The summer solstice – Thursday, June 21 – is of course the longest day of the year. No, wait. All days are twenty-four hours long. It is the day with the most daylight, at least in the northern hemisphere. You see, the northern solstice is in June, when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern solstice is in December, when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn down that way. To be technical, the cause of the seasons is that the Earth’s axis of rotation is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, but currently makes an angle of about 23.44° (called the “obliquity of the ecliptic”) – and the axis keeps its orientation with respect to inertial space. So for half the year (from around 20 March to 22 September) the northern hemisphere tips to the Sun, with the maximum around 21 June, while for the other half year the southern hemisphere does, with the maximum around 21 December. The two moments when the inclination of Earth’s rotation axis has maximum effect are the solstices, and so on. And there is more you could look up – for the summer solstice, Christian Catholic cultures and Nordic Christian Protestant cultures celebrate the feast of St. John from June 23 to June 24 (St. John’s Eve, Ivan Kupala Day, Midsummer), while the Wiccan culture observes Litha, which might have something to do with this at Stonehenge on the day. In Hinduism, the solstices are called Uttarayana and Dakshinayana – the first around January 14 each year, and the other around June 21. According to the Vedic Calendar, Uttarayana is termed as auspicious for deaths and births, while Dakshinayana just isn’t, so the offerings to ancestors and the dead occur in Dakshinayana. Is that clear? No. But you didn’t really didn’t ask, did you? Don’t worry about it.
Out here in Southern California, the summer solstice was odd (pictures and some text here), but things in Washington were even stranger. No, thousands of modern-day druids, pagans and such did not converge on our Stonehenge, the Pentagon (think about it), but it was the day Vice President Cheney made the claim that he and his office – all his staffers and advisers and whoever else works there we all pay for but cannot know about – are not part of the executive branch at all.
What?
There are rules congress can make in their role in oversight of the executive – they can say the president must keep records of what he’s up to and inform congress on how he’s spending the money they appropriate and all sorts of things – but Cheney, in a new and interesting way of looking at the rule book, that constitution thing, exempted himself. He may be the president’s subordinate, but that doesn’t matter. He’s also president pro tempore of the senate, so he’s special. No one can tell him what to do. Congress can instruct the president, but they cannot instruct him. Leona Helmsley once famously said this – “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” It’s the same sort of thing – just substitute “obey the law” for that “pay taxes” business. Curiously that implies President Bush is one of those “little people.” Cheney is not. He’s above all that “rules” nonsense.
No, this is not a spoof –
Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney.
Bill Leonard, head of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), told Waxman’s staff that Cheney’s office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman.
In pointed letters released today by Waxman, ISOO’s Leonard twice questioned Cheney’s office on its assertion it was exempt from the rules. He received no reply, but the vice president later tried to get rid of Leonard’s office entirely, according to Waxman.
That’s interesting. He will not comply with a presidential order – that would be an order from the fellow from Texas who is nominally his boss – and he tried to eliminate the office that was asking questions about it. And he says the thing on his desk or door may say “Vice President” – but that’s misleading. He not part of the executive branch at all. Perhaps he’d rather not hang around with a bunch of losers.
This makes the not so subtle suggestion that the Office of the Vice President floats above the three main branches of government we all learned about in eighth grade Civics, as a far more powerful often ignored separate branch of government, one where no silly rules apply. Who knew? No one told us.
Andrew Sullivan comments – “The idea of impeaching him really doesn’t seem so outrageous as the months go by, does it?”
Yeah, but what if he just ignored that too - and just didn’t leave? The military loves him. At least the rank-and-file loves him. They’d keep him in office, in the often neglected South American way. Of course, some generals consider him a fool and a meddler, as in this from the first Gulf War –
Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”
And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”
But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.” (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he’d already known Cheney as “one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.”
Between the hapless boy president and his loony “above all the petty rules” vice president, with weird and wonderful ideas of all sorts, the next eighteen months could be a bit of a bumpy ride, and continue if the vice president decides to stay on and run things, no matter what the voters say.
It’s the summer solstice thing – on June 20, 1973, Juan Perón returned to Argentina. Maybe the vice president has put away the Ken Burns Civil War tapes from PBS and is watching Evita now.
Why not? On the summer solstice the president’s approval ratings dropped nearly off the scale. In the latest Newsweek Poll his approval rating was twenty-six percent. As for his handling of Iraq, we’re talking twenty-three percent. This is lower than Jimmy Carter ever was, now, and sustained. This is almost Nixon territory – and he resigned – and it is month after month after month. And it’s not just one poll. Pollster.com (for you statistics freaks) compiles the averages of all the polls - now below thirty percent for the first time. The line chart (with specific data points in scatter) made the day a very long one for the president.
Here’s Sullivan again -
The man can’t go much lower among independents and Democrats, so now it’s simply a question of whether the base can send him past Carter levels to Nixon territory. Nixon only performed worse than Bush in the worst of the Watergate impeachment crisis. How to explain the recent collapse? Some will say immigration. It may well have an impact. But the data suggest otherwise:
“The sharpness of the decline is striking. The change-point for approval is April 23, corresponding to the week of the Congressional vote for deadlines and a fund cutoff in Iraq and the President’s subsequent veto. It precedes the immigration debate, though that debate may have sustained the decline. (On the other hand there is little evidence that immigration accelerated the decline which was already underway.)”
It’s relatively simple, I think. The president’s basic rationale for the war in Iraq was debunked within a few weeks of the invasion. His second rationale, democracy, is much further away now than it was three years ago. He has, in effect, no rationale now, except preventing an even worse catastrophe, which simply reminds Americans of what a colossal misjudgment he has made. Twenty-six percent is far too generous, I’d say. Bush asked to have his presidency judged on how he waged the war in Iraq. He has got his wish.
And it’s a hell of a way to start the summer, not helped by the simultaneous publication of the new Glenn Greenwald book, A Tragic Legacy, which Greenwald summarizes here –
The president who vowed to lead America in a moral crusade to win hearts and minds around the world has so inflamed anti-American sentiment that America’s moral standing in the world is at an all-time low. The president who vowed to defend the Good in the world from the forces of Evil has caused the United States to be held in deep contempt by large segments of virtually every country on every continent of the world, including large portions of nations with which the U.S. has historically been allied. The president who vowed to undertake a war in defense of American values and freedoms has presided over such radical departures from the defining values and liberties of this country that many Americans find their country and its government unrecognizable. And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret “black site” prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world.
And Sullivan riffs on that –
And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies “any method necessary” (in Giuliani’s language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story. It is one of the oldest stories human beings have told to themselves. Human beings seem to need to relearn it with each generation; and I can only express remorse that, in my time, I needed a lesson as well.
Yep, Sullivan initially supported the war, and called those who question the wisdom of doing the thing “fifth columnists” – actual traitors in our midst. But he changed his mind, and now thinks the rulebook may be useful –
The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.
It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it’s mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we’ve degenerated in so short a time.
But we can hope, a little –
There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it’s because I honestly didn’t expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.
America has exchanged some if its basic freedoms for the patina of phony security - and so easily. The Republican Party, to its historic shame, has been the main vehicle for the replacement of doubt, empiricism and calm judgment with certainty, fundamentalism and raw force. We have terrible enemies abroad, seeking to destroy our way of life. But this truth should never blind us to the danger within as well. Al Qaeda can only give us death. It is up to us to surrender the liberty they despise. In so many ways, we already have.
His own book is here. But books may not help, and it will be a long hot summer.
