1 Boring Old Man

Pretending That Bush is Not a Tyrant

All over the world down through history, political leaders who have engaged in torture and other grotesque crimes of state have justified their actions as necessary to protect their governments or their people or themselves.

It was true when England’s King Edward I had William Wallace – “Braveheart” – drawn and quartered in 1305 for resisting the crown’s rule in Scotland, and a gruesome death was what King George III foresaw for America’s Founding Fathers in 1776 when they stood up to his abuses in the Colonies.

Kings and tyrants often inflicted special pain on people they viewed as challenging their authority and – at such times – they wiped away the rules of justice. But the United States was supposed to be different.

Indeed, reaction to tyrannical monarchs was what compelled the Founders to establish a government of laws, not men, based on “unalienable rights” for all mankind, including protection against arbitrary detention and prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Which is why it was stunning to watch the June 26 hearing before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution as two representatives of George W. Bush’s presidency responded with disdain when pressed on the administration’s extraordinary vision of an all-powerful Executive operating without legal limits.

While Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington treated the committee Democrats with haughty contempt, former State Department lawyer John Yoo expressed the ultimate arrogance of power with his muddled responses and evasions of direct questions.

The soft-spoken Yoo, who authored some of the key legal opinions justifying the abuse of detainees, wouldn’t even give a clear answer to the simple question of what atrocity might be beyond President Bush’s power to inflict…

Part of it has to be their obsession with wielding Presidential power. They clearly have little to do with their time except sit around being powerful together. But that can’t be all of it. Some may be their binary thinking – "axis of evil," fear-mongering, winning. They depersonalize their enemies regularly in political games, but take it extremes with the Terrorists and other Arabs. I think they really have caught the "Great Satan" metaphor. But underneath it all is something much more obvious. They simply do not have the same set of values that our founders had. I think they really don’t care that they’ve imprisoned and tortured some innocent people. I don’t think that all people really matter to them. Their people matter to them – not even all Americans even – just their Americans.