Demagogue

What would Jagger do? Miss you...

Chickenhawk

On Crooks and Liars:

The truth about required ages of enlistment: 17 to 41. Chris Vucovich is eligible and a damn chickenhawk.

Don’t believe me? Try the Army.

Neo-confederates

On Crooks and Liars (now redacted):

The Montgomery Co. GOP, of which Vucovich is secretary, has an interesting seal. Brings to mind the Confederate battle flag, ya think?

Justice delayed

A friend writes:

I started the new Congressional term thinking, why bother with impeachment. Now I feel that since Congress isn't doing anything else, at least let's tarnish Bush's image a bit. Is it too late to impeach Reagan for Iran Contra? Conducting a war explicitly banned by Congress was the ultimate act of an imperial president.

I think there was once an impeachment after the fact, though I doubt the defendant was dead at the time, which would run pretty hard against our tradition. Since Ken Lay’s Enron convictions were on appeal when he died, they were vacated by the court after his death. I find that a little extreme, but there it is.

Impeachment is necessary. Unfortunately, it’s probably also impossible. I agreed with Nancy Pelosi that it should be off the table, though I didn’t think it should be entirely out of the kitchen. I hoped instead that investigations would bring a popular groundswell that would put it back on the agenda. Every time the Bushists stonewall – which is really all they have left – make them do it in a way that exposes their brazen criminality.

Then try Duhbya, Darth, Rummy, and Gonzo et al for war crimes (torture, mainly) after they leave office. (Yeah, like that’ll ever happen.)

More on "Justice Denied"

See Better late than never.

The reason I didn’t want Miers was her complete personal fealty to Duhbya. Mr. President, you want the prerogatives of an elected king, whatever you say I’ll agree. This – not Iraq, not for heaven’s sake abortion, not even the galloping plutocracy – is the number one issue of our day. All the others are symptoms of the fundamental dysfunction of our polity, which is slouching into fascism. Are we going to govern ourselves, or are we so tired of the petty details and hard facts that we’re going to hand over the power to corrupt men like Darth Cheney to do with us what they will – so long as we get to watch Survivor?

Did the Times advocate a filibuster of Alito? That’s the real question. As Jimmy Malone said while choking on his own blood in The Untouchables, “What are you prepared to do about it?” The media has a mania for bipartisanship (‘Broderism’), which mainly translates into Democratic restraint and lots of tongue-clucking about the Republicans’ lack of restraint. My mania is for Constitutional democracy, and that’s not a value I’ll compromise in the vain hope of comity with a bunch of would-be tyrants, even in the name of Liebermanesque bipartisanship. Especially not in the name of anyone who enables Republican abuses like Lieberman.

Too bad the Washington Democrats still hope for comity. They should at every turn be fighting political war instead of thinking about responsible governance. The only path to that is to throw the rascals out and install some lesser rascals.

That includes judges. We need to clean house by all legal means – and some extralegal means, too. You think any of the Supremes are on the Palfrey phone list? God, I hope so.

By the way, I think David Vitter is toast. Another Harvard man bites … the dust.

Why does everyone hate Michael Moore?

On KnoxViews:

I don't get it. Moore stands up for what he believes, and the Wolf Blitzers and Sanjay Guptas and Lou Dobbses of the world pillory him for it - even after time has proven him right.

Right-wingers totally get in their faces, but CNN invites them back to panel discussions, even though they manifestly have no facts and no expertise. This happens over and over again. They have even given Glenn Beck, a raving moron, his own show. Then, despite the fact that no one watches it, they let him guest host for Paula Zahn, replacing vapid with rabid.

Some liberal media.

Wolf promised Moore a correction if Gupta was proven wrong. This is as close as CNN will get. They restate a few issues, making it seem as though Gupta and Moore are in violent agreement, and Gupta and CNN never admit they got anything was wrong, though it's obvious by omission.

CNN does a non-correction correction, but they steer wide of any fact-by-fact comparison. Moore, on the other hand, sources his facts. Isn't that what journalists are supposed to do?

I haven't seen SiCKO, and I don't agree with everything Moore says about health care, but I do know this: You can't believe anything just because it is on TV. (Aside: I do agree with Moore that every second story on CNN looks like a product placement or a corporate tie-in.)

We're on our own, folks. The fourth estate has sold us out.

Out of context, but...

Comment on what?:

Taking a wicked nixon on the ideals and the work of the Founders...

Better late than never

Justice Denied ($) indeed:

In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers, students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image. Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.

Yep. Not a single wrong thing. These people want to return to the 1920s or even the 1880s. They’re bad people, willfully ignorant of those they feel are lesser than they, even if the Bushists do have good manners and nice, toothy upperclass smiles. They will rule in favor of the unitary executive, and then pissing around with legal arguments won’t get us anywhere for 40 years. I always thought big brother would come here in America from fascism long before communism.

What Harry Reid should say to Joe Lieberman

"Back our candidate or you're fucking out of the caucus."

And then, come 2009, throw him out anyway.

On Roger Ailes.

How to impeach the Bushists

Our Constitutional democracy is in grave peril. Dick Cheney and his sock puppet, George Duhbya Bush, claim that they want to restore the powers of the Executive Branch. In this, as in practically everything they say, they are lying.

The continued safety of our bold American experiment in democracy requires that we reject the Bushist despotism explicitly and legally. Otherwise, the Cheney-Bush precedent will be that the words of the Constitution are just words and that they can be redefined at will to mean whatever the Executive Branch wants them to mean.

The final remedy the Constitution provides for a President who refuses just and legal oversight and separation of powers is impeachment.

How can patriotic Americans accomplish this act of loyalty to our founding ideals?

The powers that Cheney and Bush have usurped for what they call the unitary executive are powers that the Founders feared to repose in any branch of government, particularly in the Executive, since its power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The Founders rejected exactly the sort of despotic power Cheney claims, which is the power of a king to be beyond the oversight of the other branches, beyond any law, beyond all accountability to the people. It is also the power to make war on whim and to extend the battlefield's fetters on liberty to citizens at home in the United States.

What we have seen over the past six years has been an autocratic restoration in slow motion. With the connivance of Republican Congresses and the elite media and with the acquiescence of frightened Washington Democrats, this restoration has swept away 231 years of shared and separated powers. We now have authoritarian rule, not democratic governance.

Resistance to the Bushist misrule must come from the people. The Democrats are far better than the Republicans but, even so, they are too timid to push through impeachment on their own. They think they're winning and don't want to risk their lead or their fragile coalition, and they accept the false equivalence between Clinton's hysterical, disproportionate, unwarranted impeachment and Duhbya's warranted impeachment. The fundamental difference is that Bill Clinton betrayed his wife, while Duhbya has betrayed our entire system of government with his serious public crimes.

Even so, we require the help of the Washington Democrats. The people have awakened to the incompetence of the Bushists in Iraq and to their arrogance at home, but even I don't think they understand the full story of corruption at the heart of this administration - of how fast and loose they've played with our liberty, our money, and our lives.

The way to reach the people is a steady drumbeat of investigations. The Bushists will stall and stonewall every one. Just as they did in 2000, they will try to run out the clock.

The Democrats in Congress must make Duhbya defend his imperial Presidency and its shameless secrecy every week for the next eighteen months. Congress must constantly stand firm on its demands, must find the White House in contempt, must use every process and finding to refuse its tacit assent to Cheney and Bush. If that means no more confirmations to any office, so be it, and that will mean no more recesses at all, lest Duhbya make recess appointments.

Once the people see where their taxes and the blood of their sons and daughters have been going, there will be outrage. That's the ticket. The Constitutional crisis that has been simmering along since 2001 will come to full boil. It will hurt, no doubt, as all surgery does. Sadly, the time we could have had a painless remedy was December 2000, when Florida was in limbo. Or, maybe that wouldn't have been painless, either. The media could have covered Al Gore fairly in 1999 and 2000, and then Duhbya never would have won the Presidency 5-4.

To win conviction of Bush and Cheney and remove them from office requires many Republican votes. Joe Lieberman will never be one of those votes for conviction. It's a high burden, reachable only if enough angry constituents threaten to take their votes and their money to another candidate. Much as I would rejoice to see President Pelosi, conviction would probably require a deal that would make that temporary at best.

If this deal requires keeping the Bush Cabinet (shudder!), Alberto Gonzales must also be impeached. Any deal must also forbid pardons.

If this fantastic, difficult (impossible?) scenario does not come to pass, there is one more way to hold the Republican would-be tyrants accountable to the law. They have broken laws that carry punishments:
· FISA
· war crimes statutes against torture

We should have learned from Watergate that crimes unpunished are crimes encouraged. Dick Cheney and the Republicans certainly learned that lesson. Now they stonewall every subpoena with the same lame rationales that Richard Nixon could not make stick. They evade all disclosure, and evidence mysteriously disappears. The same news media that foamed at the mouth about the missing Rose law firm records (yes, the ones that confirmed Hilary's story) ho hums at the White House's thoroughgoing evasion of official recordkeeping laws. As the Republicans have done ever since Gerald Ford let Nixon off the hook, they pardon their convicted cronies - Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, and now Scooter Libby.

This is not a time to play it safe. This is a critical point in history. We face the same scale of gamble that the Founders faced - our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Or we can watch "reality" TV and forget about running our own government.


Corrected version of what I originally posted on KnoxViews.

Respect for law

Unpublished letter to the Boston Globe:

George W. Bush gave Scooter Libby quite a present yesterday. Bush should have put Americans first instead. After all, it's our country's birthday this week.

Of all the people who might deserve mercy, it's just a coincidence that Bush would give a get out of jail free card to another Republican felon. The one guy too delicate for prison is also the guy who could expose the truth about Dick Cheney's plan to out Valerie Plame.

You have to admit that Republicans take care of their own. If you make them choose their cronies or the law that the rest of us have to obey, they'll choose special treatment for their own kind every time.

Impeachment is the only remedy we have for the arrogance of Republican power. Bush and Cheney have proven that they will stonewall the lawful oversight of Congress at every step. Every subpoena they refuse, every political secret they hide, every law they breach takes us one step closer to a banana republic.

Those of us who care about the ideals of the Founders are the true patriots. We must demand the removal of these scoundrels from power.

Abuse of process

On KnoxViews:

Darth Cheney's bullshit rationale for exempting himself from the law is just as transparent nonsense as the $67 million dry cleaner pants lawsuit. In the abusive pants lawsuit, the presiding judge awarded some costs to the defendants. I hope he will award their legal fees, too.
Cheney is simply trying to escape oversight. Clearly, Duhbya is not up to supervising his boss and never has been - what a poser!

Not only does Cheney preside over our country, he also presides over a coup d'etat against the Constitution, executed in slow motion by the banana Republicans.

Cheney believes that all he has to do to escape the consequences of his illegal actions is to get his papers into escrow in Duhbya's presidential library. (Would he dare build a vice presidential library in recognition of his regency?) Look for even more restrictive Executive Orders on the confidentiality of presidential and vice presidential papers in Jan. 2008.

What Cheney forgets (and Duhbya is too oblivious to know) is that he is a war criminal. He (and Alberto Gonzales via David Addington) may define torture as anything short of major organ failure, but U.S. law does not, and Cheney is criminally liable for at least these crimes (along with Rummy and Duhbya).

I hope to see these SOBs in orange, and I don't mean I want them to visit Neyland Stadium. (Yeah, either one is a long shot.)

Don't be an idiot

Oh, too late, you're a Cheney supporter.

The Vice President is part of the Executive Branch. You and the Cheneyites might try reading about the office in the Constitution instead of repeating obviously moronic spin that pretends they can change the meaning of words to fit their anti-democratic desires.

The Vice President's occasional role as president of the Senate doesn't make him a legislator. He only has a vote in case of ties, he doesn't sit on committees, he can't submit a bill on his own, and his very office is described in Article II, the vesting of the Executive power. He works in the [expletive deleted] White House, at least when he's not at an undisclosed location (Transylvania?).

Furthermore, Executive Orders come in many forms. A huge number of them direct the Executive Branch in implementation of statutes, as is true in this case.

The Vice President is subject to law, to Executive Orders, and to the Constitution. If we didn't live in [expletive deleted] Animal Farm, that would be obvious even to watchers of Fox "News". Cheney should be called to account for his assault on the legal basis of American liberty and government.

But Dick Cheney wants to run a shadow government from beyond the reach of any light, just like the cockroach he is. So he makes these patently ridiculous claims, and his sycophant supporters nod at the absurdity as if they've always known the VP is the fourth branch of government and defend him like the fearful lemmings they are.

Originally posted on KnoxViews.

Pseudonyms

I have to say, I have decreasing respect for those who only populate the comments sections of blogs and never put themselves out there by writing something in a form that more than three people read. Take a stand. Show some guts. Stop hiding behind anonymous screen names. Show us who you are. And stop pretending to be know-it-alls.

Waaah! If you can't beat our arguments, an ad hominem will have to do, well-spiced with aggrieved elitism at our poaching on your pundit's unearned preserve.

Screen names? C'mon, graduate from AOL.

We're pretending to be know-it-alls? Sheesh.

Now for substance in response to your lack of it: I suppose you have decreasing respect for Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Paine, etc. They didn't sign their given names either. Probably wanted to avoid the useless ad hominems of defensive frauds like you.

(Originally posted here.)

Thought experiment

Suppose there were a Republican who is a paragon of personal virtue who thinks well and moderately about foreign and domestic policy. Suppose that nonetheless this man (we are talking about Republicans, after all) could win the Republican nomination for President. Frankly, I think he'd have to stuff the ballot box at the RNC to get anything approaching reason past the fundies, the anti-tax fanatics, and the PNAC imperialists (not to mention the industrial and tribal pro-war interests).

So, with those ridiculous counterfactuals in a suspension of disbelief that J.K. Rowling would laugh at, what government would you get? You'd get the permanent policy apparatus of the Republican Party. This is what gave us Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, the vast and vapid neocon network, among others. You'd also retain the permanent political apparatus of the GOP, and you'd better believe that Karl Rove is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is no sale. There is no Republican for nationally significant office who deserves a vote. Not a single one.

Originally a comment on Philosoraptor.

Tax free

It's really bad public policy when theme parks are tax exempt just because they call themselves religious. It's the kind of nonsense that leads to L. Ron Hubbard.

Originally a comment on KnoxViews.

Against type on this

I have no problem with stripping prison libraries of Islamist, Christian Identity, or Kahanist literature. And there's certainly no reason we should pay for it out of our small enough budgets. Cons don't gain the right to whatever book they want simply by conviction of a felony.

I don't think anyone is going to be rehabbed by the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the The Turner Diaries, much less by radical Islam, Christianity, or even Judaism posing as religion when it's really revolutionary politics. They want that crap; let 'em wait until they're out.

Originally a comment on KnoxViews.

The NRA vision

Hey, c'mon, an armed society (Iraq) is a polite society. Yep, them Hatfields and McCoys always a-treated each t'other with the utmost respect.

Originally a comment on KnoxViews.

We have become what we forswore

Time magazine, not lately a paragon of hard-hitting journalism, published this yesterday.

The lead is:

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War

This happened in 2002. Anyone who has disbelieved my assertions that torture has been the Bushists' policy can now step up to the crow buffet. Personally, though, I'm too sick to my stomach to eat.

(Originally a comment on Philosoraptor.)

Gonzo and Duhbya in a rowboat

Torture and the death penalty are in the same boat. And Alberto Gonzales is rowing Duhbya around in both of them. (What an ugly twist on The Life of Pi!)

Certainly, there are convicts who deserve death, for whom even death may be too good. There are also easily imagined scenarios where torture is obviously and overwhelmingly utilitarian and thus has a claim to morality and even obligation.

Alan Dershowitz has argued that we need torture warrants and a legal review process to approve them sparingly and justly. I look at our attempts to administer the death penalty justly and fairly (and I'm just not relying on the banality of evil seen in Gonzo and Duhbya), and I don't have great confidence in the usefulness of a legalism that permits torture.

In fact, the central problem of torture under the Bushists is that they made it the policy of their regime. They didn't just wink at it or tolerate a few excesses; they wrote memos justifying it legalistically (note: not legally) even while, for public consumption, they claimed that 'torture' meant only 'maiming or killing', which allowed them to make the Orwellian claim that they were not, oh no, torturing. And they promoted successful practitioners from Gitmo to Iraq.

In extremis, torture may be permissible, but it's not permissible to legalize it. Those who are closest to the need must take the risk if they think it is worth it, and we must have the right to second guess them and even punish them if we disagree. That's the harsh reality. (24, by the way, even agrees, or it did in Day 4 anyway; I found Day 6 unwatchable.)

A good analogy is how we handle cannibalism. We don't legalize it and define the circumstances when it is appropriate (Alive!, say). We recognize that it is illegal or at least immoral but accept a necessity defense. So it should be with torture.

Not every act-utilitarian moral act is subject to rendering into rule-utilitarian law.

The precedent punishment for torture in pursuit of war, particularly war of choice, is the death penalty. Reason forces me to acknowledge that both Gonzo and Duhbya are eligible for prosecution, along with Rummy and Darth Cheney, among many others.

It was for reasons such as this that the Republicans during the Clinton years refused to join the International Criminal Court at The Hague. When out of office, the Bushists also might want to consider not travelling to Belgium, for example, to avoid its almost American sense of its own jurisdiction. No ex post facto problem there!

If these alleged war criminals are ever duly convicted convicted, I'd be satisfied with them receiving the same punishment as Rudolf Hess. Hell, I'd be ecstatic.

(Originally a comment on Philosoraptor.)