This JUST ABOVE SUNSET site, with its small readership, sixty or seventy hits a day, is certainly not Daily Kos – the most visited blog on the left. That’s a vast group effort now, and here it’s just one guy. And the daily posts here are in long form, an effort at working through the implications and details of an issue, not the customary tight and focused short posts pointing to one specific event or document or statement and saying “Oh my!” That’s pretty much how blogging is done these days. But of course everyone eventually works in the format that feels right – and some of us don’t want to leave anything out, the counterarguments or the odd details that might be important. You try to be thorough and honest, and clear as you can be, so things can stretch out at bit – but things are seldom as simple at they first seem. The “long form” approach, in a fast-paced web environment where short bursts of outrage rule, may limit the audience to the few and the patient. So be it.
But even if this site is in an oddball format, one extended commentary each day, the columns here do tend to fall on the left side of things – maybe not the “far left” but certainly on the “progressive” side of the political spectrum, what they used to call “liberal” in the old days. Chalk it up to graduating from college in the late sixties, grad school and teaching English in the seventies, and thirty years in the business world – and living in Hollywood, of all places. Or maybe it’s just realism – not buying into what you’re told you really should believe. But whatever it is, you find yourself skimming Kos a few times a day. Get past the tone of outrage and the inevitable hyperbole and you are directed to important issues and multiple primary sources to investigate. Cool.
But then you find out you’re a “devil worshipper.” Really – on the Bill O’Reilly show the man said just that – progressive blog readers are “devil worshippers.” And it is hard to tell if he was kidding –
On Fox News yesterday, Bill O’Reilly let loose on “far-left websites” like DailyKos, stating, “If you read these far-left websites, you’re a devil worshipper. You are.”
O’Reilly’s ombudsman responded, “As a journalist, you know better than that.”
O’Reilly shot back: “Satan is running the DailyKos. Yes, he is!”
He’s a journalist? Well, maybe, but he’s not a reporter or investigator. Still, his daily on-air commentary and interviews are a “journal” of sorts. Close enough.
Still this seems a little unhinged, and “Hunter” at Daily Kos is not impressed –
Oh - the Satan thing? Yeah, whatever. That’s just Fox News catering to their base: insane people with a lot of free time who like watching other insane people with a lot of spare cash. I didn’t know Satan was for healthcare for children, was against the United States torturing prisoners, wanted decent education in schools, and demanded non-insane energy policies, but I guess when you’re a Republican those are all the sorts of thing you might attribute to the devil.
Hmm, maybe the satanic part is taxing oil companies? That seems to be what the Republicans are most worked up over, at the moment. I must admit my favorite part of the Bible is when Jesus gets all mad and stuff and tries to throw the protesters out of the Exxon temple, and they’re all “but think of the children!” and he’s all “children nothing, you’re screwing with da shareholders now, punks” and kicks their asses. Then he goes off to torture some prisoners.
Where was I… oh, right, Bill O’Reilly going off the deep end. I feel slightly bad about that - I know whenever we mention him, he works himself up into a foam worthy of the finest latte - but he just makes it too easy. And, after all, he did call it “satire.”
Did he call this a satire? You decide –
At the end of the segment, O’Reilly said, “That was a little satire there… don’t get too upset about it.”
But he then added, “I still think they are Satanists.”
Hunter –
So Fox News supports their “journalists” calling people agents of Satan under the banner of “satire.” What else is new? They’re a fake news network. At least they didn’t claim Bat Boy was running for president as a Democrat - they’re saving that sweet scoop for Brit Hume.
Yeah well, Fox News supports lots of things. Forget Bill-O. The thinkers watch the Beltway Boys – Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes on the triumphs of George Bush, or the roundtable discussions with those two, Brit Hume and Charles Krauthammer, the former psychiatrist, former liberal, and now a key neoconservative spokesman.
That will give you a different perspective. Andrew Sullivan, the disgruntled old-style conservative – be careful, prudent, thoughtful and respectful of tradition – is a bit amazed by Krauthammer. Charles says odd things –
I just listened to Charles say that the torture of terror suspects in 2002 was justified because the United States was flying blind and had no knowledge of what al Qaeda was planning. He won’t say “torture”, of course, although the law is clear that it is torture. (He and Fox News keep referring to the notion of “harsh interrogation techniques.” I think they realized that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” was a little too close to the Gestapo’s euphemism for comfort.) And he then said that destroying the tapes was justified because you don’t want them coming up on YouTube, do you? So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States. Again, I keep pinching myself that I am actually hearing these things on the television.
Well, it is a step up from Bill-O calling people who are reading these words right now “devil worshipers.” But Sullivan finds it disturbing –
I realize, of course, that that’s the actual argument that Bush and Cheney make to themselves behind closed doors. I guess it’s refreshing, if a little chilling, to hear a proud defense of lawlessness and violence at the heart of a constitutional republic on national television. But there are several critical and revealing premises behind it. The first is that the United States has effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. To say that the president can waive them at any time if he sees fit is to say that the United States is not bound by its treaty obligations. The second is that the president is not bound by any law or treaty governing the laws of warfare. Bush and Cheney won’t say this because if they did, the jig would be up. The Constitution is extremely clear that the laws of warfare are determined by the Congress, not the president. So it’s up to the Beltway Boys to defend the suspension of the rule of law and the legalization of torture as executive prerogatives, in violation of the Constitution. Hey: we’re at war. The Constitution is now optional.
Well, Fox News is like that. That’s no secret. You may remember the rules for his hotel room when Vice President Cheney travels – Fox News on every television. The Fox guys will openly push what the vice president cannot.
But something else is going on with Krauthammer and this torture business –
Notice also that this isn’t the ticking time bomb case that Charles has previously invoked to defend torture. There was no imminent threat to hundreds of thousands of people; we had no way of knowing for sure that Zubaydah had any knowledge of such a devastating threat; and we have no independent way of knowing whether the information he allegedly gave up under torture was factually accurate. And so in the initial cases of torture under this administration, we discover it was used simply because we had no good intelligence of future threats; and we decided to use torture for a fishing expedition. So much for the rare exception to the rule.
Here’s a bit of Sullivan’s assessment –
The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used “judiciously” and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.
So when you look at what torture has done already to the United States, we see that every bad scenario that those of us who oppose torture feared has actually come about. And we have no independent evidence that it has solved anything, or saved any lives, except the self-serving statements of those who authorized it. And the truth is: we will probably never know. If they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy incriminating tapes, they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy any evidence within the executive branch that could prove that their torture policy has failed.
If this isn’t a form of tyranny, annexed to torture, what is? And if the executive branch can simply get away with it, and have serious commentators defend the president’s trashing of the Constitution as necessary to fulfill his oath of office, we really have left the rule of law behind in the ditch.
Thank you, Fox News.
And they didn’t cover an impassioned floor speech on Friday, December 7, from the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse. Why would they? Unless there’s something to mock they leave Democrats be – out of sight, out of mind and all that. Now Whitehouse is a lawyer, a former US Attorney, a former legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and a former State Attorney General, so he knows a few things. And now that he could, he says he’s “spent hours poring over” secret opinions issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) - and he took notes. He said he sought and received permission to have his notes declassified because he wanted to show the public “what the Bush administration does behind our backs when they think no one is looking.” It’s more than having all the television sets tuned to Fox News.
It’s quite odd –
“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:
1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.
2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.
3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.
There’s a video clip at the link if you’d like to watch, and a ton of additional detail at this site, and Libby Spencer asks the question, Can we call Bush a tyrant, now?
Is that hyperbole? The man from Rhode Island says this –
Let’s start with number one. Bear in mind that the so-called Protect America Act that was stampeded through this great body in August provides no - zero - statutory protections for Americans traveling abroad from government wiretapping. None if you’re a businesswoman traveling on business overseas, none if you’re a father taking the kids to the Caribbean, none if you’re visiting uncles or aunts in Italy or Ireland, none even if you’re a soldier in the uniform of the United States posted overseas. The Bush Administration provided in that hastily-passed law no statutory restrictions on their ability to wiretap you at will, to tap your cell phone, your e-mail, whatever.
So unless Congress acts, here is what legally prevents this President from wiretapping Americans traveling abroad at will: nothing. Nothing.
Whitehouse adds this –
In a nutshell, these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this:
1. “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”
2. “I get to determine what my own powers are.”
3. “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”
Spencer rests the case there, and you can see how one would come to the “tyrant” conclusion. But one would then be a devil worshipper.
Or you could get even deeper in to Satanism by reading the comments here. One wag went back and re-read Scott Horton’s piece about lawyers being war criminals –
For this issue, one Nuremberg case forms the key precedent: United States v. Altstoetter, also called the Reich Justice Ministry case. That case stands for some simple propositions. One of them is that lawyers who dispense bad advice about law of armed conflict, and whose advice predictably leads to the death or mistreatment of prisoners, are war criminals, chargeable with potentially capital offenses. Another is that cute lawyerly evasions and gimmicks, so commonly indulged in other areas of the law, will not be tolerated on fundamental questions of law of armed conflict relating to the protection of civilians and detainees. In other words, lawyers are not permitted to get it wrong.
On wiretapping, on torture, on what the president wants, those who wrote the internal legal memos Whitehouse finally got to read, could be in real trouble, or as the wag puts it –
The lawyers here not only did the wrong thing, they then allowed it all to be covered up. I want to see John Yoo frog-marched.
That may never happen, but something else could happen. Consider this from “looseheadprop” at the blog Firedoglake – Will American Lawyers Take to the Streets in Support of the Rule of Law in the US?
There was a speech given by Mario Cuomo in which he advocated that American lawyers take to the streets to march in support of the US Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, so you never know. And the writer received this email from Steve Fox of the American Freedom Campaign –
Here is what is happening. For the past few weeks, I have been working with Vince Warren and Michael Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Marjorie Cohn at the National Lawyers Guild to build a “lawyers’ movement” in defense of the Constitution. (The Alliance for Justice has also joined the campaign.) The inspiration behind the effort is the situation in Pakistan and the actions lawyers have taken there to defend their Constitution. In order to protect the Constitution in this country, we are asking lawyers to band together and call on Congress to launch investigations into the numerous unconstitutional actions that have been carried out by the Bush administration.
I am writing now because the group Naomi helped start with Wes Boyd, David Fenton and others, the American Freedom Campaign, is coordinating a great new project. We have dozens of law professors involved and, as the result of me seeing a posting on FDL by looseheadprop about a Mario Cuomo speech, I even approached Governor Cuomo and he is now involved.
Hey, O’Reilly, you were right. Progressive blogs are dangerous.
And here’s is what Steve Fox is up to –
We crafted the statement below and recruited 72 prominent lawyers, including Cuomo, to be the initial signers of the statement. With the help of organizations and bloggers like you, we are now circulating the statement with the 72 names throughout the Internet so that lawyers around the country can add their names. (We have set up a page on our site so that this is simple.) In mid-December, we will release the statement publicly in some manner.
Here’s the draft –
We, the undersigned lawyers in the United States, have been inspired by the many lawyers in Pakistan who have risked their own liberty and careers in an effort to preserve their nation’s freedoms.
Their courage has deepened our own resolve to defend the rule of law in our nation. As lawyers, we have both a moral and professional responsibility to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.
To that end, we are committed to creating a movement of lawyers in this nation dedicated to monitoring and, when appropriate, challenging the actions of our government when those actions threaten our nation’s freedoms.
And these folks are issuing this statement to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. They want “hearings into the unconstitutional and possibly criminal actions of the Bush Administration” –
Message to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy from American Lawyers Defending the Constitution
We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law from those who would violate and subvert them, and to hold wrongdoers accountable.
We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws. Evidence exists that it has illegally spied on Americans, tortured and abused men and women in its direct custody, sent others to be tortured by countries like Syria and Egypt, and kept people in prison indefinitely with no chance to challenge the bases of their detention. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight of the executive branch.
Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. Should these hearings demonstrate that laws have in fact been broken by this administration, we support all such legal and congressional actions necessary to ensure the survival of our Constitution and the nation we love.
And then the lawyers take to the streets, just like in Pakistan. What a kick.
The list of the seventy-two who signed on so far is at the link. It’s impressive - Erwin Chemerinsky, Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University. He’s well known out here too. And there’s Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, of course. And there’s James Gray Pope, Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School, and Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law (since March 6, 2005, Velvel on National Affairs has been on the links page, as we’ve traded an email or two).
Guess what, O’Reilly? Devil worshippers, everywhere!
But the real test – the columns here are proofread by a Senior Counsel at one of those “white shoe” Wall Street law firms (the corrected item is reposted by noon the next day), and we’ll see if he signs up. His mentor at Seton Hall Law School, the late Peter Rodino of Watergate fame, would expect it. But it could be dangerous. We live in strange times.
