1. “Well, well, well – it looks like our war-birds over at the American Enterprise Institute are getting kicked out of their very well-feathered nest, as Jacob Heilbrunn, author of a fascinating book on the neoconservatives, reports:
“The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka. There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction.”
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. Although Heilbrunn avers that Muravchik is one of the more “reasonable” neocons, in my book he’s one of the worst. Here, after all, is someone who openly argues that we must start bombing Iran immediately if not sooner, and defends the tragic history of our invasion of Iraq – the lies, the pointless deaths, the horrific blowback. In an article published in Commentary, he accused anyone who so much as whispered the word “neocon” of spreading “conspiracy theories,” and, of course, anti-Semitism. Ledeen is an outright loon, whose “faster, please” jeremiads – published even as the grandiose schemes of the neocons come crashing down on our heads – have only underscored how utterly clueless he’s always been. As for Gerecht, he’s typical of these legends in their own minds, with his ex-spook persona of world-weary intelligence “expert” and air of smug certainty while mouthing the worst whoppers as undisputed fact. He was even invited by the Cato Institute to palaver on one of their little-read Web sites, giving his pro-war, let’s-invade-everyone spiel for the delectation of libertarians – as if this jerk didn’t have endless platforms from which to spread his line of guff!
It looks like Muravchik & Co. will retreat to the safety of the Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby has gone to lick his wounds and write his memoirs. The Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies, whose made-in-Israel stamp was detected in an investigative report published in The American Conservative, has already taken in Gerecht, and others will certainly jump into this particular lifeboat. Whatever their fate as individuals, however, the neocons’ brand of armed fanaticism will wind up in the same historical dustbin occupied by their intellectual progenitors and rivals, the Marxist-Leninists.
So, can we say, with absolute certitude – and unabashed joy – that the neocons are over, and the War Party is through?
Not by a long shot.
Because what’s rising on the left-end of the political spectrum is a new brand of neoconservatism, a “liberal” and even “enlightened” variety of the same old hubris-in-arms that animated the departed warmongers of AEI.
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When people are poor and getting poorer, it’s fairly easy to convince them that the evil “foreigners” are to blame – for stealing “our” markets and selling quality consumer goods to “our” people at prices that Americans can actually afford. Economic nationalism will be the War Party’s new battle-flag. As a great libertarian economist once put it, “if goods don’t cross border, then armies soon will.”
Look for the return of the “Yellow Peril” and the revival of a half-forgotten “progressive” tradition of left-wing anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese feeling. On the West coast, starting in the 19th century, the labor unions agitated against the importation of “coolie” labor, and anti-Japanese sentiment was also rife. This anti-Asian movement found political expression in the Asiatic Exclusion League and the Workingman’s Party. The movement had enough clout in 1906 to pressure the San Francisco-based California state Board of Education to exclude students of Japanese descent from public schools white children attended.
We hear echoes of this in Rachel Maddow’s rants against that Republican congressman from a southern state who has a Toyota factory in his district, which Rachel referred to as if it were an invading army instead of a source of income for thousands of Americans. How dare he oppose the bailout of our sclerotic auto industry, which long ago deserved to go belly-up! What I want to know is where-oh-where do these people learn economics?
In short, it’s going to get increasingly ugly out there, as the Democrats take control and this kind of talk becomes more commonplace. Call it bread-and-butter imperialism – the War Party’s appeal to the common working man. Full employment through global interventionism – yeah, that‘s the ticket!
The names change, the rhetoric undergoes a subtle shift in tone, but from AEI to PPI is not a long road to travel. Those who are hoping for “change” – the mindless slogan relentlessly pushed by the Obama-ites until it becomes a mantra devoid of meaning – are in for a shock. What we’ll see in the foreign policy realm is more of the same, including a fresh crop of neocons with considerable influence among key policymakers. As a new year dawns, it’s the same old same old.“
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13945
2. “Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.
Just as Cheney is able to sow legal doubt where none exists, he is adept at issuing blanket legal proclamations about questions that are open-ended and theoretical. Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent “the hard-core.” Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago. Which brings us to Cheney’s biggest whopper of the week. In yesterday’s interview with Chris Wallace, he was as blunt as anyone can be in articulating the Nutty Version of the Unitary Executive Theory:
The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.
The claim that “the nature of the world we live in” warrants a perennially unchecked executive branch can be delivered with all the gravitas in the world, and it still amounts to constitutional nonsense. To this end it’s well worth reading Absolute Power, in which distinguished legal journalist John MacKenzie takes a close look at claims about the unitary executive. MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: “The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution.”
None of this will matter if President Bush issues blanket pardons in the coming weeks. Nor will it matter if the rest of us continue to invent reasons to neither investigate nor—if appropriate—prosecute wrongdoing by the highest-level officials in the Bush administration. Dick Cheney is counting on one or both of those outcomes when he obfuscates the easy legal questions and oversimplifies the complicated ones. If we choose to be bulldozed into living in his topsy-turvy legal universe, we really are as complacent as he believes.“
http://www.slate.com/id/2207070
3. “Obama Wants Bush Pentagon Appointees to Stay
In a move confirmed by Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, Secretary Gates is asking, on behalf of the new administration, that “all willing political appointees” remain in their positions beyond the inauguration. Morrell says virtually all secretaries and undersecretaries will remain in their positions, until President-elect chooses to replace them. If the President-elect chooses to replace them.
The move is being presented, of course, as an effort to ensure continuity for a wartime transition of power. Yet given Obama’s national security team itself consisted entirely of hawks, they would seem to be at home with the idea of a Pentagon not just modeled after the Bush Administration’s, but consisting more or less entirely of Bush appointees. It may sit well with them, but how will it sit with millions of Obama voters who cast their ballot on the assumption that it would bring about genuine change?“
4. “Will the US break up?
The U.S. military agrees that the chance of a break down in the system is real:
A new report from the U.S. Army War College [here is the report] discusses the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis.
The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” [The report also warns of a possible “rapid dissolution of public order in all or significant parts of the US.”]
In other words, the government is predicting that systems will break down. But instead of doing anything to actually fix the underlying problems which are leading to the break down (like making sure that politicians follow the Constitution and making sure that America’s manufacturing base is rebuilt, so that we can make something real, and our workers can make decent wages on a sustainable basis), the government is just planning on implementing police state measures to quell protests.
(Indeed, while most Americans don’t realize it, this already started happening years ago).
Will that help keep the U.S. together?
Maybe in the short-run. But I believe that – especially now that the illusions that we’re in an endless boom economy and that the U.S. is a true democracy following the wishes of its people have started to pop (see this and this) – within the next decade, America will break up, like the Soviet Union.
Note 1: One precipitating factor in the break up of the U.S. may be the bankruptcy of the states. California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin are all in really big trouble, and on the verge of defaulting. The rest of the states won’t be that far behind as the financial crisis intensifiehttp://webmail.aol.com/40627/aol/en-us/Suite.aspx#s. If the federal government isn’t helping them in their most dire crises since the founding of the country, and if the feds impose the heavy hand of martial law without any benefit to the states, they will have less incentive to remain a part of the union. “
georgewashington2.blogspot.com
5. “This is now the conventional wisdom, the settled consensus, of our political and media elites with regard to America’s torture program. It’s perfectly appropriate that Drezner cites and heaps praise on the self-consciously open-minded meditation on the torture question from The Atlantic‘s Ross Douthat because — as I wrote in response to Douthat — our political elites have now, virtually in unison, convinced themselves that ambiguity and understanding with regard to American war crimes are the hallmarks of both intellectual and moral superiority.
This is the justifying argument the political class has latched onto — one that was spawned, revealingly enough, by Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith: sure, some of this might have been excessive and arguably wrong, but it was all done for the right reasons, by people who are good at heart. So common is this self-justifying American rationalization that it has now even infected the mentality of long-time Bush critics, such as The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page, which today argued that prosecutions for Bush officials are inappropriate, even though they clearly broke multiple laws, because “they did so as part of a post- 9/11 response to terrorism.” As this excellent reply from Diane at Cab Drollery puts it: “civility and understanding is far more important to them than simple justice.”
There are so many fallacies with this mindset that it’s almost impossible to describe them all in one sitting. But the worst fallacy, the most destructive and self-delusional, is the stunted self-centeredness in which this view is grounded. As I detailed in the post I wrote about Douthat’s flamboyant “struggle” on the torture question, virtually every single war criminal in history can recite good reasons for undertaking “excessive” measures. Other than psychopaths who do it exclusively for sadistic entertainment, every torturer can point to actual fears, or genuine threats, or legitimate grievances that led them to sanction violence and brutality.
But people like Goldsmith, Drezner, Douthat, and The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page can only see a world in which they — Americans — are situated at the center. They cite the post-9/11 external threats which American leaders faced, the ostensible desire of Bush officials to protect the citizenry, and their desire to maximize national security as though those are unique and special motives, rather than what they are: the standard collection of excuses offered up by almost every single war criminal.
If ostensible self-protective motives are now considered mitigating factors in the commission of war crimes — or, worse, if they justify immunity from prosecution — then there is virtually no such thing any longer as a “war crime” that merits punishment. Every tyrant and every war criminal can avail themselves of this self-defense. But advocates of this view — “Oh, American officials only did it to protect us from The Terrorists” — can’t or won’t follow their premise to this logical conclusion because their oh-so-sophisticated and empathetic understanding that political leaders act with complex motives only extends to their own leaders, to Americans.
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This is the self-absorbed mindset that allows the very same people who cheered for the attack on Iraq to, say, righteously condemn the Russian invasion of Georgia as a terrible act of criminal aggression. Russia’s four-week occupation of Georgia is a heinous war crime, while our six-year-and-counting occupation of Iraq is a liberation. Russia drops destructive, lethal bombs on civilian populations, but the U.S. drops Freedom Bombs. Russian leaders were motivated by a desire for domination even though they withdrew after a few weeks; Americans, as always, are motivated by a desire to spread love and goodness. Freedom is on the March.
In the response I wrote to Douthat’s piece, I wrote that this excuse-making for the Bush torture regime “isn’t really anything more than standard American exceptionalism — more accurately: blinding American narcissism — masquerading as a difficult moral struggle.” But that almost gives it too much credit. Really, this is nothing more than stunted adolescence. The definitive adolescent mindset is pure self-centeredness personified; it demands infinite understanding of and sympathy with one’s own predicament and choices, and offers none for anyone else’s. That’s all this is: our Leaders — Americans — had good reasons to torture and therefore it shouldn’t be punished; others who do it (the ones with foreign, unpronounceable names) have no good reasons and should be treated as criminals.
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their refusal to make clear, definitive judgments is a hallmark not only of their moral superiority, but of their intellectual superiority as well. Only shrill ideologues and simpletons on either side believe that the torture question is “cut and dried.” They actually believe that their indecisive open-mindedness on such clear moral questions is a sign of their rich and deep complexity, even though it’s nothing more than an adolescent inability to assess the world through any prism other than their own immediate reflexive desires and self-interest.
Independently ironic is the fact that these self-styled complex intellectuals are actually embracing the most intellectually superficial and simplistic form of analysis possible. On one side, they hear Dick “dunk in the water” Cheney and Rush “just blowing off steam” Limbaugh overtly justifying torture. On the other side, they hear what they perceive as the Far Left “civil liberties extremists” arguing that torture unambiguously is a war crime and those who order it are and therefore should be treated as war criminals.
But all good, smart, Serious Broder-esque elites know that the Truth is never found on either extreme. It’s always found in the center — defined as whatever result is derived by randomly mixing the two poles. Even on questions involving the clearest legal and moral lines — such as torture — the Center is intrinsically right. Hence: “yes, torture is wrong; but no, our Leaders don’t deserve prosecution for it because their hearts were in the right place.” It’s as intellectually shallow as it gets — smart people always go to the center. That it’s intellectually shallow doesn’t prove it’s wrong. But it’s ironic indeed that these reflexive Centrists have convinced themselves that their reliance on this simpleton’s crutch is proof of their elevated intellectual rigor.
More simplistic still is the very idea that the motives of Bush officials — including Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld — can be reduced to one clear and pure desire: To Protect Us. Even one’s own motives, let alone those of others, are notoriously difficult to ascertain. The certainty claimed by those who are defending Bush officials about what their motives were in torturing is absurd. There are all sorts of reasons to believe that they were motivated, at least in part, by the power that comes from torture, or a desire for vengeance, or the belief that the detainees in our custody were sub-human, or just general indifference to law and morality. How have those ignoble motives been ruled out by their defenders and noble motives so emphatically embraced? Ultimately, though, the reason leaders torture is irrelevant. It’s one of those few absolute taboos, and it’s almost as immoral to seek to dilute that taboo by offering motive-based mitigations as it is to engage in it in the first place.
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Most of all — worst of all — they seek to depict their own ambivalence about torture (American Torture, that is) as the only morally and intellectually respectable position, while those who call it a war crime and want it treated as such are blinded ideologues and extremists, impervious to the Serious, multi-layered complexities of the world. “
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
6. “With that Ford pardoned Nixon and the American tragedy continues to this day. As he explained, “After years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate, I have been advised, and I am compelled to conclude that many months and perhaps more years will have to pass before Richard Nixon could obtain a fair trial by jury in any jurisdiction of the United States under governing decisions of the Supreme Court.”
The principle of “no man is above the law” was subverted for an emotional plea based on pity. The public was outraged and the taint hung over Ford for the rest of his life; his personal and professional credibility was shot. Nixon was the unquestioned leader of a cabal that subverted laws and accepted illegal codes of behavior with reckless abandon. Today the bones of Richard Nixon lie at rest; his crimes look almost trivial by today’s standards, and so Ford emerges as the even greater criminal. His pardon of Nixon made Nixon’s crimes something future administrations sought to avoid getting caught at, rather than things which should not be done.
All change in the world comes either from rot or from new growth. Ford’s pardon of Nixon might have been expedient at the time, but it has allowed the rot to fester. Senator Carl Levin wants a congressional inquiry into the actions of the Vice President and the Attorney General and their role in the torturing of prisoners. Thanks to Gerald Ford this is a question rather than a precedent. Had Nixon been put on trial, win, lose or draw there would be precedent for putting members of the Executive branch on trial.
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The incoming administration is cool to the idea of any investigations at all, preferring to put these things away in the closet. If eight years from now we look back on today and say to ourselves that Barack Obama was the most benevolent President America has ever had, it doesn’t change the fact that these things, torture camps, wire taps, watch lists, will have become codified. Some future President in 2016 might declare an emergency and set up his or her own torture camps or secret jails. Then they will ask their attorney general, was anyone ever prosecuted when the Bush administration did them?
Today Woodward and Bernstein are the equivalent of Bobby Thompson’s home run, a footnote for Trivial Pursuit. Woodward writes kindly books about a President who makes Nixon look like Mother Teresa. Print journalism in this generation is, for the most part, the first bulwark of the political fortress, instead of the battering ram to tear down its doors and to break all its windows. From the smiling Nixon in the helicopter door to Dick Cheney with his middle finger extended, while George Bush looks wistfully towards his retirement without fear, but beware for whom the shoe is thrown at, it tolls for thee. ”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21526.htm
7. “In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: “The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.” What has changed? The terror of the rich is greater than ever, and the poor have passed on their delusion to those who believe that when George W Bush finally steps down next January, his numerous threats to the rest of humanity will diminish.
The foregone nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, “marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history”, is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullshit on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and “image-making”, now magnified by “virtual” technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush’s case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win. This has been the case since the truly historic and exciting victory of Harry Truman, the liberal Democrat said to be a humble man of the people, who went on to show how tough he was by obliterating two cities with the atomic bomb.
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It is time the wishful-thinkers grew up politically and debated the world of great power as it is, not as they hope it will be. Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is. However much the colour of his skin draws out both racists and supporters, it is otherwise irrelevant to the great power game. The “truly exciting and historic moment in US history” will only occur when the game itself is challenged.”
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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