Carolyn Lochhead of the S.F. Chronicle has this good piece on the trouble with a President who seems to regard himself as Charles I of England regarded Himself. Divine right of kings and all that. Lost his head, I'm afraid.
The other day I heard our president state that those who have difficulty swallowing his lies on the wonderful prospects we have in the war on Iraq are "soft on Terrorists."
Perhaps we're just hard on the truth.
Perhaps we don't need a return to the right-wing rhetoric that I grew up with during the Cold War when anyone who didn't go out of his way to support every harebrained scheme in opposition to the Soviet Union was a Communist, usually expressed in the form of a label, where those who disagreed with the most right wing among us were called Commie, pinko, Red, or their Fellow Traveler.
Bush is the closest thing I hope you'll ever see to an American Tyrant. A maximum power leader who enjoys not only the support of both houses of Congress, but is acting as though he really is the Commander-in-Chief of the largest, most dangerous, armed force the world has ever seen. He waves his magic war wand and we invade Iraq, which hadn't invaded, or threatened to invade, us. He does this on the basis of lies, non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And we have no way to depose him. His finger is on the nuclear button for the next two years and we have North Korea acting up, threatening to detonate nuclear weapons.
Why do I feel as though we're about to enter, if we haven't already, a Cuban Missile Crisis (1962, freshman law school for me), only this time with Kim Jong Il instead of John F. Kennedy going eyeball to eyeball with Nikita Khruschev, who famously blinked, allowing the world to climb down from its perilous perch. I hope our president is as smart, and rational, as they proved to be.
Do you think our president is smart? What do you think of his ability to reason? Has he impressed you with his ability to outsmart anyone, and explain to you in persuasive words and reason why his way is better than, say, that of France or Germany? Or anyone else?
Earlier in his presidency, George W. Bush merely frightened the bejeezus our of Europe. Now he's doing it to me, and us, it appears. The other day there was a march in San Francisco, part of a group of marches around the country. In S.F. the demonstrators, peaceful, I should add, erected an effigy of the U.S. president behind bars, making him a war criminal for his policies favoring suspension of law for detainees by his fiat, and torturing them, also by his fiat. This is why Charles and England went to war against one another. Charles said "I need to do this," and that was his justification for suspending Magna Carta, habeas corpus. Bush says "I need to do this," and he suspends the rule of law for people he declares to be "enemy combatants," whatever that is. It's whatever he says it is.
At least England had a Parliament to oppose its king. We don't. We have a Congress which supports our king. This is truly a dangerous business. Congress last week passed an eavesdropping and detention and torture bill which allows the president to suspend habeas corpus and deprives the courts of power to hear the cases arising out of the president's acts in that regard.
The U.S. Supreme Court is the only body in our government which has told the president that he has no "blank check" (thank you Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired) when it comes to detentions and some form of due process to test the legality of detention. This is Magna Carta. See the excerpt from Magna Carta, Ch. 29, set forth in the top left column of this blog.
Magna Carta was 1215, Runnymede, England, the barons forcing King John at sword-point to promise in writing not to detain them absent proper proceedings according to "the law of the land," which we translate as "due process of law."
King John I of England, meet King George W of America. You two are going to like each other, a lot.
Cheney, Rice & Rumsfeld. Why do I fear that the republic has been taken over by trolls from under the bridge?
Today begins Fleet Week in San Francisco, with a parade of ships and the Blue Angels burning holes in the sky above the city and the Bay. For the first time I'm seeing it as a propaganda show for the Navy and a reminder of what our White House can do. Fighting to bring democracy to Baghdad? Did Baghdad ask us to invade under the banner of democracy?
What's happened to democracy at home? The Supreme Court appointed Bush in 2000. The Chief Justice, William H. Rehnquist, died. His former clerk, John Roberts, was appointed in his place. We're a self-perpetuating church with the priests appointing the bishops. Sort of makes it a bit clearer why the Puritans hated bishops and split for the New World in 1620 (to Plymouth Rock aboard the Mayflower) and in 1635 (to Massachusetts Bay, up the coast a bit, aboard the Arbella, led by John Winthrop, who hoped to build a city on a hill but got Boston instead).
The article below observes that Bush's conservative base seems to be leaving him in droves, perhaps for slightly different reasons.
Only two more years. If we had a parliamentary system like Britain, we'd propose a vote of no confidence and vote out a rogue leader. But we don't, and have to keep our fingers crossed that over the next two years he doesn't make us even more hated than we are. Yesterday it was a few terrorists, today it's the world. We've turned Iraq into a factory for the mass production of terrorist, who flock from all over the hopeless, desperate, belittled, Muslim world, which included Germany and France. Every Muslim youth with no future has become our enemy. They flock in droves to join Osama Bin Lama's Al Qaeda derivatives. They become suicide bombers in Baghdad, only because we won't let them on airplanes. They killed 4,000 Iraqi policemen over the past two years, according to today's New York Times.
Aside from that, Bush is doing a heckuva job of making America more safe than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
And I, perhaps foolishly, supported him when he said we needed to stop a tyrant, Saddam Hussein, who was buying and building the equipment needed to make nuclear weapons. Maybe I didn't believe him, but was willing to believe his boy, Colin Powell, who said, "I have looked at the evidence and it is good." But it wasn't, as he now admits, to his deep chagrin. He wanted to be on the team and remain important, so he allowed himself to be suckered. If Colin Powell can be suckered, so can the rest of America.
Being suckered is believing what you want to believe because you want to believe it.
That's us.
That's America, as it follows the Pied Piper.
Continue reading "KING GEORGE W: EVEN THE REPUBLICANS ARE UNHAPPY; ESPECIALLY THE REPUBLICANS" »