waiting to exhale

As I begin this, Bush is supposed to have 549 days, 23 hours and 32 minutes left in office. I know this because I have a Bush Countdown Clock on my desktop. You can have one too, freely available from such sites as nationalnightmare.com. Think about that as a sign of the times. The vast majority of the people in America ask the same question: where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket? So much so that a wide variety of outlets offer Bush Countdown Clocks for installation on your desktop, so you can check to see how far down the road toward liberation we are when you boot up each morning.

As for his actual departure: I'll believe it when I see it. I find it comforting that the Republican Party has a field of presidential candidates. They seem to believe that the normal election cycle will be operative in 2008. That's how spooked I am about what this out-of-control maniac might be up to. God might tell him He needs George to stay on, to "finish His work." Under assault by the Democratic Party, Bush is not backing off. If anything, he seems determined to provoke a true crisis. This is a key distinction between Bush and Clinton. Clinton, as you'll recall, was so afraid of being impeached that he offered to cut deals with Congress to avoid it. Just censure me, he said, I know I deserve something. Clinton said this although there was never any danger of his actual removal from office. The votes weren't there. In the Senate trial, he actually received a majority vote for acquittal. Bush is well aware that on any given workday in the House of Representatives, a vote could be scheduled to impeach him. The simple majority is there. Bush doesn't give a shit, because he knows he can't lose in the Senate. Indeed, the sooner the impeachment proceedings begin, the better his chances of survival.

He's provoking another fight now over executive privilege. As I've written before, and as John Dean writing in Findlaw.com appears to concur, executive privilege would not seem to apply to deliberations of the Justice Department over the hiring and firing of personnel, and it certainly has nothing to do with the issues involved in the Pat Tillman case. In the latter situation, the White House seems to assert that its right to mislead the public about an accidental death in combat is a matter of national security.

Somewhere, in a dark cavern in the Executive Office Building or some such haunt, a shadowy character who goes by the name of David Addington is dreaming this stuff up. Addington graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1974, which strongly suggests that he might be the product of some sort of nuclear accident. Whatever, he has been joined at the hip to Dick Cheney for a very long time, including his tenure as Republican counsel during the Iran-Contra affair. He achieved early notoriety as the author of a "controversial" minority report on the scandal. You can probably imagine which way he tilted the controversy. He went to Duke Law School, and I suspect he is as smart and creative as Bush is dumb and robotic. All these recent crises seem traceable to Addington, including the spooky assertion that Cheney is his own branch of government, and now the argument that it is up to the Executive Branch alone to decide whether to allow the Justice Department in the District of Columbia to prosecute Harriet Miers or Karl Rove for contempt in refusing to appear before Congressional committees.

Among the unintended consequences of Patrick Fitzgerald's half-assed prosecution of Scooter Libby is that we got rid of Scooter and got stuck with this guy as Cheney's new Chief of Staff, bringing with him all his necrotic ideas about torture and the unlimited power of the Executive during "wartime." I think that Addington and Cheney have their own countdown clock, and what they've decided is to test the outer limits of the most absurd, disturbing Constitutional arguments they can come up with. I will confess that is probably every lawyer's dream. How nuts can I make this and still have a chance to win? That's the problem: the Executive Branch does control the Justice Department, it does appoint all the judges, it does have the system gamed. These screwy arguments can work because the people who will decide whether they're tenable or not are people who owe their jobs to Bush/Cheney & Co. Let us face it: with all deference to the flawless perspicacity of the Founding Fathers, this is a major hole in the system. While the effort was made to design a government that would survive even bad people running it, it might not work where the heads of state are determined to break it apart, and where no one seems to pay that much attention to their efforts. That is why conservative lawyers such as Bruce Fein, who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan, and John Dean himself, have become such vociferous critics of Bush & Co. and their Constitutional depredations. They are aware of how outlandish, how dangerous these ideas are that are emanating on nearly a daily basis from Cheney and his mouthpiece. Somewhere in the cavern, you can hear their chilling laughter: moooooAAAAHHHHHaaaahhhhhaaahAAAAH. They have, according to my Countdown Clock, 549 days, 22 hours and 5 minutes to wreak unholy havoc. Don't think for a minute they won't use it.

Plame goes down swinging

Valerie Plame Wilson's lawsuit against Cheney, Rove, Libby, Armitage, et alia, has been dismissed. She was seeking damages for the destruction of her career at the CIA, proximately caused by the vindictive, and treasonous, retaliation by Rove and Libby, acting in concert with Cheney (or maybe at his direction) to discredit the criticisms of Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson. My own passing familiarity with the concept of sovereign immunity, inherited like so many American legal concepts from British jurisprudence, leaves me unsurprised at the result. This was an uphill battle, as Plame's lawyers admitted at each step of the case. In essence, sovereign immunity shields government officials from civil damages which result from actions performed in the course of their official duties. No doubt, in general, this is a salutary principle. It is hard enough to find decent and qualified people to run for office as it is. If you add to the existing risks the idea you can be sued for a policy decision which goes awry (or perhaps accomplishes the very purpose you intended), then even more crazy people would infest the halls of government. Imagine if George W. Bush were civilly liable for the damages caused by his disaster of a war against Iraq. Yes, nice to imagine...but could the damages even be calculated? How to chalk board those, as the lawyers say.

Still, I was hoping she would get somewhere with the lawsuit. Patrick Fitzgerald used the excuse of Libby's perjury to shy away from the true jugular of the case, which was the intentional disclosure of an undercover agent's identity. It seems to me the case was there; Fitzgerald, whose refusal to say anything explanatory about his decision not to pursue the main or substantive case has always struck me as exceedingly weird, simply didn't want to take on the bigwigs. He settled for a set of technical charges against one errand boy, and in the end the President, who doesn't care at all about legality or honesty, took even this hollow victory away from him.

So Rove, Armitage and Libby, along with the Vice President, engaged in a concerted plan to make public, to reporters and the world at large, the secret identity of an undercover operative working in the field of weapons of mass destruction, under the business cover of Brewster Jennings. She would have had contacts in the field, and some of them would have operated under that same cover in dangerous territory. Her disclosure, along with the wholly gratuitous disclosure by Robert Novak of her trade cover, exposed those agents and cooperators to arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. And no one in Washington who was instrumental in blowing her cover, for rolling up those networks, will pay any price whatsoever. The administration will not conduct an investigation to find out what the consequences were of this blown cover. The civil lawsuit has been dismissed. The criminal conviction has been vitiated. No one even lost their security clearance. The White House never even initiated an internal investigation by its own office of security.

I don't think the idea of sovereign immunity was ever meant to go that far. It's a measure, however, of where we are on the road to a completely unaccountable government.

Mr. Mumbles and his lousy end game

If you want to play chess, you first learn the moves. Indeed, old chess hands refer to learning the game in just these terms: "I learned the moves when I was six years old," for example. There is a humility in this formulation; no one can ever say, "I learned chess." All knowledge of chess is partial, approximate. And all qualitative statements about strategy break down in the heat of battle, for example, "control the center of the board," "maintain your pawn structure." Heuristic clues, that's all we have here. They can't guide a specific move, which depends entirely on context and your wits in figuring out what to do, right then and there. Against a good player, a single blunder is fatal. There are "standard" openings which can at least get you to the middle game with your chances more or less intact. Given the myriad complexities involved in an early situation with 32 pieces covering 64 squares, all with different vector lines and potentialities, it's useful to master certain formulas which avoid the worst of the mistakes you might otherwise make if you attempted to figure it out from scratch.

In the world of politics, such as the initiation of the Iraq War, the opening was the Joint Resolution passed by Congress in the fall of 2002. In honor of our imperial leader, we might call this the King's Gambit. Bush/Cheney & Co. successfully browbeat the Congress into support of their preconceived (that is: prior to 9/11) notion of invading Iraq, deposing Saddam, and seizing control of Iraq's oil reserves. The Democrats blundered badly, especially in the Senate, where the 60-vote rule, about which we now hear so much, would have prevented the Republican majority from conducting a floor vote on the Joint Resolution. Among the 77 senators voting to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq (and there could have been little doubt that's exactly what he had in mind), was Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, currently Senate Majority Leader.

So, you screwed up the opening, Mr. Mumbles. And now your end game is a shambles, and here's why: the rules of the game. Once you sign the resolution, you transfer the power to make war to Bush. To take that power away (so you've convinced yourself), you actually need 67 Senators, enough to override all of Bush's vetoes of every single "timeline, benchmark, troop rotation" concoction you can come up with. See how the game is played? Pawns can move forward, two squares on their first move, one square thereafter, and they take other pieces on the diagonal. You can withhold power from the President with only 41 votes, but once you give it to him, you need 67 votes to take it back. Simple, huh? All games have their rules. If you don't know the rules, you'll never be very good at playing the game.

Now, the rule book (the U.S. Constitution) does say that all the money for the war in Iraq has to be appropriated by the Congress. Bush has to have money to keep fighting this disastrous war until January 20, 2009, which is his stated intent. You keep thinking, Mr. Mumbles, that if you make the Senate stay up all night, and say lots of fierce things, that you can change Bush's mind. You apparently believe that a President with an approval rating of 25% will be persuaded if he's concerned it might drop to 24. This seems to be your approach. Or, more likely, you'll do anything to avoid the "radical" approach of Senator Russ Feingold, which is to say to Bush, "no more money." That's a move, allowed by the rule book, which permits you to say "checkmate."

So face it, Mr. Mumbles. You're afraid to win this game, so you're going to keep making moves which you know can't win, all the while pretending that it's part of a brilliant strategy. Alekhine, Capablanca, Bobby Fischer would all just shake their heads in bewilderment: if you can move your queen to KB8 and announce your victory, why would you castle and lose the game?

Delusion & Criminal Enterprises

(Thoughts after attending a talk by Richard Dawkins at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park on Saturday...)

The author of "The God Delusion" arms himself well for the predictable assaults on his character and reasoning directed at his "blasphemous" positions on religion, although he finds humor even in that very accusation. As he quoted from a bumper sticker at the talk: "Blasphemy is a victimless crime." Religion has worked itself so much into the warp and woof of everyday thinking that it's hard to appreciate that we're always talking about ghosts, goblins and spooks who just aren't there. Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist from Oxford, leads the counter-attack of atheism with grace, good humor and bravery, I think. It's valuable work, and probably more necessary than the legions of atheists would probably like to admit. There was a huge crowd at Kepler's, the audience completely filling the bookstore and all its aisles. Maybe you'd expect that so close to a citadel of great learning, Stanford University. But I had the same experience when I went to Book Passage in Corte Madera to hear Christopher Hitchens talk about his atheist work, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Something is in the air these days. Nonbelievers are tired of getting pushed around by people who think "The Passion of the Christ" is a documentary, who believe that humanoids with white feathery wings are floating around just out of view. They're sick of the psychological child abuse of Sunday school brainwashing, the hell-fear bestowed upon the innocent and described so perfectly in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Or physical abuse, as we see today in Los Angeles, where the archdiocese is putting together $660 million to buy up the rest of the 508 claims against diddling priests and other perverts in its direct employment. If you really take to heart the idea that god is not only not great but nonexistent, is a completely fabricated mass delusion intended to supply an easy answer to an infantile wish for certainty about the meaning of life -- if you really get to that point, with the able help of courageous thinkers like Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris and one of the bravest pioneers of all, physicist Steven Weinberg (who was out there taking the body blows of the religious crazies before many others in the scientific establishment) --when you arrive at that point of certainty, and then you look at the Catholic Church with its cassocked legions of child molestors, and you realize there is actually no mitigating reason whatsoever for what has gone on there, that it's all a fraud and a sham, an elaborate game of make-believe involving the investment of billions, all of it milked out of defrauded "believers," in ornate buildings and stained glass, and in all the schools and colleges selling this hokum, and in the other what-not propping up the mythology -- then you begin to appreciate the need for a massive counterforce to oppose such pervasive madness. And leading the charge is this brilliant, funny, polite --and fearless --Englishman with the droll wit and uncompromising attitude essential to the job at hand. Godspeed, as it were, to the good Professor Dawkins.

President Bush's Interesting Distinction

Boris: Sonja, are you scared of dying?
Sonja: Scared is the wrong word. I'm frightened of it
Boris: That's an interesting distinction.
--Woody Allen, "Love & Death"

QUESTION: The intelligence analysts are saying Al Qaida has reconstituted in areas of Pakistan, saying the threat to the West is greater than ever now -- well, as great as 2001.

What's happened?

BUSH: OK, I'm glad you asked. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that opportunity to...There is a perception in the coverage that Al Qaida may be as strong today as they were prior to September the 11th. That's just simply not the case. I think the report will say since 2001, not prior to September the 11th, 2001. Secondly, that because of the actions we've taken, Al Qaida is weaker today than they would have been. They are still a threat. They are still dangerous.

--President George W. Bush, Press conference, July 12, 2007

I must remember to take deep breaths, to exercise regularly, to take my nutrients, to be temperate in all things (including temperance), and to hope, may the Force be with me, that I survive until late January, 2009. I simply have to believe that the United States is a better country than this. Bush must be some sort of statistical anomaly, a singularity, an act of quantum reversal. They say it might happen: an egg, lying splattered on the floor, could reassemble itself and leap up to the counter from which it rolled only moments before. The entropic arrow could reverse itself. Something on that order of probability might account for having a man this stupid as President of the United States of America.

To read an answer such as quoted above is to induce a kind of deep, existential fear in the mind of a common citizen. Such as myself. How could a person like Bush, so elementally confused, lead a country as complex and powerful as the United States? For that matter, how does he navigate his way across a furnished room without killing himself?

What could he have possibly meant by his answer? Only one thing comes to mind. On September 11, 2001, we are fairly certain that 19 members of al-Qaeda were killed instantaneously; thus, their ranks were diminished, to that extent, by late morning, September 11, 2001. They were at their lowest level of strength since earlier that morning. With Bush in charge of America's anti-terrorism efforts, however, they began to recover, beginning the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Therefore, if I read Bush correctly, according to the CIA's latest National Intelligence Estimate, al-Qaeda is at its greatest level of strength since the afternoon of September 11, 2001, although not as strong as it was that morning. This would appear to mean that al-Qaeda is still 19 members short, 20 if you count Khallid Sheikh Mohammed in Guantanamo. Also, "because of the actions we've taken," they've been unable to recover the loss of those 20 operatives.

Still, it is difficult to see how this could be an accurate assessment. I assume among the "actions we've taken" is the invasion of Afghanistan, and our destruction of the jungle gym complexes around Kandahar. We then left, and our ally Pervez Musharraf, democratic dictator of Pakistan, entered into an understanding with tribal groups in western Pakistan that al-Qaeda and the Taliban could have free rein in this cross-border area. Thus, the terrorist sanctuaries, probably including the crucial jungle gym infrastructure essential for teaching Islamic extremists living in Hamburg the art of flying American commercial jets, are back in business. In addition, the group in Iraq known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which President Bush cheerfully equates with the group "which attacked us on September the 11th," reportedly has about 10,000 new recruits, all of them joining up in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While math is probably the stronger of Bush's facilities lying along the verbal/quantitative axis, I think he's miscalculated, indeed, misundercalculated. What the CIA may mean is that, as a "result of actions we've taken," al-Qaeda is now at a point where they have at least 9,980 more members than they used to have, plus two strongholds instead of one. By the time this guy's through, we may need a reversal of the entropic arrow just to put the world back together again.

The irresistible Senator Vitter

I confess that part of my fascination with Senator Vitter's story is connected to my own psycho-inculcation with prohibitory religious indoctrination, a condition for which one is likely in lifelong recovery. It can't be all bad; 'tis said by some that the Victorians were the sexiest people of all because virtually anything, the glimpse of a bare ankle, could be orgiastic. Nevertheless, today's follow-on news about the junior senator from Louisiana reports that in 1998, while he was still a state representative, Vitter wrote an op-ed piece in the Times-Picayune in which he proclaimed President Bill Clinton "morally unfit to govern" because of his sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky.

Probably the very best apothegm of all time, the pithiest, the most telling, the most incisive, came from the droll mind of Oscar Wilde: "Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue." No doubt Senator Vitter honors and reveres virtue in the abstract, and when he has engaged in vice (apparently the D.C. Madam was not his first procurer, according to some reports now coming out of the Big Easy), his public hypocrisy, including most of his work in the United States Senate, indicates that he knew better. The word "vice," however, brings up a delicate problem. Isn't Senator David Vitter now an admitted john? I believe that's a crime, which is an interesting distinction between Bill Clinton and David Vitter, insofar as sexual activity is concerned. Whatever Monica was doing under the desk in the Oval Office (and a lot of it sounds like huge fun for Bill), I don't think it was illegal. They were consenting adults doing legal, if sometimes nasty, things.

Well, some guys have all the luck. Bill Clinton didn't have to pay for it, and Senator Vitter, trying to keep it all quiet and impersonal so as to preserve his sterling image as a church-going family man, in a desperate and sweaty effort to get what he craved without being obvious about it -- well, he did. Does it mean he's morally unfit to govern? Not in my book. It just means he's a sanctimonious asshole.

Some Rise by Sin, Some by Virtue Fall

I do not think less of the junior senator from Louisiana, Republican David Vitter, because his telephone number appears on the list provided by the D.C. Madam to the press. Well, let me qualify that. Why didn't you use a pay phone, David? Sheesh. I think it behooves all of us to become intimately acquainted with our shadow selves, as Jung would have it, and thus to temper our quick condemnation of the human failings of others. He was away from his wife and kids, back home in Metairie, and Sen. Vitter, understandably exhausted from the hard work of trying to steer anti-gay legislation through an intractable, libertine Congress, took a walk on the wild side. Just because Vitter got jiggy with it one night (or ten, or twenty) does not mean his efforts at "defense of marriage" are hypocritical. In one sense, if you think about it, it just proves marriages need all the defense they can get, not just from gays who want to try what Vitter has obviously had some troubles with, but from pimps and madams who cater to our weakness.

I admit I was a little disappointed in Vitter, not just for being such a maroon that he used a telephone with his name on it, but because he won't talk about it now that he's made peace with his wife and God, apparently the only two people he thinks have a rooting interest in this thing. What a killjoy. His defense of marriage advocacy is so boring it makes your bones itch to think about it. But down and dirty nights in D.C.? Finally Vitter, who looks a lot like a choir boy grown fat on too much jumbalaya, would have something fun to talk about.

I wonder if he realizes it was God who got him into this jam in the first place. As a little Catholic, he sat in church on those sweltering Bayou days listening to the bombastic condemnation of perfectly normal human tendencies. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud (much as it might help) to see that's where the tantalizing urge to pimp his night originated. He just had to try it.

Oh well. Let's face it. His 100% rating by the Christian Coalition will be the first casualty of his fall from grace. And, of course, he won't be leading any more floor fights for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. And if he ever uses the word "moral" in a sentence again, everyone will be rolling in the aisles, and I'm not referring to Pentecostals. And since he was something of a vapid Ken-doll in the first place (he used his own telephone number?), he's probably on the home stretch of his tenure in Washington anyway. It won't be long before he'll be spending a lot more time in Metairie, and while God might be okay with it, it's hard to like his long-term chances with his wife. Some marriages need more help than the Constitution can provide.

White House Announces Alternative Benchmarks

"The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy, according to senior administration officials closely involved in the matter. As they prepare an interim report due next week, officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war." Washington Post, July 8, 2007.

[following is a transcript of President Bush's remarks today in a Rose Garden conference with the press - July 10, 2007]

Good afternoon. I'd like to make a reporting on significant new progress in the war on terror, specifically Iraq, where's the military is engaged in active ongoing operations against an entrenched foe and al-Qaeda. We're making steady progress, and I am in constant communication with actual military commanders on the ground. In other words, we're making good progress and I'm basing these assessment and other on what military personnel is saying directly instead of legislating a war plan in the Congress. Some of the highlight to specify or to make further note of include a number of perameters which is highly suggestible of good progress. In other words, toward a goal, which is victory, which is criteria we are constantly reviewing and not just staying the course.

Some of these indicators are folks just living their life in Baghdad now in peaceful ways that before was made harder by evildoers and killers who hate their freedoms and the new democracy and institutions which is developed. On a Tuesday in the third week of May, as just one example, a Shiite unemployed teacher had a kebab lunch with his family and two Sunnis were also there and enjoyed the fine food. In other words not all this civil war talk you hear so much around this town really is like that. It's not all death squads.

Since 9-11 the world has changed. These foe are determined and will not give up their desperate fight on a Congress timetable. Six more years later after 9-11 when America was attacked by a ruthless ideology. We're taking the attack to these same ruthless foe now. In other words, we've gone on offense since 9-11.

Some perameters which can be seen in Iraq now includes fewer dead bodies on the Baghdad streets on typical mornings. In other words, fewer corpses. Today we are finding fewer bodies and often the heads are still attached. There is still too many headless bodies and drill holes in the skulls, often though with fewer drill holes than one more year before these count. Exploding cars in Baghdad are downward also with fewer cars actually blowing up on many days. In other words the streets can be more peaceful with less cars exploding in Baghdad. Also we are not counting the dead bodies from car bombs because too many Americans we're seeing cars blow up in their TVs and thinking that no progress was being made because of body counts, which we do not do. Far too many mosques are being blown up in Baghdad still, often in acts to retaliate because one group, the Sunnis, will blow up a mosque of the Shia. Then the Shia will often blow up a mosque which is Sunni. In other words, tit for tat. This is sectarian violence which is ongoing in Iraq, but some perameters are trending down, though not all or as many as you would like yet. Also our focus is al Qaeda, the same murdering ideology which changed the world by attacking us on 9-11 and we are taking the battle to the enemy. In other words not just waiting to be hit again. Iraq continues to step up so we can step down with many units fully operational according to commanders on the ground who report to me, although morale problems and the militia problem remains problematical, with units not always reporting for duty, but fewer incidents of Iraq army units we trained fighting against as militia are being reported.

The Iraq Parliament cut short its summer vacation and are in the Green Zone, where security remains good, although commanders do report daily attacks by evildoers on the Zone by mortar and artillery. Even in these conditions the brave new democracy meets and talks and while they do not yet have a oil law or any power sharing agreement, democracy is hard work. In other words you talk and then you agree, and Prime Minister Maliki, who reports often to me, is assuring this kind of talking and progress through agreement.

The biggest mistake we could make would be to heed the call of some who want to break off the fight with al Qaeda now when progress is steady, not as fast as we or other wants, but toward a goal of a stable Iraq. I urge the Congress to see the plan through and to give it a real chance to work. I would be glad to take any questions now.

The President Covers His Tracks

On the legality of Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence, there is not a lot to say. Critics can rant and rave all they want, but there it is in the Constitution, Article II, Sec. 2, where the President, on an unqualified basis,

shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

The Supreme Court has construed this power (which applies only in the case of federal law, such as the offenses for which Libby was convicted) to include the power to commute sentences, for any reason, for no reason, for a bad reason. The power has always been controversial, harking back as it did to the British king's power to let political allies off the hook. The more things change, the more they seem the same.

Looking at matters circumspectly, it is obvious that L'Affaire Plame is the true legal Achilles heel for both Bush and Cheney. It strains credulity well past the breaking point to believe, for a moment, that Bush did not know, in detail and in real time, everything there was to know about the coordinated leaks to the press which occurred in July, 2003. The press has been remarkably timid and reticent about this point, choosing to accept the ludicrous idea that Bush was telling the truth when he expressed his determination "to get to the bottom of the leak" etc. ad nauseum in the summer and fall of 2003, before he went underground with the excuse that he did not want to comment on an "ongoing investigation." Since we now know, to a moral certainty, that Cheney, Rove and Libby, among others, already knew everything there was to know about the leaks, what are the odds Bush was not similarly in the loop? His Vice President knew everything Bush professed not to know at the very time Bush was making statements to create the impression he did not know anything. We also know, from hearings which Henry Waxman conducted, that the White House's own office of security did not even open a file to investigate the leak. How, then, was Bush conducting his "inquiry?" There was no inquiry because Bush already knew the whole story. If he didn't know it as it happened, he knew when Cheney told him immediately after.

Lawyers use "Canons of Interpretation" to construe statutes, contracts, and other legal matters. For example, where a contractual matter is ambiguous, the interpretation least favorable to the drafter of the document is employed. The enumeration of specific things in a statute is assumed to be to the exclusion of things not mentioned, unless a contrary intent appears. And so forth. The main Canon of Interpretation to use with George W. Bush's every action and utterance is this: the man never does or says anything out of principle if such action could possibly be to his own detriment. Applying the Bush Canon to the Libby commutation, we see what's going on with renewed clarity. By commuting, instead of pardoning (which will come later), Libby remains in technical legal "jeopardy." (Try not to snort your July Fourth beer out of your nose as you read that.) Thus and therefore, when Libby's oft-testifying ass is hauled before a Congressional panel to find out what Bush and Cheney knew and when they knew it, he can escape, for now, with a Fifth Amendment plea. A blanket pardon would remove this cover for Bush and Cheney. That is the sum and substance of what is going on.

In the long run, Bush and Cheney know there is no way out of this trap other than pardons for both of them. They obstructed justice by failing to disclose the truth when they first knew it; they deliberately misled investigators and the American public. They are trying to run out the clock, with the feckless assistance of the pusillanimous press. Bush will eventually pardon Cheney, then resign, and Cheney will pardon Bush. They are going to give Article II, Section 2 a real workout. Just wait and see.

Musing about "SICKo"

Michael Moore, like Woody Allen, inspires a lot of envy among reviewers and other creative artists who wonder how these two can so inerrantly and consistently put successful movies up on the screen, and so they draw more than their fair share of ad hominem attacks. For example, Woody's amorous oddities are portrayed as pedophilia and Moore's critics are quick to note how fat and slovenly he is. It is true that Moore is grossly fat and dresses like a slob, and there is an irony to his appraisal of the American healthcare system, since it seems that a great deal of America's health woes can be traced to the epidemic of obesity, with its concomitant high incidence of diabetes, heart disease, failing leg joints and other problems. These are problems he never mentions in his film.

Nevertheless, "SICKo" is a superb movie. Moore has learned to avoid some of the annoying tricks and tropes of his earlier documentaries, such as the quick-cut collages, statistical inaccuracies (e.g., comparing total murders in Canada to the U.S. in "Bowling for Columbine," despite the great difference in population) and conspiracy-theory deadends. These habits set him up for easy refutation and a perhaps deserved reputation for doing agit-prop as opposed to documentaries. Contrariwise, I don't think there is a refutation to "SICKo." As the title of his film suggests, America's healthcare system is a sick joke. It is the ultimate expression of our end-point devolution from cohesive society to Darwinist nightmare. American citizens face awful decisions on an everyday basis, whether insured or uninsured, such as Moore's opening sequence about a woodworker who had to choose between reattaching his middle finger for $60,000 or his ring finger for $12,000; lacking insurance, his middle finger was thrown into an Oregon landfill. In an evenhanded, unforced, let-the-facts-speak-for-themselves way, Moore asks ironic questions of hospitals and healthcare workers in Canada, Great Britain, France and finally Cuba. "Where do people pay after they stay at the hospital?" "Where is the admissions office to see if my insurance will cover this emergency visit?" In one hilarious moment, he finds the "Cashier" window at an English hospital, only to learn that the office dispenses money to patients so they can take a cab ride home.

In the most celebrated sequence of the movie, his trip to Cuba by flotilla of small boats to seek care for 9-11 rescue workers who could not get coverage for their lung and PTSD problems in the U.S., his crew of patients are first told they cannot receive the care given to the "evildoers" at Guantanamo Bay, so they travel instead to Havana, where all of them are given compassionate, first-rate treatment by Cuban doctors and therapists, for free and apparently with few questions asked. A lung patient is given an inhalant drug which costs 5 cents in Cuba and $120 in the U.S. One's empathic state at this point is such is that all you care about is that these ravaged, miserable souls (one rescue worker had worn his teeth to stumps with PTSD grinding; he was given a full set of new teeth) finally found someone in the medical profession to take care of them.

Then in an immediate and heartbreaking transition to Los Angeles, we are witness, by video camera, to the practice of USC Hospital's dumping of mentally deranged homeless at the rescue mission in South Central L.A. Cutting off the identifying plastic bracelets, hospitals in the area simply buy a one-way cab ride to the shelter for the indigent, insane, uninsured detritus who can't pay for confinement, with instructions to the cab driver to dump them on the sidewalk. Two countries, two systems.

Some criticism has come Moore's way, of course, about his failure to prescribe a specific remedy. This is ironic, indeed. I am not sure, from the somber tone of this movie, that Moore really means to suggest a solution. He is more like a pathologist doing an autopsy. At one point he overvoices a question which had occurred by the same moment to most audience members: is this who we really are? I thought about this question as I left the theatre. I think maybe this question had already been answered by the Katrina debacle. America's reaction to that tragedy was to treat the victims as a TV show. There was great wringing of hands, for a while, about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were ruined, about all the helpless who drowned or died on the streets. We got over it pretty fast. Probably three-quarters of a million people have died in Iraq because of the American invasion, but we have no official policy of counting them and snipe at people (Johns Hopkins researchers, e.g.) who do. There is no "national conversation" about that, and the official candidates for President consider such a disquieting datum unacceptable in polite debate.

So we're not going to have a national healthcare service in this country. We have Medicare for the elderly, a flawed system which tries to co-exist with the health-for-profit system it's integrated into, but it's headed for a fiscal brick wall along with Social Security. No money is going to be pried loose from the $1 trillion allocation of the discretionary budget given over to war, armaments and intelligence. No serious presidential candidate running in 2008 is proposing universal care, in the sense all other Western industrial democracies already possess, and such a plan, if proposed, would never get through Congress. The flip-point for Social Security and Medicare, when they go red in the middle of the next decade, will ensure that calls for a national health service are labeled unrealistic and unaffordable, while America's "defense" needs are greater than ever, since so many young Muslim men have access to fertilizer and C-4 explosives.

Moore's movie has the quiet, respectful tone of a requiem, or of a grave prognosis made on the basis of a symptom that finally spells the end, despite all heroic efforts to reverse the course of the disease. Let his detractors say what they will, it is a masterwork.


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Searching for hidden clues to America's malaise

There are presently 2.25 million people in America's jails and prisons. China, commonly regarded in the West as a police state and a bastion for human rights violations, has about 1.5 million citizens locked up, although it has about 4 times the U.S. population. Simple math tells us the per capita rate of incarceration in the U.S. is about 6 times higher in America than in China (Chinese prison population = 67% of American; 4 divided by 2/3 = 6.) That strikes me as an astounding differential. Russia, famous for its gulags and Siberian labor camps of another era, weighs in with about 875,000. In fact, the United States, with 5% of the world's population, incarcerates about 1 in 4 of all people under lock and key in the world.

It is interesting to me that the same disproportion keeps showing up in various unfavorable parameters. The United States belches out about 1/4th of the world's CO2 emissions; it uses about 1/4th of the daily energy; it consumes about 1/4th of the world's supply of petroleum. Those three data points, of course, are related directly. I wonder if they might be related to the fourth, the incarceration rate. More than one out of every 150 Americans currently lives in the pokey, while outside the prison walls the free citizens spend their times driving and burning energy at unprecedented rates.

It's probably just a coincidence. We have to remember that 500,000 of those American inmates are in jail on drug charges. Although, when you think about it, could that be a clue as well? What's with all the drug use? Could it have something to do with the profligate use of energy, the indifference to the natural environment, the contempt for the natural horrors that such things bring about? Are all of these things actually related, and are they all, really, symptoms and different manifestations of the same social breakdown?

Lacking the Gravitas for Real Fascism

Thus, my conclusion, my take on the pretentious equation between modern American government and the truly impressive tyrannies of yesteryear, those run by sadistic brutes like Hitler and Mussolini who really knew their way around totalitarianism. As with so many things, we are apt to overrate ourselves and to take our own troubles too seriously. Hitler, in particular, was actuated by a desire to emulate and to outdo Napoleon; thus, his disastrous decision to follow the Little General right over the cliff and invade the Soviet Union. Hitler ran a police state, closed down the free press by force, terrorized the German populace and drove all the powerful and influential dissenters out of the country. The Bush/Cheney Cabal, by contrast, has it very soft. There is a free press, but it's no bother. Bush/Cheney serve the economic interests of the large congolomerates which own about 90% of the media outlets. Why would they have to coerce them? Haven't they always reliably broadcast Bush's pro-war propaganda? Of course they have.

As for running concentration camps - simply unnecessary. Americans, in general, pay no attention to what's going on, and their dissent is limited to writing stupid blogs like this one and to periodically altering the mix of Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. At the time of the Iraq invasion, 70% of the American populace thought Saddam Hussein was chiefly responsible for 9/11 (see note on "free" press above). While it's true that Bush has a 26% approval rating and Congress is at about 25%, this is because of economic factors. Most Americans, probably on the order of 80%, aren't doing too well anymore, and they will channel their "rage" into voting in a slightly different mix of Republicans and Democrats in 2008, then turn on the 42" plasma and watch re-runs of "Everybody Loves Raymond."

Thus, despite the looming catastrophe of the entitlements programs, and the unstanched flow of American jobs to foreign countries, and our declining standard of living, and the absence of national health, or a comprehensive railroad system that really works, and the insane budget and trade deficits, the current workforce in Congress will, for the most part, remain on the job, enjoying premium healthcare, guaranteed pensions, large staffs, power and influence, and salaries the vast majority of them could not earn in the private sector. As such books as Hostile Takeover, by David Sirota; The Best Congress Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast; What's the Matter with Kansas?, by Thomas Frank (awesomely brilliant), describe in detail, Congress is not engaged in a "conspiracy" against the American people; it is just that they have learned that money is the means by which they can ensure their life-long tenure in Washinton. And the best source of money are the folks who have a lot of it, the lobbyists from America's (increasingly transnationally-oriented) large industries, who tell Congress what to do.

The power flowing through a system defines the system. So said the very bright people who devised systems analysis. What could be simpler? The power in American politics is money: serving the needs of Big Money, passing laws for Big Money, and ignoring anything (like the floundering entitlements programs) not concerned with Big Money. The Republicans build on an unlikely base of the not-well-off by throwing out anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Fundamentalist rhetoric. The Booboisie swallow it, hook, line and sinker (see Frank, ibid;). The 26% residual support is only partly comprised of America's fat cats; there simply aren't that many of them. The rest are Falwell and Robertson's wingnut brigades.

So it's not Fascism. Fascism would almost be interesting compared to what we got. This is about as interesting as a new Starbucks opening on another corner downtown. The American Congress, and the Executive Branch (unchallenged by the Republican-stacked judiciary or by a tame and compliant press) are more simply a Chamber of Commerce. Whatever is good for business - war, defense contractors, monopoly, tax cuts, lax standards for the environment -defines their mission statement. I don't think it will end well, but neither is it reformable.

Americo-Fascism, part 2

The official budget deficit for the American government, for the last fiscal year available, was about $248 billion. Thanks to the diligent research of Hale "Bonddad" Stewart and others who actually study federal balance sheets, we know that this number is a fiction. It was concocted in the same systematically deceitful way that the federal government announces its deficits or "surpluses" every year, by pretending the "excess" FICA money paid into the Social Security "trust fund" and then swiped by Congress for war and other worthy causes is general revenue, and not a desperately needed reserve for ensuring the solvency of the system in future years. When the truth is told, or the federal cover blown, the actual numbers can be calculated by simply measuring the growth of the national debt year over year. When this is done, the calculation looks like this:
09/30/2006 --- $8,506,973,899,215.23 --- $574,264,237,491.73, where the first figure is the total national debt and the second (about $574 billion) is the growth in the debt from the previous year.

Thus, the true deficit is over twice the official, rosy announcement. Since Bush's pledge to "cut the deficit in half" by 2009 depends on lying, however, the real number is never used since it makes him look bad. Again, and since his latest "approval" rating is 26%, there is only so much more bad news he can take. As has been said so many times it has at last become part of the national discourse, the money swiped from Social Security is replaced with IOUs. L'il W, with his microencephalic grasp of Big Issues and congenital case of foot-in-mouth disease, nearly stepped in it big time when he derided the security for Social Security as a bunch of pieces of paper in a filing cabinet in West Virginia, the repository for the government bonds representing the total owed on an "intragovernmental" basis by the Treasury to the Social Security Trust Fund. Since the Chinese, Japanese and many other foreign nations have invested their Wal-Mart and Prius largesse in exactly these same pieces of paper, Bush's puppeteers told him to cool it with the "filing cabinet" talk. What Bush was unwittingly disclosing, of course, is that the federal government has no earthly way to pay back all that money it has been routinely embezzling in order to run the Military-Industrial Complex all the years since Social Security was reformed (about 25 years ago). The federal government is exactly like a stressed-out member of the American booboisie overheating in a double wide in Bullhead City with his credit cards totally maxed out and just able to pay the vig on his monthly payments. The federal government has no way whatsoever to come up with the actual cash it needs to retire all that foreign debt it has borrowed on time (over $2 trillion at this point) nor to catch up with the "intragovernmental" debts it's piled up. To the foreigners and domestic investors in T-Bills and bonds, the U.S. pays interest, to keep the game afloat. On its intragovernmental obligations, such as to Social Security, it adds another piece of paper detailing the interest "accrued but not paid."

A few years ago Bush had the bright idea of "reforming" Social Security in order to eliminate it. He would privatize it, and require investments of "retirement accounts" on Wall Street, thus rescuing his friends in that languishing industry and also getting the Feds out from under all the money that would otherwise be wasted on Social Security when the system tips from green to red in about 2017 or so. Understanding the mentality behind this move is the principal lesson in today's sermon about America's version of Fascism.

Congress is quite content with Social Security and Medicare so long as these two remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society do not interfere with its true purpose, which is serving the interests of corporate lobbyists. When the systems more or less pay for themselves, all is well. Indeed, better than that, because the boost of FICA taxes in the early 1980's meant that a hidden tax, off the top, was imposed on American workers that found its way into the general revenue, where it could be added to the $1 trillion or so that is spent annually on military and intelligence budgets. Social Security, in particular, thus paid for itself. True, it was boring to Congress members because there was no way to use its funding as a way to sell influence for money from lobbyists. But it was not a complete nuisance, either, because it was a stand-alone system that Congress did not have to pay for, and it did produce that little kicker of a surplus every year. And all those grateful AARP members, who are such diligent voters. Congress is not big on financial planning, however, and it became apparent that American demographics, at some point, were going to flip; there would be insufficient Gen-X and -Y workers working to support the leisure-loving Baby Boomers, particularly since Americans as a rule did not make much money anymore; and a system that had produced a surplus was not only NOT going to pay for itself anymore - it was going to require an actual injection of cash from the real budget, the play money that Congress earmarks and pays out to K Street parasites. And that time was coming within the next decade.

Alan Greenspan has disclosed the grim truth, surprisingly enough. There is simply no way, at this point in time, with so little time left, that America can grow or tax its way out of the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. No. Way. Whatsoever. The problem is an order of magnitude removed from fiscal solutions. When the federal government reneges on all of its obligations to Medicare and Social Security, fresh Hell, as Dorothy Parker said, is going to descend on America. The insiders see it coming and are preparing their getaway, in the time-honored manner demonstrated by Fulgencio Batista when he fled Cuba to avoid Castro's retribution. Asked how he had managed to get all that money out of Havana, Fulgencio answered with admirable concision and clarity: "In suitcases."



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Fascism in America, Part One

fas·cism (American Heritage Dictionary...what a fitting source)
n.

1. often Fascism
   1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
   2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.

Thus, we have begun by defining our terms in the time-honored style of serious academics everywhere. The first thing to note is that this classical definition of fascism does not appear to work as a description of America's current politics. Disappointing, of course, since it's always reassuring to place one's dysfunctional government on a continuum with failed political movements of the past. Like so much in this ingenious land, America's fascism, if such it is, must be sui generis.

I think the term gets thrown around because certain features of National Socialism and Mussolini's tyranny in Italy appear in play in modern America; to wit, the rise of corporatism and the diminished role of a free press in organizing dissent to a centralized power structure. If Leo Trotsky were still around (I call him Leo because "Leon" makes him sound so bratty), he would make short work of the analytical task. Alas, even if Stalin's hit man had not struck him in the head with an ice axe in Mexico City so long ago, it's doubtful Leo would still be with us. So we're left to our own devices. What to call this peculiar political system in the USA?

I suppose we could draw attention to its salient features and see if that suggests anything. The first thing we should note is that the American system today is totally, completely and absolutely dedicated, consecrated and devoted to the service of Big Business. That is its first and only value. The reason we have the leaders we have today is because they are adept at representing Big Money. Bush is little more than a useful idiot for these purposes, but he was effective, because of his name (mainly) and because Americans are suckers for a kind of moronic folksiness, in getting to the White House. Once enthroned, representatives of Big Money who had used the revolving door between Fortune 500 companies and the federal government to build large personal estates (Cheney and Rumsfeld) could then use him, along with the venal horde known as the Republican Congress, to set things up so that Big Money, and only Big Money, could prosper.

It is not difficult to find evidence for these generalizations. Almost the first order of business was a large-scale repeal of the progressive income tax; followed later by a massive overhaul of the bankruptcy laws on terms which favored banks and credit card companies; and then the piece de resistance, the prescription drug "benefit" law which specifically forbade Medicare from negotiating volume discounts with pharmaceutical companies. I mean: do they have to draw you a picture? The Iraq war, of course, has largely served two functions, to control oil for America's domestic suppliers (if by no other means than making sure it stayed in the ground - see Greg Palast's work on this subject), and to allow the funneling of taxpayer dollars to certain inside war contractors, such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater, as well as munitions and weapons contractors generally.

So one feature common to both National Socialism and modern America is the essential identity between the interests of Big Money and Big Government; however, we arrived at this position along a path different from Nazi Germany. Nazism grew out of post-World War I desperation in
Germany and conditions of hyper-inflation. Hitler promised a resurgence of the commonweal for everyday Germans. In 2000 by contrast, America's standard of living had been on the decline for some 30 years, and its major difficulty was that it could no longer sustain its own post World War II prosperity. The world had caught up to our manufacturing advantage, and increasingly the U.S. had turned to "service sector" jobs, meaning minimum wage or slightly better, which brought about the destruction of the American middle class. The process, if anything, is accelerating, as the U.S. becomes one of the most stratified societies in modern history, with an ever-increasing percentage of total wealth held by an elite.

What was left in America was the wealth of the super-rich, and most of this was derived from transnational corporations who participate in the global economy. Washington D.C. serves this special interest group, and Congress routinely passes laws, such as "free trade" agreements, which facilitate the international nature of the business they pursue. For those who are successful in international business, the rewards are very high, and more of the capital can now be conserved and reinvested because of tax "relief," and taxes other than for the entitlement programs are redistributed mainly to big business through the military-industrial complex.

Thus, the circle is complete. In a fundamental sense the federal government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Business which functions as an operative arm of its international business plan. As a further example, the current immigration proposal is solely for the purpose of guaranteeing a cheap and efficient labor pool for agri-business and other users of minimum wage earners. If proposed legislation in Congress is looked at through this lens, many of their more egregiously counter-productive measures (if considered from the viewpoint of the average American) make perfect sense as the result of business lobbying.

Next time I will look at Social Security reform, which had a brief vogue a couple of years ago, then sank beneath the waves. It will be seen again, and the reasons for it are instructive in seeing what America has become.

Bush, Fearless Champion of the Frozen Blastocyst

A fun game to play while we wait for January, 2009, is to read the words and consider the "reasoning" of the Occupant-in-Chief in the White House, and to pretend they make sense while knowing all the time they do not. Thus, along the lines of this game, you can consider the "implications" of his "thinking" in an effort to determine his "meaning" and the "principles" which underlie it. You may also wish to count the holes in the acoustic ceiling of the next elementary school classroom you find yourself in. Your choice. The reward is about the same. I have sometimes mused, in accordance with modern pop-psych theory, that the entire United States of America and all its people currently suffer from reality distortion caused by having an untreated alcoholic as their Father Figure. Bush constantly tells us to deny the authority of our senses and to treat inane utterances as deep, revealed wisdom. We're all going nuts because this state of affairs has gone on much too long. As one example among thousands, Bush tells us we must win in Iraq (meaning: kill all the Arabs) or they will all "follow us home," even though we know that they "followed us here" on September 11, 2001, even before we "followed" them over there, thus indicating they know where we are already (although the "there" in Iraq's case was not the "there" they were from, but a different there, and the ones we followed were not the "they" we're at war with but a different "they" we picked out of the Yellow Pages, or something).

So Bush is about to veto another stem cell bill, playing the role, as he always does, of the Vatican to the scientific establishment's Galileo. Bush is the ultimate Choke Point for all scientific progress in the U.S.A. But while we twiddle our thumbs, belching out CO2 and falling behind the rest of the world in cutting edge research, we can play the Bush Game just to pass the time. Bush is the fearless champion of all those frozen blastocysts residing in fertility clinic freezers all over this blessed land. While it is not certain how much time he actually spends with them, he clearly feels that he is the only one standing between them and a kind of Frigidaire Genocide lusted after by all the murderous stem cell researchers who want them for spare parts. Indeed, Bush's main objection to stem cell research is that sacrificing a four-day old clump of cells is "murder." So let's consider that claim.

First, homicide as an everyday kind of crime is within state jurisdiction. The Feds can prosecute murder only when federal issues are involved, such as in an armed robbery of a bank (interstate commerce clause) or assassination of a federal official. California, for example, considered the idea of fetal murder and amended the main Penal Code Section, 187, to conform to general dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Keeler case in 1970, where, up in the mountains of Amador County where Gold Rush customs still reside, the husband of a woman 35 weeks pregnant became enraged upon discovering he was not the father and attacked his wife, resulting in still birth. After the amendment, the statute read like this:

187. (a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.

Because legislators are not the most diligent and thorough of public servants, they didn't bother to define "fetus," a kind of obvious oversight, when you think about it. What were the odds a clever defense lawyer would not try to avoid a murder charge by arguing that whatever that clump of cells his client knocked off was, it wasn't yet a "fetus?" Sure enough, in 1994 in People vs. Davis the California Supreme Court was forced to read the tea leaves left behind by the legislature a generation earlier to try to figure out what they meant. After going through cases from all over the map, and doing the usual kind of halfbaked analysis of embryonic science that judges usually do, they came up with "7-8 weeks." That's when all the "bodily structures" are present in nascent form, they said. Davis got off, however, because how was he to know the woman he shot in the chest at the convenience store was farther along than that, and that Justice Stanley Mosk of the Supreme Court was going to pencil in a start-date for feticide after he pulled the trigger? Another glorious day in jurisprudence.

Section 187 excepts from its rule any therapeutic abortion or any "feticide" to which the mother consents (subsection c). So, just to use California for the moment, donation of a blastocyst to research could not be "murder" under California Penal Code Section 187. The blastocysts are not 7-8 weeks along in development, and they lack the "bodily structures" in nascent form which Davis requires. And the mother's consent wipes out the "crime" in any event, maybe because she'd like to see an actual human being reconnect the nervous tissue at C-5 and walk again, and values this outcome more than eternal life for her "offspring" in the Jenn-Air down at the lab.

So what do you say, George, while we're playing this silly little game? You know you don't mean it anyway; I've seen few people in public life who demonstrate their contempt for human life more than you do. How about an exception for any blastocyst where Mom says OK? Win-win? Worried the blastocysts might follow you home?


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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.

Founding Fathers Day

Maybe renaming the Fourth of July could revive some of its historic relevance. I get the sense that the holiday has become completely untethered from the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the nation, so that most Americans associate the day with drinking margaritas outside and setting off explosives, but not with the act of treason which got us going. For years on the Fourth of July I used to read the first paragraph or so of the Declaration, along with its stirring call to action at the end, often out loud, sometimes with an audience. It never failed to choke me up. It is without doubt one of the truly great political manifestoes of anytime, anywhere.

It is said, without fear of much contradiction, that every 100 years the Earth is populated with all new people. The United States has thus cycled through about 2.3 complete turnovers. No one who witnessed the Revolutionary War was around to see the Spanish-American War. No one who rode with Roosevelt on Cuba likely watched the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton on C-SPAN. The continuity of America, such as it is, resides in the institutions of the country and in its collective memory and adherence to certain salutary traditions.

I sometimes muse about what the Founding Fathers would think about modern America. I suppose it would be generally recognizable to them; they would be pleased that the three-branch system of government was still more or less intact, that the state/federal scheme was still around, and that an indirect method of electing presidents, the electoral college, survived.

I think they would be most surprised that the system ossified into a two-party colossus that cannot be budged or dislodged by any competing political factions. As smart as they were, they couldn't think of everything. Their careful system of checks and balances begins to break down when only two parties always control everything. If, on top of this, one party is almost always in the position of appointing all the judges, as the Republicans will have been for 20 out of the 28 years between 1980 and 2008, then the Supreme Court, that classically neutral arbiter of power, will become another political arm of the entrenched party. I don't think the Founding Fathers foresaw their delicate machine being thus traduced. They also could not have foreseen that the lasting hegemony of just two parties, who have held unchallenged sway over American politics now for at least 100 years, would be reinforced by modern media, and its tendency to reduce consumer choices to one or two dominant brands.

I imagine Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest of the Big Thinkers envisioned something more fluid and responsive than a huge bureaucracy of career politicians, elected for life, insulated from and capable of manipulating the general electorate, and skilled at co-opting the small number of Big Media companies by rationing access to the rulers. They set up a system that worked at the level of the town hall, where the elected had to justify and defend themselves in front of the people who knew them, who elected them on condition they got the job done, on time and on budget. Thirteen small states spread over a manageable territory.

It is now what it is. The forms, the rhetoric, the ideas still exist. The career politicians intone the principles of the Founding Fathers at every turn, especially when the heat is on. Whether that old system still really works under modern conditions is a different question, but it is academic. The powers that be have learned to use it, and they're not going to vote themselves out of power. If big changes come again, they will not result from volitional development, but thrust upon an intransigent body politic.
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Rethinking Nader

Nader's justifications for acting as a spoiler in 2000 were twofold. First, he claimed that there was no essential difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, that both were simply corporate advocates who depended on lobby money for their continued sinecures in Washington, and that a new party (the Green Party, in his case) was essential to bring back actual representation of the American people. His second argument was that even if Bush were demonstrably worse than Gore, not actually an arguable proposition at this point, the resulting ossification and depreciation of the body politic brought on by having an idiot in charge of the government would bring on more rapid devolution and radical change. Nader, of course, has been vilified and attacked in every aspect of his persona; his liberal critics, if anything, have been more vicious and unforgiving than any negativity from the Paleo-Right, who seem to see him as an attractive nuisance. If you're a blog-type wonk, see, for extreme example, the unmodulated screeds of Eric Alterman about Nader. It is the sort of smear campaign which elevated Rove to national prominence.

It is a commonplace observation that prophets are never honored in their time. Most people concede that, whatever else you say about Nader, he made the American consumer safer. I imagine that without him the Ford Pinto or its successors would still be blowing sky high when lightly tapped from the rear, and legions of additional Chevy drivers would have been impaled on their steering posts. The idea, however, is that in challenging the Big Two Monopoly, he got above himself and tilted the balance of the American Uniparty to the Right. There is no doubt that he did. The remaining question is whether his justifications were correct.

With respect to the first point, the identity between Demublicans and Repugnocrats, one might consider this latest development from the fecund mind of the dynamic Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader:

"The first [plan], sponsored by Reid and Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would set a goal of beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops by April 2008, unless the Iraqi government demonstrated political and security progress. However, President Bush would have the power to waive that requirement." [CNN News, 6/12/07]

In what sense is this a "plan?" There is a "goal" to "begin" the withdrawal of U.S. troops about one year from now, unless there is progress in Iraq; however, Bush is empowered to vitiate even this vague "requirement." Deconstructing this "plan," it appears that the Senate majority is suggesting they would like to see Bush start drawing down the numbers of U.S. troops unless the Iraqis get it together over the next year, but it's up to Bush whether he wants to use Iraqi "progress" as a criterion. That's it. That's the bold initiative. Since any third grader knows that Bush can tolerate endless carnage and expense in Iraq, and does not care if his obstinance tilts the Uniparty farther to the Left, the Senate is proposing something they know for a fact to be utterly meaningless. They are hoping it fools the American electorate into believing something momentous is occurring.

The second specimen for dissection is the current "energy bill" meandering around the Senate. Among its exciting new initiatives is to raise American fuel standards to 35 mpg by 2020. In other words, to require American manufacturers to compete with Japanese hybrids, such as the Prius and Honda, by nailing an efficiency number that is only 70% of the mileage one can get right now by buying Japanese. And this bold action is taken after waiting about 20 or 30 years to do anything at all about CAFE standards. The other bold plan is to grow a lot of corn and make ethanol, which will make the agri-business lobby happy, but the Senate might want to consult with physicists familiar with the laws of thermodynamics on whether the rules of energy returned on energy invested can be suspended for the first time in the history of the Universe.

Which leads to Nader's Second Premise: the dismantling of the Uniparty in favor of some legislative body which might respond to actual needs of the American public. The most recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, for the period ending June 10, 2007, placed Congress's approval rating of 27%, and the disapproval rating at 62%. Bear in mind that these ratings occurred about 6 months after the ascension of the Demublicans to control. The numbers are considerably worse than the current ratings for one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. Nader, it might be noted, doesn't have much to do with that. I suspect the 27% making up the approving cohort are either lobbyists, homophobes or Creationists; like E. coli, such organisms are always with us.

I don't know where I come out on Nader. Was he an ego-mad interloper who would ruin America to satisfy his own vanity? Or did he know something -that America was already on the road to ruin, and it took an ego-mad interloper, one without much to lose, to point it out.

Becoming accustomed to tyranny

"A federal appeals court ruled that the president may not declare civilians in this country 'enemy combatants' and have the military hold them indefinitely." New York Times, June 11, 2007.

We've arrived at a strange pass in American history when a ruling such as that of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is a "landmark" decision rebuking "Bush policy." You may not have been aware that George W. Bush was exercising the power described in the quoted holding from the 4th Circuit (generally, a conservative pro-Bush bastion). If you were not aware, you have not been following along as Jose Padilla, as one notable example, has made his way through a maze of military and civilian jurisdictions, all while Congressional representatives and senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, have sat passively and silently by while Bush & Co. have exercised police state power over ordinary citizens. It's a remarkable illustration of the principle that the only requirement for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

Once upon a time in a magical land called America, there was a legal justice system. Without question, it was the finest in the world. Founded on the basic ideas of the English common law, it was as fair and effective a system as one would ever find anywhere, at any time in history. I think the legal system, in fact, was the pride and joy of the Founding Fathers. Many of them were talented lawyers, and the awesome edifice of Enlightenment protection embodied in the Bill of Rights stood the test of time. Despite external and internal threats during the first 225 years of American history, it was never necessary to abandon those principles, even if, in the case of Japanese internment and the disgraceful treatment of blacks, the rules were not applied with equal justice. But mostly, and even for the oppressed after the legal system corrected matters during the civil rights era, one could have confidence that, whatever your station in life and despite public outcries against you, you would get a fair shake. Your side of the matter would be heard. You would not be thrown in a dungeon, never heard from again, the doors to the court house locked.

Along came George W. Bush. To say he has been a bull in the china shop of American justice does not quite capture the wholesale wreckage he has inflicted on the system. We now know, from endless examples, that he doesn't know what he's doing. The damage, however, has come from his own personal confidence that he does. He has no comprehension how the whole legal system works, how interdependent the various statutes, rules of criminal and civil procedure, avenues of appeal, extraordinary writs, international law and treaties are. How they all interact in a time-tested, carefully considered system that produces the closest thing we can create to justice protecting society from the miscreant, and the individual from tyranny and mob rule. Bush has invented all kinds of new defendants, new categories, new courts, new jails. Enemy combatants, unlawful enemy combatants, al-Qaeda or Taliban-connected soldiers who become unlawful enemy combatants, American citizens labeled enemy combatants and disappeared into a brig (Padilla) or an actual 9-11 conspirator, a foreigner, tried openly in a civilian court (Moussaoui). Military commissions, offshore prisons outside the reach of habeas corpus (Guantanamo), review tribunals to determine whether an Arab is an unlawful enemy combatant where he is not allowed to challenge the evidence nor even to see most of it, nor to have his own lawyer present; restricted appeals to one designated federal court for an Arab unlawful enemy combatant convicted of a war crime on the basis of hearsay and purchased evidence, by a military tribunal created under the Military Commissions Act. Contravention of the simple and humane rules of the Geneva Conventions at every turn. A giant, stinking mess of contradiction, of open-ended incarceration for years and years without trial, without access to courts, without lawyers, without hope. All these Arabs prejudged as guilty, granted no rights, jailed for life without review by anyone.

That's the United States under Bush. It never would have happened that way before. The indifference of Congress ensures it will be that way from now on. Do you think there just might, someday, be some kind of blowback for this? Simply because Americans, with their famously fatuous proccupation with celebrity, with bulimic cases locked up for drunk driving, can't trouble themselves to worry about this, don't be lulled into thinking that more "primitive" societies, who pass on the message by word of mouth about what happened to their kinsmen, are not enraged. And God have mercy on any American soldier who falls into the hands of another "justice" system after all of this. We've sown the wind.

A china shop doesn't work. The bull, however, suggests shit. That might be the image. The American justice system, after Bush, will resemble a pair of old jockey briefs worn by a fat American pizza-eater. You find them, discarded, in the alley between houses. They are stiff with the skidmarks of shit. Flies buzz all around. The shorts don't look much like they did when they were taken out of the cellophane.

The agony of Paris Hilton

Paris, in a happier moment.

I honestly think I'm in danger of taking things a little too seriously. I blog, and sometimes bloog, about the Iraq war, Bush's non-species-specific intelligence quotient, global warming, while leaving alone those issues that strike closer to home, that define who we are as a people. I speak, of course, of Paris Hilton. There is something pretentious about refusing to engage with her crisis, I see that now. I think I'm too good for all that. Clearly this is an illusion. I'm no better than anyone else; refusing to devote blog space to Paris Hilton, and her ongoing agony, is an act of arrogance. The Sheriff's Department, in transporting Paris from court to jail, from jail to West Hollywood home, from home to court, from court back to jail...the law men can barely do their job because of the crush of paparazzi and reporters. There's a reason for that. People want to know what's going on with Paris Hilton, and they want to know because of who Paris Hilton is. She's Paris Hilton. She's famous for being Paris Hilton, and has been for quite some time.

I've gone to Google and put Paris's name in the browser, then hit Images. I did this because I kept hearing the name, the name "Paris Hilton." There are some amazing pictures of Paris Hilton. Some might make good plates in an obstetrics and gynecology textbook. In the above photo, Paris is dancing in Miami Beach on New Year's Eve. A continent away from the Lynnwood lockup, of course, and I would surmise Paris had two or three hundred of her closest friends at the disco with her. Including someone named Nicole, who may be Paris's sister. If I weren't such an insufferable intellectual snob, I would know for sure. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who know more about Paris's life than I do. At the lockup, Paris is in solitary confinement. She apparently freaked out right away. This is not an uncommon reaction in anyone who is confined. If I had a chance to talk to Paris, and I really wish I did, I would tell her that the first two or three days of her stretch will be traumatic, then she'll settle into the routine and it won't be so bad. Then she can make another fortune giving interviews about the ordeal of being in stir, but first she has to endure that initiation.

It's odd, to say the least, that the Sheriff's Department suddenly took Paris out of a court-ordered jail stretch and drove her to her house in West Hollywood. From what I've been able to gather, however, Paris is actually quite charming, and even though the pundits who take themselves way too seriously (the way I used to be before I loosened up and became a regular guy) talk about how "scrawny" she is, and horsey-faced, I think she's kind of cute, and I'll bet the Sheriffs do too. Plus, I have a feeling Paris really raised a ruckus in that jail. Once that nervous breakdown started to come on, when she realized there would be no sushi or Dom Perignon in her "room," and she was actually supposed to sleep on that mattress and pee in that toilet...I'll bet things got just a little shrill. But what am I doing now? See, I'm slipping into that arch, above-it-all tone, just like all the cable news guys who pretend they're not fascinated by the life and times of Paris Hilton. Do they think Paris Hilton became famous for no reason? That's silly; she became famous, a celebrity, because she's Paris Hilton.

Claustrophobia, which Paris is enduring again right now, as I write this (I can barely stand to think about it - when will it end?), must be especially acute for her. (Paris, reading this, thinks I just called her cute again.) Paris is used to having lunch in the West End, continuing by Gulfstream to Milan to pick up a skirt (total square inches: 14), and then finishing up at a disco in her namesake city. Given the contrast between life before and after incarceration, maybe Paris has already done enough time, in terms of relative deprivation of freedom. See, that's why Paris Hilton is such a staple of People magazine and dinner-hour cable news. Paris is a very privileged young woman who uses all those privileges. We can identify with her, because secretly we know that most of us would behave the same way with all that money, glamor and access. We wouldn't spend our time like Princess Diana, making the rounds of all the land mine victims and disease hotspots. We're just as frivolous as Paris Hilton. Go ahead and call her a disco-dancing, jet-setting, coke-snorting, magnum-swilling, bed-hopping airhead celebutard. She's got a quick riposte for you (it's like "put-down," Paris): I'm Paris Hilton and you're not.

I'll probably write a lot more about Paris Hilton, now that I'm into it. Maybe a legal analysis of the fairness of her sentence. Too lenient? Too heavy, as the judge sought to make a point about equal justice? Or maybe this blog is it. It took about 15 minutes to write. That's all the fame Paris should have had, logically and according to Andy Warhol, but there appears to be no end in sight. This jail stretch is just what Entertainment Tonight was praying for.