Analyzing and Explaining, and Doing Something

Ah, Andrew Marvell –

 

Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.

 

Ah, Eliot –

 

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Do something, or just think about it.  That’s always a bother.

 

Ah, Sidney Blumenthal!  What?

 

It seems the former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, who writes a column for Salon and the Guardian (UK), is not going to be writing those columns from here on out.  He joining Hillary Clinton’s team as an advisor – he’s tired of analyzing and explaining – he’s a senior fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security – and wants to do something.  Don’t we all?

 

But he can – there his background in the Clinton White House (see his book on that, The Clinton Wars) and he’s up on things (his book The Strange Death of Republican America will be published in April 2008).  So, why not do something?  This is what he will do, but not before his final critique of the Bush administration, the last salon.com column, which may be a preview of the new book.  It may also be an extension of his last book, How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, August 10, 2006), but it hardly matters.  What he has to say in the new (and last) column, Goodbye, Mr. Bush, should be noted.  It’s pretty good summary of what the next president will face. There will be a lot of things to fix –

 

The damage is broad, deep and spreading, apparent not only in international disorder and violence, the unprecedented decline of U.S. prestige, and the flouting of our security and economic interests but also in the hollowing out of the federal government’s departments and agencies, and their growing incapacity to fulfill their functions, from FEMA to the Department of Justice.

 

Well, nothing is working very well, and he’s probably joining the Clinton camping because of this –

 

The more rigid the current president is in responding to the chaos he has fostered, the more the Republicans still supporting him rally around him as a pillar of strength. His flat learning curve, refusal to admit error and redoubling of mistakes are regarded as tests of his strong character. Whatever his low poll ratings of the moment, his stubborn adherence to failure is admired as evidence of his potency.

 

Blumenthal find the notion that weakness is strength, the basis of Bush’s remaining credibility within his party, “patently perverse.”  Blumenthal may be onto something there – if you saw a young man running headfirst into a brick wall, over and over until he’s woozy and stumbling, you might pull him aside and tell his there really is no Platform 9 ¾ and no train to Hogwarts, and, in fact, there is no Hogwarts, and in fact, no such thing as magic.  It’s just a book.  It’s just people imagining how things might be, not real at all.  On the other hand, if you’re a Republican of the current sort you might very well admire that young man for his strong character, and also assume there’s some real potency there that the cynics just cannot see.  And yes, belief in all that is good and magical is wonderful in its way – but there’s still that brick wall.

 

You can say the laws passed by Congress do not apply to you, assuming power beyond them, but like that brick wall, there are still laws.

 

As for the actual weakness, as opposed to the claimed strength, Blumenthal cites Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson on the constitutional principle regarding that 1952 Youngstown Steel case – “When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”  Our constitutional system is that brick wall, or ought to be.

 

Are brick walls, metaphoric or real, just an illusion?  Here’s where we stand now –

 

In his waning year, Bush is pointedly indifferent to the predictable consequences of his collapse. According to those who have met with him recently, he envisions himself as a noble idealist having made moral decisions that will vindicate him generations from now.

 

Be that as it may, or may not be, Blumenthal argues that despite the obvious shortcomings of this president’s policies, “he has startlingly succeeded in reshaping the executive into an unaccountable imperial presidency.”  In fact, this presidency outside or above or beyond the law – chose the word you’d like, “is now accepted as the only acceptable version for major Republican candidates who aspire to succeed him.”  In fact each, save for Ron Paul, “have pledged to extend its arbitrary powers.”  And that makes the next election a bit interesting and a bit of a turning point in constitutional government, if you think about it.  Blumenthal argues that this campaign pits two parties running on diametrically opposite ideas of the presidency and the Constitution – “There has not been such a sharp divergence on the foundation of the federal system since perhaps the election of 1860.”  It’s no time to hang around the NYU offices and write things.

 

But the following Blumenthal comparison may be over the top –

 

Two models of the presidency are at odds, one whose founding father was George Washington, the other whose founding father was Richard Nixon. Under the aegis of Dick Cheney, who considered the scandal in Watergate to be a political trick to topple Nixon, the original vision has been entrenched and extended. Cheney is the pluperfect staff man, beginning as Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant in the Nixon White House, and was aptly code-named “Backseat” by the Secret Service when he pulled the strings in the Ford White House as chief of staff. For Cheney and the president under his tutelage, eagerly acting as “The Decider” on decision memos carefully packaged by “Backseat,” the Constitution is a defective instrument remedied by unlimited executive power.

 

Like Nixon, Bush and Cheney act on the idea that the more they operate outside the constitutional system, the stronger they are. But, unlike Nixon, they are willfully contemptuous of facts and evidence, believing that unfettered power gives them the authority to create or impose their own. Bush and Cheney have refined and simplified Nixon’s concept, purging it of his realism and flexibility. There will be no opening to Iran as there was an opening to China. In Bush’s imperial presidency, neoconservatism meets Nixonianism, the ideology providing the high concept of low politics.

 

If that is true then in ways that Nixon did not achieve, Bush has reduced the entire presidency and its functions to the commander in chief in wartime –

 

And in order to sustain this role he has projected a never-ending war against a distant, faceless foe, ubiquitous and lethal. Fear and panic became the chief motifs substituting for democratic persuasion to engineer the consent of the governed, as Jack Goldsmith, Bush’s former director of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, explains in “The Terror Presidency.” He writes, “Why did the administration so often assert presidential power in ways that seemed unnecessary and politically self-defeating? The answer, I believe, is that the administration’s conception of presidential power had a kind of theological significance that often trumped political consequences.”

 

Theology?  Is the pope going to come up here?  Yes, he is –

 

The imperial president must by definition be an infallible leader. Only he can determine what is a mistake because he is infallible. Stephen Bradbury, the acting director of OLC in the Justice Department who wrote secret memos justifying the torture policy in 2005, defined this Bush doctrine in congressional testimony in 2006: “The president is always right.” Placing his statement in context, Bradbury explained that he was referring to “the war paradigm,” the neoconservative idea of the Bush presidency, “the law of war,” wherein the president is a law unto himself. This notion seems medieval, but it is central to the new radical Republican notion of the presidency. When Bradbury uttered his extraordinary remark, he did not think he was saying anything unusual. His statement, after all, was only a corollary of Nixon’s infamous one made in his post-resignation interview with David Frost, “When the president does it that means it’s not illegal.” Bush exceeds Nixon in his claim of divine inspiration from the Higher Father.

 

And you see what follows –

 

Every executive policy does not exist on its own merit but as part of an overarching plan to establish an executive who rules by fiat. Enforcing these policies is intended to break down resistance to aggrandizing unaccountable power for the presidency. Warrantless domestic surveillance is a case in point.

 

But then, so is torture, which may be the linchpin of the new Republican argument on presidential power.

 

Blumenthal suggest this –

 

Abuse of detainees is the metaphor for beguiling the public into supporting abuse of the presidency. The sadomasochistic ecstasy of torture and the thrill of vengeance are the ultimate appeal of the party of torture. Projecting violence against accused terrorists in an endless war is a deep political strategy to forge and fortify a new regime. This novel form of government, never before installed in the U.S., despite precursors from Nixon’s planned seizure of powers, is being cemented into place so that its penetrability and removal will become extraordinarily difficult.

 

When a fellow argues in a national magazine that Americans should be proud that our government is waterboarding any suspicious persons you know “removal will become extraordinarily difficult” – the president can do anything and what he does is good is commonsense now.  You don’t think so?  Then you are unpatriotic and subversive.

This leads Blumenthal to argue that “restoring American constitutional government after Bush demands the most strategic political and bureaucratic genius.”  Hillary Clinton may or may not possess that genius, but Blumenthal is family.

 

Oddly, in this general critique, Blumenthal offers some underreported news, details to make his case, but surprising.  If torture is, as he argues, so vital to this “imperial presidency” gambit, then the nomination of the new attorney general, Michael Mukasey, is key, and “his refusal to oppose a ritual designed during the Spanish Inquisition to purge sinful heresy: waterboarding.”  As many have said, were Mukasey to have called waterboarding torture, and it seems to be, the he would have been obligated to prosecute those responsible for war crimes.  It’s simple – and Mukasey’s testimony “was symptomatic of the new constitutional order forged by Bush.”  The man had to be leashed. 

The underreported news is how that happened –

 

On Oct. 25, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois received written responses from Mukasey to questions he had submitted. In one question, Durbin asked about a report that Mukasey had met with unnamed conservative figures to discuss his legal views and allay any misgivings they might have.

 

The list of names extracted from Mukasey by Durbin passed by unnoticed in the controversy. Mukasey revealed that on order of “officials within the White House” he sat down with six prominent right-wing leaders, whose gathering constituted a de facto subcommittee of the “Inner Party” of the conservative movement. Those present were Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III; former Reagan and Bush I legal officials Lee Casey and David Rivkin; the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo; the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Edward Whelan; and the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (founded by Pat Robertson), Jay Sekulow.

 

Mukasey’s meeting with this group at the insistence of the White House amounted to a supra-official confirmation hearing. The incident demonstrates that the Bush imperial presidency is a central tenet of the permanent elite of the party extending beyond his administration. Politicizing paranoia, subsuming intelligence by ideology, purging and deputizing prosecutors, dismissing law by fiat (signing statements) and holding in contempt checks and balances are not temporary measures.

 

Wild – it’s like a movie.  Which movie?  You decide.  It’s not Mary Poppins.

 

And we in for more of the same, as it looks like the Republican candidate will be Rudolph Giuliani, or someone like him –

 

Whether Giuliani becomes the nominee or not, he has defined more clearly than the others the coming themes of the Republican campaign for 2008. His political premise in running for mayor of New York was that the city was under siege, overrun by crime and chaos. His answer to crime was his new police commissioner: Bernard Kerik, the lawless lawman.

 

Giuliani’s image of New York then is transformed now into an image of the country besieged from within and without. As mayor he stoked inflammatory racial confrontation and basked in demagogy. His heated and cynical paranoid style has gone international. (For cynicism, few episodes exceed his showdown in 2000 with the Brooklyn Museum over an African artist’s painting of a portrait of Jesus using elephant dung as a material when Giuliani was slipping in the polls against his prospective opponent for the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton. When the chips are down, Giuliani always looks for the elephant chip.) Whether he becomes the Republican candidate or not, he has helped consolidate Bush’s authoritarian model as the only acceptable one for Republicans.

 

So Blumenthal is off to join Hillary.  Many of us feel that if he really wanted to fix things he go with that Obama fellow.  But then, she more electable – she doesn’t seem to be black – and he knows Hillary Clinton.  He’s a practical man.

 

And he has a good close, on the issue of practicality –

 

The Democrats at key junctures have been seduced by the illusion of anti-politics to their own detriment. Anti-politics upholds a self-righteous ideal of purity that somehow political conflict can be transcended on angels’ wings. The consequences on the right of an assumption of moral superiority and hubris are apparent. Their plight stands as a cautionary tale, but not only as an object lesson for them. Still, the Republican will to power remains ferocious. The hard struggle will require the most capable political leadership, willing to undertake the most difficult tasks, and grace under pressure.

 

It’s time to get to work.