different kind of politics, aimed at the utter destruction and marginalization of their opponents in order to establish permanent one-party rule from an extremist ideological position.

It was a kind of political thuggery that was more reminiscent of Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany: the Constitution was mangled, laws passed by the legislature were ignored, effective oversight of the leader was non-existent, the advice of military specialists was overridden, elections were manipulated, ideology ruled all.

Under the reign of Cheney and Bush, torture and secret prisons and “the disappearing” of perceived opponents were commonplace. Bush was given (or simply grabbed) near-dictatorial powers to rule as “commander-in-chief” in a permanent “wartime” setting, free to violate whatever laws were in force for everyone else. (This included ignoring the 600-year-old legal tradition of habeas corpus — appearing before a judge to verify that arrests are legal.) In effect, the democratic presidency had become the feudal monarchy, and for a country that had established itself in opposition to a brutal king, this contradiction in American political life could not last forever.

Most Americans, coming from a long tradition of more genteel political battles, for the longest time didn’t know how to confront this mendacious, authoritarian juggernaut that was rolling across the Constitution and distorting so many of the governmental institutions. Though the progressive blogosphere had agitated against the CheneyBush administration early on, it took a long while before the general public caught on (aided by the constant revelations of new and more reprehensible scandals) and the opposition built to critical mass. It was those new alliances that created the critical mass of opposition that led to the demise of not only the Bush Administration but the rapid decline of the ideological fanaticism and faction behind it.

The important thing I want to emphasize is that the United States under Bush and Cheney came mighty close to a totalitarian, fascist society. Had the Democrats, buoyed by public outrage, not stood up to the Bush Administration and confronted them time after time directly and with courage, there might well not have been a Restoration period in American history. Withdrawing funding for the Iraq War, and the initiation of impeachment proceedings, appear to have been the precipitating factors that fomented the essential momentum for the swift exit of Bush and Cheney from the scene. Without those moves, American democracy might well have been strangled, and even more destructive wars abroad might have been initiated.

“HARD IMPERIALISM” DAYS ARE OVER

BW: Finally, Professor Tribe, could you sum up what your historical research reveals for our own time?

IS: The forces of worldwide change were manifesting themselves before Bush and Cheney, to be sure, but their Administration hastened the slide of American power and dominance in the world by their lack of creativity in dealing with these changes. They relied on the long-discredited and ineffective “hard imperialism” that did little but reveal their technological might’s inherent weakness in dealing with the many low-tech nationalist rebellions.

Thankfully, Restoration leaders toiled intelligently and mightily to undo much of the great damage done abroad, and to right the ship of state domestically as well, returning to the type of Constitutional rule that shone as a beacon and model for many societies abroad. It took more than a decade and a half to undo most of the damage done to our political system, but most citizens would agree that it has been well worth the difficult effort and has diluted the impact of worldwide Islamist terrorism.

But even in our more enlightened times, there still are, there always are, those forces frightened by major change and determined to try to control society through more draconian, authoritarian measures. They exist in all three major parties. We all must resist that backward-looking movement with all our might, lest we return someday to a situation as bad or even worse than what history has revealed about the administration of Bush the Younger.

ACT 1: SURVIVAL OF THE UNFITTEST

When trying to figure out the motives of the Bush Administration on nearly any issue you can think of, the first place to look should always be Karl Rove’s “politics” workshop. By “politics,” I mainly mean how an action affects the survival of the CheneyBush Administration, and only incidentally with how it affects the Republican Party.

This solipsistic concern for their own political/economic welfare is as true today with regard to the various impeachable scandals — lying to Congress to foment wars, the outing of a covert CIA agent, the domestic spying program, U.S. Attorney firings, etc. — as it was in the first years of the CheneyBush Administration.

We were told in those early years, by a White House insider, of the predominance of Rove’s political operation in deciding which policies the Administration would advocate and support. Whoops! Strike that word “predominance,” since there was virtually no policy-making apparatus in the White House; politics was effectively the ONLY thing in play.

“KIDS ON BIG WHEELS”

That insider was John DiIulio, who was the first chief of Bush’s faith-based-funding operation — another politics-based scheme, this one designed to pay off the fundamentalist base with grants of public funds to religious groups. DiIulio in 2002 put his finger right on the button of why the CheneyBush Administration has been such a train-wreck. Here’s his money-quote in Ron Suskind’s January 2003 article in Esquire:

There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. … When policy analysis is just backfill, to back up a political maneuver, you’ll get a lot of ooops.

Suskind writes: “An unnamed ‘current senior White House official’ [said] pretty much the same thing: ‘Many of us feel it’s our duty — our obligation as Americans — to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels, who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. DPC (Domestic Policy Council) meetings are a farce’.”

IRAQ IN ‘O6, IRAQ in ‘08

It must be obvious to everyone by now that the CheneyBush Administration has no intention of getting out of Iraq, and recent events have served as confirmation. Bush and his Press Secretary Tony Snow blathered on the other day about the U.S. staying on in Iraq as it has in South Korea for 54 years. Defense Secretary Gates confirmed that policy a few days ago that America might well stay in its hardened military bases in Iraq for many decades.

Plus, the U.S. is constructing the world’s largest embassy, which CheneyBushRove envision will be the locus for U.S. political and military adventures in the greater Middle East for decades to come. Bush is quoted in a Dallas newspaper telling Texas friends that he is setting up Iraq so his successor can not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

But the prospect of the U.S. troops being bled to death by a thousand “insurgent” cuts over that time frame is not something the American citizenry might look on with favor, so there’s always a countervailing political spin going on to create confusion and try to take the sting out. And, surprise!, that spin gets spun as a new election cycle in America comes into play.

IRAQ WITHDRAWAL-TALK THEN

Do you remember what happened in Iraq prior to the all-important 2006 midterm election? Here’s how arch-conservative Pat Buchanan ( www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=6812 reported it in July of 2005:

Standing beside our defense secretary in Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari called for the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces. The top U.S. commander, Gen. George Casey, also standing beside Rumsfeld, said ‘fairly substantial’ withdrawals of the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could begin by spring…

Casey’s comment lends credence to a secret British defense memo that described U.S. officials as favoring a ‘relatively bold reduction in force numbers.’ The memo pointed to a drawdown of Allied forces from 170,000 today to 66,000 by next summer, a cut of over 60 percent.

Previously, the administration had denounced war critics who spoke of timetables, arguing that they signal the enemy to go to earth, build its strength, and strike weakened U.S. forces during the pullout. Now, America’s top general is talking timetables.

But, of course, major withdrawals of American troops never happened and any ideas about timetables were scrapped. It was all spin designed for the 2006 midterm election, to help the Republicans maintain their majorities in the House and Senate. (The Roveian ploy didn’t work, as the American public, tired of being bamboozled yet again, threw the GOP bums out and installed Democratic majorities.)

IRAQ WITHDRAWAL-TALK NOW

These days, even amidst the talk of America remaining in Iraq for decades, the Administration is engaging in feints and spin about the possibility of the U.S. withdrawing tens of thousands of troops prior to the 2008 election — the election, it just so happens, that will decide which party controls the Executive Branch (and presidential pardons) for the next four years.

Just a few weeks ago, anonymous “senior administration officials” leaked to the New York Times that the Iraq plan being considered calls “for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels [in] the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000…”

Do they think we’re that stupid not to see through their unbelievable, pre-election B.S.? Wait, don’t answer that question.

Clearly, the Congressional Republicans have got to figure out a way to seem to be supporting Bush’s war while not being associated with it in any way. They know that support for the war is poison at the polls and that they’ll lose their jobs in a crushing defeat in 2008 unless the Iraq War news starts turning positive and quickly. So spinning the possibility of troop withdrawals is to their partisan benefit.

But those withdrawals ain’t gonna happen. The Bush Administration, led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, launched an unnecessary war, botched its implementation and occupation, and helped foment a sectarian civil war. There is no way, at least not at this stage, that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again, no way that the U.S. comes out looking good.

All the options at this stage are awful, but some, such as withdrawal ASAP, are less onerous than the others. Staying in-country, presumably hunkered down in hardened military bases on Iraqi soil, is no solution at all, good, bad or otherwise. It turns American troops into stationary targets for mortar and rocket attacks on the bases and moving targets and potential political hostages once they drive off them. CheneyBush simply refuse to acknowledge that most Iraqis do not want foreigners permanently occupying their country.

ACT 2: 2008 IS ALL THAT MATTERS

Am I making this up, that all policy is filtered through a Rovian political prism — even, or especially, U.S. strategy in Iraq? Don’t take my word for it. Check out what the Washington Post’s former Baghdad Bureau Chief, Rajiv Chandrasekeran, reported in his book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.”

As Chandrasekeran reports, the Coalition Provisional Authority overseeing the U.S. occupation in the first few years was an ongoing disaster, run by incompetent bunglers who could not talk or think straight. Supposedly the CPA was preparing the ground for a functioning democracy in Iraq — based on setting up a privatized, free-market “libertarian paradise,” heedless of cultural/historical realities — but since the CPA had FUBAR-ed the situation so totally, Chandrasekeran wrote:

What was best for Iraq [in 2004] was no longer the standard. What was best for Washington was the new calculus. … The only election that mattered was the one in November — in the United States.

And that’s where we are today both with regard to policy in and about Iraq, and domestic policy as well. Unless it helps Rove lay the groundwork for a GOP presidential victory in 2008 — achieved by hook or by crook — forget about it.

THE U.S. ATTORNEYS SCANDAL

We now know, based on the evidence that has surfaced in the past several months, that the presidential vote in November of 2008 is what lies at the heart of the U.S. Attorneys scandal. Rove has a long history of winning elections by any means necessary; one of his main ways of doing this is to encourage the removal of hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the precinct rolls in key states, by illegal or unethical means. Usually, these voters are simply bumped from the rolls; most of them live in vulnerable minority areas.

In addition, many of the fired U.S. attorneys in those key states were leaned on by Rove and his minions to file criminal charges against individuals or groups registering new Democratic voters and to do so before the elections. It didn’t matter if the charges were unsubstantiated or ridiculous — file the charges, smear the Dems and their supporters prior to the balloting, make them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the indictments, scare away wavering voters who might vote Democratic, etc. For example, New Mexico’s U.S. Attorney David Iglesias says he was fired because he wouldn’t file what he called “bogus” charges of “voter fraud” before the election.

As the U.S. attorneys scandal unravels, the situation inside Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice has been revealed to be even more outrageous: The DOJ, it turns out, is basically run as an arm of the White House’s political operation: inquiring about ideology and party affiliation (which is illegal) before appointing applicants to judicial jobs, staffing the Civil Rights Division with those antagonistic to civil rights and thus not following the law, etc. And other government agencies are similarly infected as well, holding workplace seminars on ways to aid “our candidates,” which is also illegal, etc.

It’s abundantly clear that Gonzales will not resign and will not be fired; he’s the consiglieri in the White House mob, knowing too much about the various illegalities to be cut loose. The House should initiate impeachment hearings of Gonzales ASAP.

EPILOGUE: CHENEYBUSH MUST GO SOONEST

Likewise, Bush and Cheney will not resign. They are prepared to sacrifice thousands of more troops in Iraq — and perhaps put them in danger over Iran as well — in order to further their imperial policies in the greater Middle East. During the next year and a half of their scheduled tenure, the damage CheneyBush can do is immense: further destruction of constitutional protections, fomenting more terrorist anger, ruining America’s reputation even more through aggressive wars and through other policies as well; even on global warming, for example, Bush is unwilling to do anything meaningful, other than to delay and delay until he leaves office.

The only way out of this reckless nightmare endangering America’s national security is to initiate impeachment hearings at once against Cheney and Bush. Once their “high crimes and misdemeanors” are laid out as evidence for all the public to see, it’s conceivable that many Republicans will join the effort to convict, if for no other reason than to hang on to their Congressional positions in the 2008 election. It’s won’t be done maliciously — it’s just politics.

But it’s not just in foreign matters that such outrageous, in-your-face behavior obtains. And the best example of this can be found in two separate, but interrelated, cases that came into view this past week.

The one with the most political and constitutional significance involves Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — and by extension the POTUS Himself — asserting for the first time in public, through their attorneys, that they are immune from prosecution because they are above the law.

Libby recently was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame criminal case. He and Cheney and Rove are being civilly sued by Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame for their having outed her as a covert CIA agent and thus endangering her (and her contacts) and ruining her career. The response by the defense legal team to the judge hearing the case, as reported by the Washington Post:

The lawyers said any conversations Cheney and the officials had about Plame with one another or with reporters were part of their normal duties because they were discussing foreign policy and engaging in an appropriate ‘policy dispute.’ Cheney’s attorney went further, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wanted to make sure he heard them claim what he thought he heard them claim, so he explicitly inquired: “So you’re arguing there is nothing — absolutely nothing — these officials could have said to reporters that would have been beyond the scope of their employment,” whether the statements were true or false?

That’s true, Your Honor…,” said Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division.

Richard Nixon had asserted much the same claim of absolute authority about his actions in the Watergate scandal, that when the President does something, it’s ipso facto not illegal, and can’t be illegal, since he’s the President. The U.S. Supreme Court at that time made clear that nobody, not the President and not his associates and aides, are outside the reach of the law. In addition, a conservative-led federal appeals court years later ruled that President Bill Clinton could be civilly sued by Paula Jones while he was in office.

But in 2007, there’s a new, more “conservative” Supreme Court, which may explain why the CheneyBushRove forces are pushing the issue of absolute presidential authority to the point of a Constitutional Crisis. They figure with Roberts and Alito on the court, they should be able to get a 5-4 decision granting the “commander-in-chief” carte blanche in “wartime.”

What war, you ask? Why the Bush-proclaimed permanent “Global War on Terror,” that’s what war. Since that war is one being waged against a tactic, it’ll never end and Bush is thus free to do whatever he wishes to do for the duration of his term.

THE ASHCROFT HOSPITAL SCENE

The scene shifts to another location on a separate matter, but with the same arrogant, intimidating approach so prevalent in the Bush White House for the past six years.

The public learned in gripping testimony last week by James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General, that in 2004 he was informed that Attorney General Ashcroft’s wife — who was by her husband’s bedside in the ICU after his emergency gall-bladder surgery — had agitatedly called the DOJ for help. She’d been alerted (Comey said he believes the call came from Bush) that two White House officials — then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-chief-of-staff Andrew Card — were on their way to the hospital that minute to see the Attorney General on an important matter. Because her medicated husband was still groggy and disoriented, she had restricted any calls and visitors, but that didn’t seem to matter to the White House.

With sirens blaring and lights flashing, Comey and his security detail made it to George Washington Hospital and raced up the stairs. Their aim was to get to the ICU room before Gonzales and Card arrived to get Ashcroft to sign a document re-authorizing a domestic-spying operation that the DOJ had adjudged to be unconstitutional.

Ashcroft and Comey had discussed this domestic-spying program before the A.G. went into the hospital, and both had decided, as did the DOJ’s legal team, that they would not, and in all conscience could not, sign the required document attesting to the program’s legality. Comey, as Ashcroft’s deputy, was named Acting Attorney General while the A.G. was in the hospital, and the White House had been so informed.

When Gonzales and Card entered the ICU room, carrying a document, they didn’t want to talk to Comey. (Comey had the reputation as somewhat independent. Comey was the DOJ official who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, another straight-arrow, to prosecute the Plame case.) Instead, Gonzales and Card spoke to Ashcroft about the need for him to approve the top-secret surveillance program — it needed to be re-authorized every 45 days, and the deadline was the next day — and they wanted him to sign the paper.

THE DRAMATIC TENSION IN THAT ROOM

Ashcroft gathered enough strength to push himself up off his pillow, denounced their behavior, and informed them that, in any case, Comey was the Acting Attorney General. In the infighting that followed over the next few days, FBI Director Robert Mueller stood with Ashcroft and Comey, with Cheney on the side of Gonzales and Card.

The tension in that ICU room must have been positively electric. “Comey was so concerned that the White House officials would resort to thuggish behavior he [had] called FBI Director Robert Mueller and had Mueller instruct the FBI agents present in Ashcroft’s room not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances.”

When White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked the other day about the mob-style tactics in that hospital room, trying to lean on a very sick man to get what they wanted, Snow said, apparently with a straight face: “Because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn’t work?” Snow — who may have been speaking metaphorically when he got the operation wrong — would say no more about the incident. And Bush would not answer reporters’ questions about whether he sent his heavies to Ashcroft’s room in the ICU.

CARD ORDERS COMEY TO WHITE HOUSE

After Gonzales and Card left the hospital, having obtained no DOJ signature on the document, Card called Comey and angrily ordered him to come to the White House later that evening for a meeting. Comey told Card that based on the behavior of White House officials that afternoon in the hospital room, there was no way he would meet with Card without an outside witness being present. He chose Solicitor General Theodore Olson as his witness.

The White House meeting solved nothing. The DOJ officials would not agree to authorize a domestic-spying program they had determined to be illegal.

What did Bush do? According to Comey, “The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality.”

Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller threatened to resign in protest unless Bush changed his policy. Perhaps because of the threat of another scandal going public just before the November 2004 election, Bush said he would back off and make adjustments to the program to meet the DOJ objections. But, to this day it’s not clear what changes, if any, he might have made in the program.

BUT WHICH DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM?

One reason virtually nobody is sure what Bush did is that it’s still unclear what domestic spying operation was being discussed by Gonzales and then by Comey.

On the surface, the program would seem to be the NSA’s domestic spying program that Bush&Co. took out of the hands of the legally-constituted FISA authorities, the super-secret court that has jurisdiction in okaying wiretaps on U.S. citizens suspected of ties with terrorists. This is the domestic-spying program that received all the publicity when the New York Times finally made it public in 2005 — notably, after the presidential election.

But if one pays careful attention to Gonzales’ February 6, 2006 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, one is led to wonder if Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller were adamant about the admitted-to NSA spy operation or about another, still undisclosed domestic-spying program.

In that testimony, when questioned by senators as to the NSA domestic-spying operations, Gonzales continually used the phrase “the program which I’m testifying about today.” ) In a later written clarification, he said: “I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities.” Using the administration’s term for the recently disclosed operation, he continued, “I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President, the legality of which was the subject” of that day’s hearing.

The clear implication in Gonzales’ carefully-parsed language is that there were other domestic spying programs in place that Bush had not described.

THE “MYSTERY” SPYING OPERATION

Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller all were conservative-Republicans who had supported virtually every one of Bush’s numerous violations of civil liberties, but in this case they were willing to take the ultimate step of putting their necks on the block by resigning and going public. So you can bet that program was something major and truly outrageous. It could well have been the NSA program, but, if not, there are at least two other possibilities:

1. The “Total Information Awareness” program, involving massive data-mining of millions of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails, had been defunded by Congress when the legislators found out about it. Could the TIA, or something very much like it, have been made operational, perhaps under another name, and that this was what Bush&Co. wanted to legalize in some fashion?

2. Could there be a domestic surveillance operation that enabled Bush&Co. to spy on political opponents to Bush policy — Democratic leaders, anti-war activists, etc. — that had no cover of law and needed a legal fig-leaf?

At the very least, Comey, Ashcroft and Mueller should be invited soon to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and explain what the hell the Bush Administration was doing that was so legally suspect that the three top men in the Department of Justice were willing to go public with their resignations in opposition to the policy.

So far as I know, Ashcroft has not been questioned under oath about his tenure as A.G., and it’s long past time that he be asked pointed questions about that period, and especially about these episodes. And certainly it’s time for Gonzales to be grilled again under oath about this, and other matters involving the legality and advisability of his behavior as White House Counsel and Attorney General. Lift up those rocks and the American public will have the opportunity to see a whole lot of bad.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald sums up the situation accurately: “What James Comey described on Tuesday is the behavior of a government completely unmoored from any constraints of law, operating only by the rules of thuggery, intimidation, and pure lawlessness. Even for the most establishment-defending organs, there are now indisputably clear facts suggesting that the scope and breadth and brazenness of the lawbreaking here is far beyond even what was known previously, and it occurred at the highest levels of the Bush administration. We are so plainly beyond the point of no return with this criminality. It is now inescapably evident even for those who struggled for so long to avoid acknowledging it.”

Even the Washington Post, normally friendly in its editorials to CheneyBush spin, came down hard on the Administration, speaking of a “lawlessness so shocking that it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.” But, sad to say, this incident, and the CheneyBush Administration’s conduct in Iraq and in its domestic spying, does in fact represent the mob currently residing in the White House. Impeachment ASAP is a necessity to save our country.

Frost’s own voice in the poem raises the reasonable thought: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out…”

In my college days, I got to hear the Great American Poet read “Mending Wall” — all sensitive and silver-haired and incredibly ancient, it seemed to me — and was impressed by Frost’s calmness and clarity of thought. He came across as a wise, gentle soul.

I was entranced by the grand metaphor with which he was working. Consider: A fence, a wall, can be built to keep something out (the Great Wall of China) or something in (the Berlin Wall). That could be people, or ideas.

On a larger scale, walls and other barriers are designed to protect the status quo and stop change in its tracks. But before we get deeper into that thought, let’s examine just a few fences and walls, and see if and how they work.

THE EXTERNAL WALLS

*The Berlin Wall was designed to keep East Germany’s put-upon residents, chafing under their bleak Communist rule, from fleeing to the lively, prosperous West, and to try to keep Western ideas and practices from penetrating into regimented East Germany society. There were periodic escapes over, around and under the Wall, but, by and large, the barrier worked for nearly three decades: East Germany became a locked-down society in all senses of that term. Eventually, the Wall, which had become a larger-than-life symbol of Cold War repression, was torn down as Communist rule decomposed in the Eastern Bloc.

*Israel has nearly finished its giant Wall of Separation, ostensibly to keep out would-be Palestinian terrorists. It seems to have worked to a large extent in this regard, but is no less controversial. Israel claims that the wall is “temporary,” and easily could be removed if and when peace arrives in the Middle East. In other words, it’s permanent. Rather than bringing peace and quiet, the wall exacerbates anger and resentment. In building it, the Israelis carried out a blatant annexation of Palestinian land that stands as a clear impediment to peace; indeed, it is a gross incitement to continued violence, since major Israeli settlements, on land supposedly reserved for Palestinians, are now placed on the Israel side of the wall.

*The Bush Administration is starting to build parts of a huge barrier fence along the Mexican border to keep out hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S. Whether that wall will be effective is problematic; it’s virtually impossible to seal a several-thousand mile border. (And let us not forget that there is also a fairly porous border to the north of the United States, also several thousand miles long.) As with so many such barriers, the border fences envisioned for the Southwest are designed more for domestic-political reasons — although they do not take into account the power of the agribusiness lobby, which wants cheap, non-unionized labor to harvest America’s crops.

*As a way of tamping down the sectarian violence in Baghdad, the U.S. military has constructed a huge concrete barrier around a Sunni neighborhood, ostensibly to keep Shia death-squads from entering. The local residents claim they are being ghettoized — using the analogy of the Warsaw Ghetto where the Nazis crowded Jews — and thus are more vulnerable with the wall in place since the residents are more tempting targets, massed all in one place. Also, they complain, it’s more difficult for them to escape when the wall is breached by killers — or when those guarding the entry and exit turn out to be their executioners.

In general, these kinds of walls and fences represent unresolved social matters, and remain in place as long as the political conflict remains “hot.” On the Israel/Palestine dispute, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for any movement toward peace because of the wall. The prospects for a peace treaty and negotiations for mutual projects seem woefully out of reach, mainly because each side is effectively ruled by extremists who simply want the other side to disappear and figure violence is the way to make the disappearance happen. Such a policy does little but stimulate a never-ending cycle of vengeance.

When Communism imploded in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, there was no need for a barrier wall in Germany and so it came down virtually overnight. The new political realities ruled rather than prejudice and military fears. That wall had lasted three decades — its existence spanning a full generation of citizens — and then, poof, was no more. In short, walls can be taken down in short order (Belfast’s wall separating Catholics and Protestants is another example) once the political realities shift.

THE INTERNAL WALLS

There is another kind of wall, in some ways much more significant and socially malignant. It’s the wall that separates humankind from accurate information, often because of closed religious minds.

The two major colliding forces in today’s world have walled themselves into ignorance and Dark Ages-type thinking. Extremist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity both believe they are doing “God’s work” in opposing “infidels,” those refusing to recognize the “one true God”; those “non-believers” need to be crushed because they represent the most nefarious kind of “evil.”

Osama bin Laden and his like-minded supporters would be happiest if society returned to the theology and societal organization of the Muslim caliphate from the 7th to 11th centuries. George W. Bush and his neo-con and fundamentalist supporters would be happier in an old-fashioned colonialist world, where a “Pax Americana” would reign supreme. Each side believes that if you’re not on their side, you’re ipso facto an enemy and should suffer the consequences. Neither side is amenable to compromise and negotiation, which explosive situation leads inexorably to the deaths of untold numbers of innocents who just happen to be in the way (”collateral damage”).

Extremist Islam wants nothing to do with modernity and commerce, which bring with them all sorts of contemporary “depravities” and “immoralities.” Fundamentalist Christianity, with Bush as a key representative of that movement, wants nothing to do with the proven facts of modern science and with facts delivered to him by the professional intelligence agencies. There is no room on either side for the concepts of toleration and power-sharing. It’s “victory” or nothing — a “crusade” for “righteousness and purity,” based on a foundation of problematic beliefs and self-righteous religious faith.

There are plenty of folks in the middle, but the violence-griddle is kept so hot by the extremists that a massive attack is usually enough to frighten the timid middle into at least a tacit alliance with those who promise to protect them from the dastardly “Other.”

CHANGE AS A FRIGHT AGENT

Earlier, above, I suggested that walls are generally built to support the status quo and delay the possibility of significant societal change. Extremist, rigid religious thought cannot abide that kind of change; to them, change is “blasphemous,” “heretical,” and ultimately terrifying. Thus, they attempt to stop the world by building strong, permanent barriers (actual and ideological) to keep out the scary thoughts, the scary people.

Let me be clear: There definitely are terrorist types worth being scared of and defended against. But the rush to erect walls and barriers against entire masses of people is what lazy, ignorant people do. It takes too much creative mental work to come up with alternative ways of incorporating change, compromise, tolerance, into their lives. To deal creatively with change, you actually have to open your mind, and sometimes even your heart, to deal with people and ideas that are different.

Doing so, in an open way, is the beginning of wisdom, and of human progress. You let the light in, and also let the darkness in, and then you fashion a way to incorporate the two at the same time in order to move forward in something approximating harmony and peace. Doing so doesn’t have to mean you love and accept everything that comes your way in this fast-changing world, but it does mean you have to figure out a way of dealing with the new information and the new people. If things are exceptionally tense, you make treaties and remain suspicious, but at least you’ve figured out a way to co-exist together relatively peacefully.

Doing that has got to be better than a Dark Ages-type of smashing “the Others” over the head with clubs because you are pissed off by, and frightened of, them.

SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Finally, some personal observations that perhaps may prove useful in meditating on the question of walls and barriers:

I think I went into journalism as a young man (starting in my teens) because I needed to figure out how the world works and how I could maneuver successfully in it. In that regard, the hunt for truth became my friend. If I could open myself to how the world really operated — the good parts, the bad parts, the ugly and scary parts — I could somehow stabilize myself in what seemed like a very chaotic, frightening social system. Truth provided the glue that held it (and a shaky me) together.

As a bone fide reporter, I was encouraged to ask questions, amass information and then attempt to sort it all out in some coherent fashion. Likewise, travel outside the “safe container” of home and homeland yielded more information about different ways of thinking and living; it was journalism in a new sort of way, and I did indeed keep journals of my travels, trying to organize what I had learned by such adventuring around the country and abroad.

Good journalism, of course, constantly gets one in trouble, since the status-quo forces arrayed against truth-telling are legion and powerful. And these days, with an extremist regime in control in Washington, D.C. — one more inclined to avoid reality, even stomp on it when it appears — good journalism is all too rare. Mostly, the institutional, conglomerate-owned media (the owners of which reflect much the same economic goals and worldview as those in government) tend to flatter the rulers and shade and conceal the truth — in effect becoming another “wall” blocking our view of the real world. That’s why the free-wheeling internet is so valuable as a corrective, with numerous bloggers and reporters dedicated to opening windows on what’s really going on behind the ever-present spin barriers.

Those in power who put walls and fences between themselves and the hunt for truth cannot deal effectively with reality and risk societal disaster. Good example: How CheneyBush took America into the catastrophe that is the Iraq War. They are destined for ignominious failure because they long ago slid off the reality tracks, and refuse to acknowledge their mistaken judgment, ideology and policy. They are heading that sliding train straight for the cliff of ultimate failure and don’t seem to care if they take everyone else down with them.

CheneyBush have demonstrated time and again that their personalities are so stunted and insecure that there is no way they would be able to acknowledge the depth of their mistakes, their moral responsibility for failures, and their warped ideologies. This means that those of us desiring to save our country, and save those who are otherwise destined to die and be maimed by their participation in this militarist madness, need to remove our ostensible “leaders” as quickly as possible.

At the very least, there would seem to be sufficient evidence of enough high crimes, misdemeanors and malfeasance to justify the initiation of impeachment hearings ASAP.

There’s too much at stake to just let it ride; even with the Democrats starting to exercise their oppositional muscles, the continuing damage the CheneyBush Administration can do in the next year-and-a-half — including an unprovoked attack on Iran — is too excruciatingly awful to contemplate. It’s impeachment time — let’s get on with it.

God, that was humiliating! I’ve never taken a dive before, and it showed. I was sweating like a pig as those senators used me like a punching bag.

Obviously, I couldn’t tell the truth about the U.S. Attorneys situation, or the whole enterprise would collapse — Karl, Dick, The Boss, the whole lot. Ain’t no way I’m going to the slammer, at least not tripped up by anything I’ve said.

If the Demoncrats are going to get me, they’ll have to prove it, and I don’t think they’ll be able to locate anything but circumstantial evidence. The cleaning crew did its work well. I hope.

So there I was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee coming off like someone with early-onset Alzheimer’s: “I can’t recall,” “I’ve wracked my memory and have no recollection,” “that meeting just isn’t in my memory,” and a hundred other such variants. Embarrassing!

Sure, it was obvious I was lying my head off, but they can’t get me for a “faulty memory” or for when I said “I believe” that such-and-such happened or didn’t happen. I know my way around the magic words. We rehearsed for days so I’d be comfortable using those terms and delivering my lines with believability. (Who was it that said “once you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy”?)

Yes, everyone knew, even my Republican friends, that I was sent up there as a grand deflector, and they were pissed as hell that it was just me in front of them and not Cheney or Rove or Bush. To the senators, I was disrespecting them, treating them like easy marks; they’d just as soon I depart my job ASAP. But they are dumb marks, thinking they’re in control of the situation when in reality, as long as we all keep our various stories straight, we still are.

STILL IN CONTROL OF JUSTICE

We figure my immediate humiliation will pass in a week or two, and I’ll still be in charge of the DOJ, from where we can control the pace and direction of the anti-Bush Administration flak coming our way — especially with regard to impeachment. And our replacement U.S. Attorneys will still be in position to help us for the 2008 election, doing whatever they can to minimize liberal turnout (it’ll be “Democrat voter-fraud” big time) and to protect our Republican office-holders.

After my testimony, as we expected, the Democrats have been blustering and raging, along with a few turncoat Republican weaklings, scared of losing their seats if they don’t cut their open support of the Bush Administration. But the whole mess should blow over quickly, since “I serve at the pleasure of the President” and he’s not going to throw me to the wolves, no matter how loudly they bay.

Bush values loyalty and my years of serving him faithfully (sometimes drawing, how shall we say?, slightly outside the legal lines), so I think I’m safe for the time being. But, they’ve let me know that if the situation doesn’t calm down, if things get really hot for the Administration because of me, I’m expected to resign. A pardon, maybe even a pre-emptive one before indictments are unsealed, should cover me down the line. (It worked for Bush’s dad when he was President, pardoning Iran/Contra scandal figures before they’d even been charged.)

THE NIXON & REAGAN PARALLELS

I know my history. I know how Nixon kept throwing one after another of his assistants overboard in Watergate in order to protect his closest and most loyal aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who knew every illegality they and Nixon and the rest of the crew had committed — and then had to dump them as well to try to save his own hide. So I know I’m ultimately expendable, but we’ll try to keep that day from ever happening. (But if Goodling and McNulty and Sampson at DOJ start dropping bombs on me, that may not be possible. And like Haldeman and Ehrlichman, I know where the bodies are buried as well.)

So, yes, I was thrown back into history with the Nixon parallels. But I had another deja vu experience, this one going back to President Ronald Reagan.

Remember when Reagan, with a straight face, said about the Iran-Contra Scandal: “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

And there I was the other day responding to the senators on whether or not I mentioned to President Bush that I had received complaints from Rove and Senator Pete Domenici about that New Mexico U.S. Attorney:

“I now understand there was a conversation with myself and the president.”

And pundits pundit-ed and folks laughed, and I had to endure satire like this supposed “translation” of what I said from some creep named Archer at the Lawyersworldland blog, which is now circulating around the internet all over the goddamned world:

“In the dim dawning light of understanding, understanding that I never had before and which, miraculous to relate, I have now, I begin to grasp — only because it has been explained to me and I couldn’t grasp it myself and don’t believe it’s really true, but people who are much smarter and stronger than I am have made me understand, or perhaps have brainwashed me … Yes — that’s it — people have kept me up late and interrogated me night after night until I now understand there was a conversation with myself (see how crazy I really am?) and the president. But I only understand that now — I didn’t understand before, because whatever has been done to me to make me say this stuff, whatever terrible victimization I have endured (and no, I don’t remember what it was, so it must have been terrible) had not yet been done to me.”

That’s not funny, diary; it’s too close to the bone. We should find the traitor who wrote those hurtful words — which casts aspersions on our fine roster of DOJ lawyers and U.S. Attorneys around the country, along with the soldiers in Iraq — and send him somewhere for some robust questioning.

PEELING AWAY PROTECTIVE LAYERS

The Democrats really want to get Cheney and Bush in the Senate well, and Rove under oath at a committee hearing, on trial for their jobs. But they know they can’t get to them. Yet. So they are peeling away at the outer core of the onion — with inner-circle folks like me.

Already preparing themselves for likely subpoenas and interrogation on various matters: Rove and Harriet Miers and Condi Rice and maybe Stephen Hadley.

We could all go down on this deal and all the associated “White House Horrors” (as John Mitchell termed the hidden Watergate secrets), what with our manipulating the voting process, harsh interrogation methods, extraordinary rendition, abandoning habeas corpus as a protective judicial concept, etc. etc. Those pinko liberals hate that we take all that law-and-order stuff seriously. We use the law and keep them in order.

So the trick is not to go down. I think I’d better fasten my seatbelt. We’re all in for a mighty bumpy ride during the remaining year-and-a-half of our Administration’s tenure. If we last that long.