The job of a commentator is to point out what's really going on. Keith Olbermann, a lawyer working as a news anchor and commentator for MSNBC has issued a powerful broadcast message to Pres. George W. Bush at http://movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment-BushLies.mov.
Francis Fukuyama, below, observes how government reacts to threats by making secret even more information from the public. The less the public knows, the more anxious it becomes, and the more manipulable. The president warns that we have to attack the terrorists in Iraq before they attack us in Kansas City. There were no terrorists in Iraq until we attacked, but that's beside Pres. Bush's point.
Fear is a normal reaction when someone points a gun at you. Anxiety is the fear that someone may point a gun at you. Anxiety, among normal people, can be dispelled with the addition of more facts. When reassured that the thing pointed at you is not a gun, or that there are no guns, the feeling is relief. One can then proceed to the business at hand, which may include gun control, except in America where we allow psychopaths to have access to guns to murder children in classrooms, but why worry about that when we can worry about terrorists in Kansas City some day in the future.
There are normal reactions to fear, and sick. Organizing to defeat real enemies is healthy. This is why we've invented something called "government." To prevent government from becoming an enemy of the people itself, see Charles I, we invent constitutions, whether we put them in writing or not. These are designed to draw certain lines over which government may not pass, and when they do we become alarmed indeed.
In the American system of government, born of rebellion against the tyranny of King George III and a corrupt Parliament, which itself had been re-created out of the tyranny of Charles I, who fancied himself a God-given absolute monarch, above the law, and who made war on his people, we've divided power among the three branches, limiting the president, and forbidding him to legislate.
However the current president, George W. Bush, following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has continually raised the specter of fear to stampede us into a perpetual state of war. He's aggrandized his own powers to listen in on Americans, to pretend that habeas corpus did not apply to prisoners detained off-shore in Guantanamo, Cuba, and to torture prisoners whom he called "enemy combatants," to take them, by his fiat, out of the Geneva Conventions. In the Guantanamo Cases (Hamdi, Padilla, Rasul) and in Hamdan, he was told by the Supreme Court that he had not a blank check and must obey the Constitution, particularly the due process guarantees, and afford proper hearings, yet to be defined or held. To avoid the hearings, the administration sends prisoners home to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, thus bypassing the legal process which requires the government to put up or shut up. We don't put up.
We don't shut up either. We keep maintaining that the people we act against are "the bad guys." In Vietnam, when body counts were the measure of our success in combat, all dead Vietnamese were counted as Viet Cong, VC, the enemy, even when they were women and children. To the Israelis, all Palestinians are terrorists, especially the dead. Labeling the dead and captured as the enemy forecloses the question whether they really are, or were, the enemy. Kings and generals do this frequently, in history, so it should be no surprise to see the Bush Administration doing so as well in what it sees as a war. We were attacked, and our response has been to make war, so we're at war, with all of the mind games this entails.
Bush calls critics traitors. Mind game.
The problem is that Bush may be overplaying his hand. More and more critics are questioning not only his alleged facts, and lack of law, but his sense of reality. The thrust of these criticisms is that he's acting as a crazy tyrant in his speech and deeds.
The problem is that no one yet is doing anything about it except talk, which, politically, is something. We do have mid-term elections coming up in November in which to send him a message. There is no talk of impeachment. Just that the president is nuts and has torn up the Constitution in the name of fear of further attack.
We've been attacked before, and have faced the prospect of greater attacks, yet we haven't torn up the Constitution and our better American values. The Constitution for some is an anchor, to be cut loose and left on the bottom when the storm strikes. For others it is our life ring, the one device which, if hung onto, will save us from the storm.
Bush, it seems, holds to the "We must jettison the anchor" view and cling to him. He's not much of a lifeguard, however. He and sees sharks everywhere and doesn't know in which direction to swim.
It seems odd that we invaded Iraq on the theory that a madman was in process of acquiring nuclear weapons components, representing a threat against which we needed to take preemptive action. Does this mean that we will now invade or otherwise attack North Korea, whose leader, Kim Jong Il, is a match for Saddam any day? North Korea is said to have detonated an underground nuclear device yesterday.
Update: Pres. Bush, after speaking with leaders of Asian and other nations, seems to have ruled out a military strike against North Korea by stating that the U.S. will rely on diplomatic means to deal with the nation which starves its people and invests its resources in military force. The U.S. donates food aid, while China, South Korea and Japan also provide financial and energy aid, some significant portion of which is used by the regime to bolster its own control. If we withdraw the support, we allow more people to starve. If we continue the support, we prop up the regime, which is now capable, it appears, of making nuclear missiles to use against us, our interests, and our allies.
This is when we need a really smart leader.
It's easy to get into wars, especially if you find pretexts to attack, something we're good at. It's a lot harder to get your way while avoiding going to war. This takes brains, as well as extraordinary patience, something our president has shown he's terrific at, yet.