By Patricia Lee Sharpe
George Bush lite. That’s what we’ve got, it seems. Some of us had hoped that we’d be liberated from the national security state once Barack Obama had been inaugurated as President of these United States. Instead we’ve got George Bush lite. As many of us equally feared, even before the election, Barack Obama has become as enamored of the swollen powers of the presidency as his predecessor was. The seemingly inexorable process toward tsarship maintains its terrifying progress.
So we should probably, with all due historical perspective, be charitable to Bush, who was simply (or simplistically) more straightforward about the “cult of the commander in chief” and the myth of the “unitary executive,” which reminds me of how Rome clung to the use of the window-dressing term “republic” long after it had become a dictatorship with a thoroughly cowed Senate and plebes lulled by blood sports in the arena.
Garry Wills notes that “sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal and constitutional diminishment the settled order.” Supposedly we are citizens. Yet we cannot make intelligent decisions on the most important issues that face us, because we have minimal access to classified “state secrets” which are subject to impossible clearance regulations despite the enlightened Freedom of Information laws that remain on the books. Our courts cannot function and people who are arrested cannot defend themselves because evidence is withheld. Like children, it seems, we are to be protected, and we are expected to trust our protectors blindly.
But we are not children, and some of us persist in thinking of ourselves as citizens, as “deciders.” No wonder, with no access to reality tests, so many of us are downright paranoid and most of us are furious. George Will calls Obama an “entangled giant.” I see him more as a willing accomplice whose susceptibility was evident before the election. My scorn is not lessened by Will’s much too generous observation that any president “must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief.” So Will himself is losing heart. He concludes: “None the less, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made.”
Should be made? Must be made! And there is hope. Barack Obama gave us Eric Holder who, as Attorney General, has made the effort, challenging his boss on major national security issues. Unfortunately, if Congress will not show backbone, even on the rewriting of the Patriot Act, for example, Holder’s dedication to the rule of law will go nowhere.
Meanwhile, read David Cole on the torture memos, which the President—that’s President Barack Obama, not President George W. Bush, did not want to divulge. Here is a critical paragraph from an article deriving from Cole's book The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, which we all should read, and I will, shortly:
George Bush lite. That’s what we’ve got, it seems. Some of us had hoped that we’d be liberated from the national security state once Barack Obama had been inaugurated as President of these United States. Instead we’ve got George Bush lite. As many of us equally feared, even before the election, Barack Obama has become as enamored of the swollen powers of the presidency as his predecessor was. The seemingly inexorable process toward tsarship maintains its terrifying progress.
So we should probably, with all due historical perspective, be charitable to Bush, who was simply (or simplistically) more straightforward about the “cult of the commander in chief” and the myth of the “unitary executive,” which reminds me of how Rome clung to the use of the window-dressing term “republic” long after it had become a dictatorship with a thoroughly cowed Senate and plebes lulled by blood sports in the arena.
Garry Wills notes that “sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal and constitutional diminishment the settled order.” Supposedly we are citizens. Yet we cannot make intelligent decisions on the most important issues that face us, because we have minimal access to classified “state secrets” which are subject to impossible clearance regulations despite the enlightened Freedom of Information laws that remain on the books. Our courts cannot function and people who are arrested cannot defend themselves because evidence is withheld. Like children, it seems, we are to be protected, and we are expected to trust our protectors blindly.
But we are not children, and some of us persist in thinking of ourselves as citizens, as “deciders.” No wonder, with no access to reality tests, so many of us are downright paranoid and most of us are furious. George Will calls Obama an “entangled giant.” I see him more as a willing accomplice whose susceptibility was evident before the election. My scorn is not lessened by Will’s much too generous observation that any president “must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief.” So Will himself is losing heart. He concludes: “None the less, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made.”
Should be made? Must be made! And there is hope. Barack Obama gave us Eric Holder who, as Attorney General, has made the effort, challenging his boss on major national security issues. Unfortunately, if Congress will not show backbone, even on the rewriting of the Patriot Act, for example, Holder’s dedication to the rule of law will go nowhere.
Meanwhile, read David Cole on the torture memos, which the President—that’s President Barack Obama, not President George W. Bush, did not want to divulge. Here is a critical paragraph from an article deriving from Cole's book The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, which we all should read, and I will, shortly:
History has shown that even officials acting with the best intentions may come to feel...that the greater good of national security makes it permissible to inflict pain on a resisting subject to make him talk. History has also shown that inflicting such pain...corrodes the system of justice, renders a fair trail virtually impossible, and often exacerbates the very threat to the nation’s security that was said to warrant the interrogation tactics in the first place.Secrecy in governance has a similarly corrosive effect. When inquiries are not prompt and thorough, when conscienceless operatives do anything they're told to do and supervisory officials are not held publicly responsible for their directions, when there is no accountability and no culpability, at low or highest levels, there is no democracy. Nor are we made safer thereby. Indeed, we must fear, not only the terrorists, but our own government, which may lock us up and throw away the key. In the interest of national security, of course. We can only hope, now, that Eric Holder will keep the faith, since his boss obviously will not.