This is not schadenfreude

As I and millions of other Americans await Pat Fitzgerald’s announcement this morning, I want to point out that my barely restrained glee is not schadenfreude. This is not partisanship, either. The atrocities committed in America’s name in Iraq began with Bush 41, continued under Bill Clinton, and achieved maximal evil fruition under Junior. Junior is merely the ripe-to-rupture pustule on a boil that’s been growing for some time now.

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The coming coup

Could George W. Bush orchestrate a coup d’etat?

Merriam-Webster defines coup d’etat as “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics; especially: the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” Here in the US, we have a constitutional government. When the President is sworn into office, he takes the following oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

If the President takes steps to suspend the Constitution, he is by definition engineering a coup. Still, most folks wouldn’t see it that way. This essay by political scientist Daniel Hellinger covers the history of the suspension of civil liberties by US presidents. How many Americans remember (or ever learned) that Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1861? Defying the Supreme Court, Lincoln imprisoned thousands of draft resisters and Southern sympathizers. Yet no one ever accuses Lincoln of orchestrating a coup, except perhaps those good ol’ boys south of the Mason-Dixon Line who still fly the Confederate flag.

Thanks to the Patriot Act, the US Constitution ain’t what it used to be. At present, the Bush Administration’s position is that they can throw anyone they like in jail — indefinitely, without trial — simply by claiming this is necessary for national security. George W. Bush can use this argument to overturn major sections of the Constitution, as detailed on this web page (scroll down to the list of potential executive orders).

So: it’s bad now, but it could get much worse.

The Plamegate indictments are hours away, and there’s talk of an expansion of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s scope to include George W. Bush’s role in the Niger forgeries (the supposed “proof” of Saddam’s nuclear WMD program). “Bush’s brain” Karl Rove and VP Dick Cheney‘s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby will almost certainly be indicted tomorrow. Will Cheney be named as an unindicted co-conspirator? Can Dubya weather the upheaval?

This is a guy who has already laid claim to dictatorial powers. What will he do when his back is up against the wall? How far will he go?

From the conclusion to Professor Hellinger’s essay:

Violence and international crisis have often raised the question of what balance should be struck between security and civil liberties. However, rather than defend the “homeland” from terrorist attacks, abridgement of civil liberties has more often been aimed at suppressing dissent, advancing some other agenda, or boosting the careers of unscrupulous politicians.

Instead of boosting the careers, read protecting the careers. Considering that loyalty is one of Bush’s obsessive traits, what will he do to protect his friends?

I don’t have much confidence in our President’s self-restraint. I believe things could get mighty scary in the coming days and weeks. If the Executive branch of our government goes renegade, I worry that Congress will be too divided/conflicted/cowardly to defend our civil liberties. The Supreme Court may stand up for the US Constitution — that is their job, after all — but there are precedents for US presidents ignoring the SCOTUS. Lincoln did it (see above), as did Andrew Jackson*.

But there’s one more wild card out there. Take a look at the oath taken by our armed forces:

I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Coups can’t fly unless the ruling cabal has the military’s support. What will our generals do if they are faced with internal conflict between defense of the Constitution and obedience to the President?

D.

*The Removal Act of 1830 authorized the removal of all native peoples over a vast area east of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee took the case to the Supreme Court; Chief Justice Marshall ruled in their favor. President Jackson ignored the Supreme Court decree, stating, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Note to my faithful readers: So y’all wanted humor and sex, not to mention more of me making a fool out of myself, and I gave you politics. Sue me. There’s always tomorrow.

Um, wait. Tomorrow’s Fitzmas. How can I be funny about Fitzmas?

I’ll try to find a way. For now, if you’re jonesing for sex & a laugh, check out Wickipedia’s page on sexual slang — but make sure you have at least a half hour to kill.

MoDo with your morning mojo

In this morning’s NYT Op-Ed, MoDo sings what we lefties have known all along: it’s the three of them, and Bush.

Remember John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? “There are three of them and Alleline,” George Smiley says, reflecting the general wisdom that boss man Percy Alleline is too dimwitted to be the Russian mole. Now we know, thanks to Colin Powell’s point man Colonel Wilkerson, that a cabal runs our government, headed by VP Dick Cheney and packed with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and Paul Wolfowitz. There are three of them (or more) and Dubya, you might say.

Full text of MoDo’s op-ed piece can be found at Cyphering. Snip:

It’s exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we’d actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

Yes, it is exactly what we’ve known all along. Soon, maybe, I hope I hope I hope, Pat Fitzgerald willing, we’ll be cleaning house.

I think it’s too much to ask that the American people never again elect a cypher to the office of the Presidency.

D.

Aren’t they precious?

Have your internet eyes been raped yet by the sight of Prussian Blue? I think this blogger says it best:

Vanaf hun negende vermaken deze twee evil-Olson-twins onder de naam Prussian Blue, allerhande zieke amerikanen met hun nazi-propaganda.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Dan liever toch maar die aan anorexia lijdende idioot en haar tweeling zus.

Not sure what that means, but ‘deze twee evil-Olson-twins’ and ‘anorexia idioot’ says it all.

I’m not going to say anything nasty about these two girls. They’re thirteen years old, so I’ll have to save the wicked snark for their VILE DUMB-ASS PARENTS.

The twins are a musical duo, don’t you know, and they’re bringing their message of racial purity to the hungry ears of trailer trash skinheads everywhere. If they come ’round your area, give them a warm welcome, okay?

D.

Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure

Props to Nevada Thunder for posting the full text of today’s Frank Rich Op-Ed column, “Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure.” Right from paragraph one, Rich focuses on the question which should be on everyone’s mind: given the lack of WMDs and no provable tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, why did we go to war in Iraq?

Rich finds somewhat different motivations among the major players. On the one hand, the Rove-Bush camp wanted to secure Republican victories in the November ’02 midterm elections. Bush’s post-9/11 political capital had hit the skids, thanks to the bungled effort to capture Bin Laden “dead or alive” and waning American interest in an extended Middle East war. Hence the impetus towards something dramatic:

Mr. Rove could see that an untelevised and largely underground war against terrorists might not nail election victories without a jolt of shock and awe. It was a propitious moment to wag the dog.

On the other hand, we have the Cheney-Scooter Libby-Wolfowitz camp:

Mr. Libby had been joined at the hip with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz since their service in the Defense Department of the Bush 41 administration, where they conceived the neoconservative manifesto for the buildup and exercise of unilateral American military power after the cold war. Well before Bush 43 took office, they had become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their ideas about realigning the states in the Middle East and little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda.

The desires of these two groups converged with the plan for a war in Iraq. Rich: “the path was clear for a war in Iraq to serve as the political Viagra Mr. Rove needed for the election year.”

The answer to Why? Republican hunger for unmatched political control of the United States government, and neocon wet dreams of a world-dominating American military juggernaut.

Why? Because they wanted to rule our country with an iron fist. Because they had that same glorious vision for the rest of the world.

And we all know what absolute power does, don’t we?

D.

Maureen Dowd fixes a Judy Miller kebab

Peking Duck has reprinted Maureen Dowd‘s Op-Ed piece in full*. In “Woman of Mass Destruction,” Ms. Dowd begins by examining what she likes (liked?) about Judith Miller. I get the sense it’s a case of one strong woman admiring another. Then Ms. Dowd reminisces about Miller’s bitch mode:

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times’s seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official’s background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, “I think I should be sitting in the Times seat.”

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw.

Ms. Dowd succinctly covers the flaming arc of Miller’s career, and closes with what we’ve all been thinking:

I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy’s case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover “the same thing I’ve always covered – threats to our country.” If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Hmm. That assumes The Times would have her back; yet it’s looking more and more likely that she’ll soon be out on her butt. That’s okay. With her unique brand of inflammatory fiction, I’m sure the Weekly World News would have her. Let her cover the Bat Boy Beat.

At the moment, the liveliest discussion on this Op-Ed can be found at Huffington Post.

D.

*Such tactics are necessary because the NY Times now buries its most popular Op-Ed items (Dowd, Rich, etc.) in the Times Select Black Hole. Screw them. Their paper is in a state of crisis thanks to Miller, and what do they do? Alienate people by trying to score a buck.

Friedman’s Op-Ed: Leading by (Bad) Example

Good government and good parenting are not too dissimilar.

Thanks to my dose of the Duggars last night, I’m thinking about child-rearing techniques. Seems to me the most effective technique is to set a proper example for your children*. What are the Duggars teaching their children? The “goodness” of conformity. Yeeech.

Thomas Friedman has written a fine op-ed piece on the Bush Administration’s “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy vis a vis Iraq. You can read the full text here, at fbihop. Bottom line: how do we expect to lead the world when the example we set at home is so atrocious?

Okay, folks, I have patients to see. More Duggar goodness later. (Big hair! Ruby lips! Slapstick editing techniques! And more!!!)

D.

*One of the main reasons I’m disappointed that Louisiana or FEMA never tapped me as a volunteer: it would have set a vivid example for my almost-ten-year-old son. I know my willingness to volunteer made some impression on him, but I think the lesson would have been much more memorable if I’d actually done the deed.