W's Alternative Futures

John the Baptist, after torturing a thief,
Looked up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief,
Said, 'tell me, Great Hero, but please make it brief,
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'
-Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"

In January, 2009, the long travail known as the Bush Presidency will at last come to an end. The least interesting, and most grossly incompetent, man to serve as President in living memory will depart the Oval Office and will go --somewhere. He's probably not sure where. I would imagine part of his thinking, if that's the term, will depend on what Laura Bush wants to do at that point, including whether she wants to be anywhere near W. I would surmise that she doesn't. Enough, after all, is enough. If the BBC reports are true, Bush has resumed drinking; the reason suggested by the British investigative reporters (they still do that sort of thing) for Bush's absence with a "stomach ailment" one morning at the G-8 is that he was up late the night before slamming down etwas helles Bier mit Angela Merkel. There are pictures to that effect, dismissed by Bush flacks as nonalcoholic beer. But who would drink nonalcoholic beer in Germany? Angela, the physicist turned national leader, probably egged on the alkie turned world-stage fuckup. "Nur ein Bier, Herr President," she probably teased, seeking some way to steer her one-on-one encounter with this moron in a direction that would at least be perversely fascinating.

So it's possible that one of Bush's fantasies is to resume a true drinking life, and he's in the process now of reactivating his liver enzymes. Probably not, however, down on the "ranch." I think the ranch was a stage prop; most presidents (Clinton was an exception) need some private sanctuary with a pretentious name where they can go and "recharge." W is not going to hang around that place clearing brush and catching bass some Secret Service agent just put in the water, especially if Laura is somewhere else. One alternative future for Bush is to retire some place like Houston and live out a retirement reminiscent of a middle manager from an insurance company. I can't imagine he'll be "consulted" on anything; he's too stupid. The Republican candidates won't mention his name now, and he's still the President. So he'll drink, play golf and watch television. His days as Leader of the Free World will seem like a weird dream, as a life lived by someone else.

That's the optimal outcome for W. The alternative reality is where the world, including the United States, animated by a unmitigable revulsion, rises up against him. I can see that happening too. In that scenario, Bush becomes a criminal defendant, indicted either in U.S. courts or the International Criminal Court, for a long list of war crimes and atrocities. Bush, or his handlers and puppet-masters, have seen that one coming. That was the sole purpose of the exoneration provisions for torture and violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that we find enshrined today in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Indeed, with respect to the latter statute, we can go further and declare that the sole and only purpose of the Military Commissions Act was to insulate Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang from the truly scary implications of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, where the Supreme Court (even this Supreme Court) surprised the High Command with the holding that all these Arabs and Afghans thrown into Guantanamo, or into Abu Ghraib, and forgotten about were human beings with Geneva Convention rights! Ach du Lieber, as Eichmann said before his neck snapped.

Something had to be done. Not the right thing, of course. That isn't how Bush operates. The sneaky, cowardly, unprincipled and self-serving thing had to be done. Fortunately, Hamdan came down with a little time left on the clock for Bush's pet Congress over on Capitol Hill, time enough to neutralize some of Hamdan's more disturbing elements before a gang of Democrats descended on Washington, D.C. and foreclosed the option. Thus, all of a sudden, there in the fall of 2006, it became urgent to get that Military Commissions Act passed. I remember watching Bush on a television in the dining room of a hotel in Lyon, France, listening to his plaintive cry for mercy for America's torturers, who only forced glo-sticks up the asses of Afghan opium farmers because they thought it was the right thing to do. The idea of punishing these loyal American servants for just doing their jobs was "unacceptable," Bush squealed.

Well, of course the exoneration provisions went a little farther than that. Nested within similar get-out-of-jail free provisions found in the Detainee Act, like a set of Russian dolls, the new escape clauses essentially let everyone off the hook all the way back to September 11, 2001, and for some things all the way back to 1997, for anything except what was called a "grave" violation of the Geneva Act, and made acting on the "advice of counsel" a material consideration in determining whether anyone could be held liable for anything. You know, like Bush relying on Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo, who assured him you can torture the shit out of these Untermenschen because no law anywhere protects them from anything.

One thing's a cinch: Bush won't try to live in any foreign country after retirement, unless it's a place like Paraguay. An interesting question will be presented if the exoneration provisions are repealed: if, at the time you tortured or ordered the torture of a prisoner, it was a violation of the U.S. Anti-Torture Statute, for example, as indeed it was; and if that crime was later "exonerated" by an ass-covering piece of dreck that you ordered your Congress to pass; and, if further, at some point an enlightened and perhaps enraged Congress repeals the exoneration - well, does prosecution now violate Ex Post Facto? I think the right answer, in Bush's special case, as a Bill of Attainder all for him: let's treat this tricky Constitutional question the way Bush would handle it. Let's give the matter the same grave and serious respect which Bush has always afforded the supreme law of the land.