Futurama

We're living in Futurama, ruled by the head of Richard Nixon carried around in a bell jar by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Sort of...at least that's what I've decided after reading Digby, seconded by Sifu Tweety at the Poor Man's place.

First, let me make one thing perfectly clear...

If President Bush wanted to use the NSA to spy on American citizens here on American soil, he could easily have asked for permission and almost certainly would have received it from the court with the power to give it.  As Josh Marshall reports, that court is not in the habit of saying no.

And it was the not asking that was Bush's crime---yes, crime.  Break the law, you've committed a crime.  Bush committed a crime.  Ezra Klein explains, his patience fraying a bit with each reiteration, the law, the procedure Bush should have followed, and why what Bush did was wrong, here, here, and here.

So the question is, why didn't Bush obey the law?  It wasn't even as though he was acting in the heat of the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and even if it had been the court and the process were designed for speed.   All that was needed was a little bit of paperwork that could have been handled by a junior lawyer in the Attorney General's office who probably would have had to do nothing more than fill out a form and walk it over to the right judge's clerk.

Ezra thinks Bush's speech the other day in which defended his crime was Bush's great Fuck You moment.

Since telling anyone who disagrees with him, criticizes him, or advises him even with the most obsequious deference to do what he doesn't want to do or not do what he does want to do to fuck off has been Bush's first and often single reflex, it's plausible to read back from the speech to the order itself and hear Bush, as he sets loose the spooks, saying "Fuck you" to any aide who suggested that he ask the judges for permission first.

But Digby and Sifu Tweety hear the first fuck you, the primal fuck you as being said not by Bush himself, or even by Dick Cheney, who we know is good at saying it.  The first fuck you was uttered with a shifty look out from under hooded brows and with a tremendous shake of shadowed jowls by Tricky Dick himself, only it sounded like this:

"When the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

W's Presidency is Dick Nixon's Revenge.

Nixon lives on in the Bush White House, his head preserved by former minions and henchman and current acolytes, chief among them Dick Cheney, who tells Bush all he needs to know about the law.

Digby:

[L]ike Nixon, [Bush] believes that the president has only one "accountability moment" while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if the president does it, it's not illegal, the president being the executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of govenrment.

Sifu Tweety:

The way they see it [they being the Nixon loyalists, Cheney,  Rove, "essentially the whole fat lot of them who were alive at the time"], everything in American political history, from that unjustified prosecution [of Watergate] right up until 9/11, was a species of mistake. And in the days after the attacks, as a new reality settled around us, they realized that this was their grand political reset button. The political winds, to their minds, finally shifted back to their natural course.

So this NSA scandal, this return to the domestic spying of the Nixon years, is part and parcel of their recreation - amplification - of those halcyon days. They don’t fight for the right to torture because they have a hard-on for torture. They fight for torture because the right is, in our Attorney General’s immortal words, “inherent in the office of the President.” They don’t eschew negotiation, cross-aisle communication, or compromise because they are shrewd political operatives angling to hype up the base. To them, any concession to Congressional prerogatives is showing weakness to an equal, a rival. This is why they hold open votes, threaten nuclear options. What do they care for the traditions and precedents of the Congress? They are The Presidency. They don’t fight “activist judges” because of some kind of constructionist ideology, or even, for that matter, because they crave specific rulings. They fight for ready-to-knuckle-under simps like Scalito because, to them, the three branches of government no more act in concert than do three squabbling candidates in the heat of primary season, or three College Republicans fighting for the same assistant treasurership. They have their horse in this campaign, the presidency, and to win, in this case, means to win absolutely, to take the reins of power singly. Sharing the work of governing is abdication, defeat. You can see this attitude in WPE’s dismissive public comments. In winning the election his office became our nominee for the next phase of the campaign. We backed his horse. Now we need to shut up, stay outside the sausage factory, and let them do what they do best.

Some day, when they are all dead and presenting themselves at the gates of heaven, the current crop of the Washington Media Elite will stand before a tribunal of judges including the shades of I.F. Stone, Edward R. Murrow, and Jack Anderson.  The judges will look down from their thirty foot high bench built out of the leather bound transcripts of the Nixon tapes, the Iran-Contra hearings, and Ken Starr's final report on Monica, and they will ask David Broder, speaking for the rest of his clubmates, "Tell us, please, explain to us, we beg you, how when George W. Bush first declared for President in 1999, you all looked at the collection of former Nixon henchmen and bagmen, Iran-Contra traitors and thugs rallying to his side, a gang brought together by everything that was vile in American politics going back 30 years, and you turned to the rest of the country and said, 'Fear not this seeming moron, George W. Bush, because he is a man of the people, a regular guy, who just wants to bring honor and dignity back to the White House, and if you doubt our word, why, behold, look at this troop of distinguished statesmen lined up to advise him and help him steer our battered ship of state to safe harbor!'"

And Dean Broder will plead for mercy, saying, "But they gave us access!  He bestowed upon us nicknames!"

The judges will put their heads together for three seconds and then speak us one.

"You go to hell!"
____________________________________________________

Sifu Tweety also links to this fine post by hilzoy of Obsidian Wings.

Pepper is compiling a playlist of songs to be spied upon by.  She's looking for suggestions.

And the post below this is by my friend Steve Kuusisto, poet, essayist, and sometime commentator on All Things Considered.

Comments

[Campaspe]

Lance, I have a Rumpole quote just for you:

What distresses me most about our times is the cheerful manner in which we seem prepared to chuck away those blessed freedoms we have fought for, bled for and got banged up in chokey for down the centuries.

("Rumpole and the Right to Silence", in Rumpole a la Carte)

I have thought of this one so often lately that I may put it up as my screen wallpaper.

[Jennifer]

Okay, someone remind me why or how a person can confess to a crime and nothing is done to him. It seems to me that George turned himself in... where are the people at the other end who then arrest him??? And is claiming you had the balls to commit the crime a defense? I am sure there are many cocksure prisoners in jail right now who thought they were above it all somehow. My memory is short when it comes to how one goes about "arresting the Prez".

[DrPepper]

I think Bush isn't just Nixon redux, but Nixon to the second power. Nixon was just an old-fashioned Machiavellian who thought of his administration as continuously embattled by potential threats. When Nixon referred to his "enemies," he was just talking about the people who happened to be his political opponents. There weren't really any values at stake; he generally wasn't talking about enemies of "freedom" and the supposed American providential mission. Bush has a similar paranoid mind, except that he has ingeniously enlisted God on his side. Unlike Nixon, Bush is less concerned about "subversives" per se than in forces he deems "evil." That's why I think Bush is far more dangerous than Nixon ever was.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

The Neocons never miss a chance to lie and blame Clinton for 9/11. He didn't order illegal wiretaps like Bush did.

Think Progress: BILL KRISTOL: I wish Bill Clinton had done this. I wish we had tapped the phones of people that Mohammed Atta, that Mohammed Atta here into the United States, if we discovered phone calls from Afghanistan to him. That’s why 9/11 happened. That’s what connecting the dots is.

The old rule was if you invoked Hitler during a discussion, you lost the argument. Now after 5 miserable years of control of all three branches of government, once a Neo-Con shreiks "Clinton," he's toast.

I think one of two reasons for the wiretaps, or maybe both.

1) the wiretaps were on democrats, Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Kerry, newsmen like Seymour Hersch and Helen Thomas, etc.

2) some advances in super computer allow NSA to scope EVERYBODY'S in US phone and email. The scoping would be a search for keywords like bomb, terror cell, what have you, but everybody's communications would be examined, and that would NOT be permitted under the FISA law which is an order to wiretap a single individual, and not wholesale taps on every citizen in the country.

Bush's speech the other day which defended his crime was Bush's great Fuck You moment. Bush is lecturing when he says, the American people HAVE to UNDERSTAND that BUSH is PROTECTING them. I think that BUSH has to UNDESTAND, what the DUTIES of a President are, which is a temp position at best, and BEGIN now to see that the LAWS of the US are FAITHFULLY executed.

Or else that job is totally beyond him, Jail to the Chief!

[Pepper]

Here's Bush's twist on Nixon's "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal." He means, "When the king does it, that means it's not illegal."

Because what he have on our hands is an elected king. In all his speeches, he wasn't coming out to comfort us or rally us or whatever. He was mad at us for not obeying. Every moment of that speech was censorious, a "wag of the finger" as Stephen Colbert saw it.

Heck, I thought he was "talking down" to me, and he got elected because most people were afraid Kerry would "talk down" to them.

[Gotham Image]

If you want some comic relief you may be amused by the exchange Bush has with his staff and Hitchem we just posted.

But this is more serious.

Consider this: They offer a jusfication based on inherent Presidential power. Do they believe that in their heart. Would they argue that general principle, if Carter or Clinton was President/

If not, then it is not a policy or view -it's a personality cult, of sorts, masquerading as point of view.

I think if Clinton did this, they would ask him to step down or be impeached - but they make exceptions for Bush, sotto vocce mostly, in an appeal to 'character,' which is both laughable and cryable.

If you read the Bushbot blogs - they really do, some of them, believe that Bush and Cheney have certain allowances that others do not.

When leftists cry fascism, I usually laugh, but there is a whiff of fascism in this attitude they have, revealed recently by leaks and then the attempt to direct blame to the whistleblower.

[Gotham Image]

Jennifer's point makes me think that they probably, somewhere along the way, asked themssleves, "What are they gonna do about it?" - Should they get caught.

It's a question worth answering.

In the appellate ct. decision upholding Fitzgerald against Cooper and Miller, Judge Tatel drew very specific lines between what consitutes protecting whistleblowers exposing illegal government activity (exposing illegal wiretaps), on the one hand, and partipating and furthering an illegal plot (against Wilson) and using the inherent press shield as protection, on the other hand.

Lance - those are the issues.

The Bushbots argue that they were using extreme means to tap terror suspects - but you have ever reason to doubt their version of events, even if you thought it was ok. They could have used the normal procedure, if these were real suspects.

But as has been noted, people like Bolton liked finding out what ordinary people were saying on raw intelligence. They may have used this to tap political enemies instead of terror suspects.

You have every reason to suspect as much, otherwise they would have used FISA - after all, they did use FISA in many cases.

Why was FISA used at all if Bush really believed he did not need to adhere to it.

You know why - You cannot prove it, yet, but you know.