1 Boring Old Man

Law or Lawlessness
By Marc Ash
t·r·u·t·h·o·u·t | Perspective
Friday 03 August 2007

We are not a nation of laws, if law cannot be enforced at the highest levels of our government. It’s that simple.

Noting the Constitution assigns both the right and the obligation to Congress to intercede when the executive branch violates the law is one thing, asking Congress to actually do it, is apparently, quite another. While it is agonizingly obvious the time has more than arrived for Congress to do what the Constitution mandates, namely rein in a rogue president, such action would be extraordinary nonetheless.

Mr. Bush and his entourage have not only broken the law, they flaunt it. Moreover, this group that now controls the executive branch even assumes to take the power of law brazenly unto itself; in some cases, even relying on their allies in Congress to change laws the administration had already broken, to retroactively shield White House officials and their subordinates.

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Mounting a serious legal challenge to the executive branch is a daunting task for Congress under any circumstances. However, as the breadth and scope of this White House’s transgressions are totally unprecedented, so too is the challenge Congress faces. Never in its history has America been confronted with an executive branch so determined to break every law designed to regulate its conduct. In the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "The American people don’t know the half of it."

During the same interview, Pelosi was asked about impeachment as a remedy for illegal conduct by the Messrs. Bush, Cheney and other administration officials. Pelosi replied, "It’s not worth it."

If the price of inaction is the forfeiture of our constitutional democracy, then the worth of action needs to be reexamined – quickly, and in earnest.

This Congress has been saddled with an unenviable task: They are asked, scripted by the nation’s founding fathers, to undertake a rather monumental stand in defense of the republic. The Constitution is clear. What will prevail, law or lawlessness?

Ruling Limited Spying Efforts
Move to Amend FISA Sparked by Judge’s Decision

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president’s spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court’s decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision.

But why do I always feel like I’m on the other side of some argument [the wrong side] with this Administration? Why do I always feel that whatever I think is going to meet with some sarcastic attack ["You Liberals think …"]? And why do I feel that whatever they say, it is unlikely to be the truth – rather some overly simplified version designed to lead me down some predetermined path I wouldn’t go down if I had all the facts?

The O’Reilly/Dodd scream fest yesterday is a great example of what we’ve had to live with for more years than I want to count. O’Reilly [or his staff] found some offensive cartoon on a DailyKOS weblog and used it to trash DailyKOS, the YearlyKOS meeting in Chicago, and all the Democratic Candidates [who will appear at YKC]. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Dodd did a fine job of staying with O’Reilly, but why should he have to do that? No one wants to defend that cartoon. It was some doctored photo depicting Joe Lieberman about to give Bush a blow job. It is, in fact, an example of some Liberal Blogger doing exactly what O’Reilly does – simplifying something and being sarcastic. Lieberman is pretty criticizable – a man who has turned on the Democrats and a lot of his own constituents, but that cartoon is, as O’Reilly says, offensive. O’Reilly makes his living attacking others for doing what he, O’Reilly, does himself – and Dodd did as good a job as is possible in calling him on it. But why should he have to do that? O’Reilly is a media monkey – like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. What is it that makes such antics acceptable to so many people [See, I can do it too]?

The Nazis did it. The Stalinists did it. Hussein did it. Bin Laden did it. I guess divisive simplifications and sarcasm work in the public forum. I’ll bet they had such shouting matches in the Senate in Ancient Greece. And so it’s why we have oversight – to keep people from simplifying one side of an argument and ignoring the other side. Rather than go nuts about the F.I.S.A. judges and have some big reform, how about telling us what that judge decided? Let us think about it before we have some simplistic debate. Maybe that judge had a good point…  

For some reason, I’m having a hard time with the political thing right now. Admittedly, I spent three weeks in Europe and then a week in the American Wilderness – so I’ve been away from it for a while. Maybe it’s re-entry shock. But watching Scott Jennings testify is simply excruciating. It seems like someone ought to walk in from the back of the room and knock him in the head and haul him off to prison. Why the elected, senior Senators have to listen to that kind of crap is beyond me – just beyond my sense of acceptable conduct. In this exchange with Senator Kennedy, he seems to be smirking as he explains how his briefing government employees on the agenda of the Republican Party isn’t a violation of the Hatch Act, it’s a morale booster. I’m not even sure I understand what he means by that.

Independent of how all of this comes out, Bush is condoning [encouraging] disrespect for our government and our country. This guy is not answering questions about what he did acting under a claim of Executive Privilege. As Leahy put it quite clearly, Mr. Jennings doesn’t work for the American people, he works for Mr. Bush. The background message is that our Congressional “Representatives” don’t “represent” us, only Mr. Bush “represents” us, and I wonder if he even thinks that is the case – or cares.

But more than that, it’s just exhausting to watch the news. Each piece is screwier than the last. We’re essentially a country without a government, floundering on for an unknown number of months in hopes that some sense of purpose and competence might return. I used to think Osama Bin Laden shut us down. I now think 9/11 isn’t what did it. Bush and Cheney would’ve found some other way to plunge us into the dark morass that grips us, even if the Twin Towers still stood in New York.

I guess it’s okay to have a period of being discouraged. It just seems so tragic to throw what we could have, what we could be, down the toilet for no real reason that I can see. It’s like all those ridiculous wars and monarchies in the European history classes that were so hard to keep separated. They were hard to remember because they weren’t about anything that mattered. And to have Scott Jennings sitting in a Senate Hearing acting like a perfect ass while Rome burns just feels like too much to bear. Shame on you, Scott Jennings! Shame on you!

If you have a discouraged day like I’m having, check out YearlyKOS. It’ll remind you what we’re about…

I didn’t watch Vice President Cheney on Larry King last night. Here‘s what he had to say about the War on Iraq:

Cheney: …don’t take it from me [about progress in Iraq] — look at the piece that appeared yesterday in the New York Times, not exactly a friendly publication — but a piece by Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They’re just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war. Both worked in the prior administration, but now saying that they think there’s a possibility, indeed, that we could be successful. So, we will know a lot more in September, when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker come back and report sort of to the Congress and the president on the situation in Iraq and whether or not we’re making progress.

King: You don’t know what to expect, though, do you? Or do you?

Cheney: Well, I think it’s going to show that we will have made significant progress. The reports I’m hearing from people whose views I respect indicate that indeed the Petraeus plan is in fact producing results.

Did you see the Bill Moyers program on the lead-up to the Iraq war in which he traced how the administration leaked to the New York Times what turned out to be a debatable report about Saddam’s WMD, and then the next day the Vice President went on Meet the Press and quoted the Times, as if they were a second, confirming source? (Pretty clever, good to remember if you want to start a war.) And then, of course, Cheney stressed that the Times was a liberal paper, more or less saying, see, even liberals see that we’re right.

Ware: Well, Anderson, there is progress. And that’s indisputable. Sectarian violence is down in certain pockets. There are areas of great instability in this country. They’re at last finding some stability. The point, though, is, at what price? What we’re seeing is — is, to a degree, some sleight of hand. What America needs to come clean about is that it’s achieving these successes by cutting deals primarily with its enemies. We have all heard the administration praise the work of the tribal sheiks in turning against al Qaeda. Well, this is just a euphemism for the Sunni insurgency. That’s who has turned against al Qaeda.

And why? Because they offered America terms in 2003 to do this. And it’s taken America four years of war to come round to the Sunnis’ terms. And, principally, that means cutting the Iraqi government out of the loop. By achieving these successes, America is building Sunni militias. Yes, they’re targeting al Qaeda, but these are also anti- government forces opposed to the very government that America created.

Unlike Durand, I’m not so interested in the fact that Vice President Cheney is trying to trick us into believing that the ‘surge’ is ‘working’ – ‘producing results.’ I think there’s a much bigger trick afoot – that our being in Iraq is a good thing in the first place. Putting a government in place that supresses the Shiite majority doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me. It reminds me of the former Yugoslavia. Tito created a country that supposedly united a bunch of warring factions. It lasted until he died – at which point they picked up where they left off decades before. Unlike Durand, I don’t think the fate of the ‘surge’ really matters.  I’m not even sure the fate of Iraq is even the point. I’m not even sure Iraq is a country.

But we’ve already lost what we apparently set out to achieve – something called The Bush Doctrine. The goal was for a post-Cold War America to flex her muscles by ignoring the U.N. [unilaterality], by unseating another government we didn’t like [pre-emption], by becoming a great military force that policed the world [strength beyond question], and by spreading our form of government over the globe [‘Evangelical’ American Democracy]. Even putting aside the Administration’s obvious wish to win oil rights in the Middle East, and taking what they said as straight, this policy can now be pronounced an abysmal failure – ‘surge’ or ‘no surge.’

But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be” to “use moderation and restraint in responding to the… terrorist attacks against the United States.”

I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt as I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the earth; a side of the Pentagon destroyed; and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.

Moderation and restraint is not what I felt – and moderation and restraint is not what was called for. It was a moment to summon our national will – and to brandish steel.

I didn’t watch Vice President Cheney on Larry King last night. I don’t much care about what Vice President Cheney has to say.

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Note: Larry King Live wasn’t ‘live.’ It was pre-recorded, not in the CNN studio, but in Cheney’s office building.

Rove’s Diagnosis
by Robert D. Novak

Karl Rove, President Bush’s political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party’s defeat in the 2006 elections.

Rove’s clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.

In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

I think he’s wrong about that. I hope the Democrats don’t even bother to engage his tactics and instead work hard on policies to solve our real problems. This election doesn’t need to be about political tricks. It needs to be about political reform – K Street’s Lobbyists, the Justice Department, the Military, the Debt. Karl Rove has fooled "all of the people" long enough. His unprincipled cynicism is wearing mighty thin…

Last Sunday [July 22nd], I took off for Northwest Arkansas with some friends and colleagues involved in our Trail Tree Project, and I made a mental note not listen to or watch the news, not to read the blogs or the papers. I call it "news restriction." I did it for three weeks before the 2004 election because I was too "into" what’s happening in Washington. In 2006 during the election, I voted, then we went camping on an isolated mountain for the same reason. This time, I was just plain disgusted with the shoddy way our governmental officials were acting. It didn’t help that I’d spent three weeks in Eastern Europe learning about how those people lost most of a century because their leaders went crazy and lost sight of what government was for.

This last week was great. I kept my vow and we had a fine time roaming the woods of Arkansas and Alabama looking for Indian Marker trees from the early 1800’s [and before]. If you’re interested, take a look at my "other" blog for a brief report of how to get a break from the sad news from Washington. Northwest Arkansas is a beautiful place. Where we were, there were no fast food restaurants, no "MacMansions" or new subdivisions. Except for the new trucks in the driveways, it looked like my world looked when I was a kid in the 1940’s travelling with my parents. The motels were owned by one person. The restaurants were mom and pop places. The people were wonderful and beyond hospitable. It was ironic that the World Headquarters for Walmart was just one county away from us, but I saw no sign of them except for an occasional road name and an ad for the Walmart Bass Tournament on nearby Beaver Lake. It was Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed Show country through and through. Made it easy to take a break from the daily news.

But even in the absence of stimulus, it wasn’t too far from my mind – the Bush Administration. Northwest Arkansas is Bush Country. I found myself wondering how these fine people who treated us so well were taken in by the Republican messages. I sort of get the patriotic thing, and the religion thing, and the fear thing – but I’m just being generous in saying that. George Bush and his cohorts have not only been the most incompetent Administration in my lifetime, have not only been the most deceitful Administration in my lifetime, they’ve been the most disdainful of the people – people like the ones in NW Arkansas. It was in the slightly Democratic Eastern Arkansas where they attempted to replace Bud Cummins with Timothy Griffin – the mastermind of "caging" and their "voter fraud" plan.

I’m hoping this nightmare may end in 2008, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen again. The same sentiment, the same vulnerability, the same voters will still be out there in our future, even if we squeak by next year. I’m going to rest my sore muscles for a day or so, and ponder this more deeply. I think there must be something we’ve done to allow this Administration to so radically polarize and hoodwink this country. I’m just not sure what it is…

The river cruise up the Danube from Budapest to Linz, Austria was relaxing. The political turmoil I periodically felt in Hungary was mostly left behind and I enjoyed the beauty and culture of the cities along the way – particularly Vienna – a place I knew a lot about from years of teaching the Freud Course in our Psychoanalytic Institute. I’d been there 35 years ago, but Vienna has enough top keep one occupied for many visits. And who could ever tire of the coffee and pastries there? Not I. Then we moved on to Prague, and the history began to again color my thoughts. Prague was also part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. When World War II was brewing, Prague and the Czech Republic were in the center of things. There was greater ethnic diversity in the Czech Republic than Hungary. There’s a part of the Czech Republic, Sudetenland, that had a lot of German speaking people. This is the part that Hitler got in the infamous "Munich Treason" in 1938. In 1939, Hilter occupied the rest of the Czech Republic. Unlike Slovakia which had its own Nazi Party, the Czech Republic was taken over by the German Nazis.

After the War, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were joined as a short-lived Republic that was taken over by their Communist Party in 1948. During the post-war period, 2.7 million people of German extraction were deported from the Sudetenland. After years of repressive Communism, Alexander Dubcek tried to "put a human face on Communism" during the 1968 "Prague Spring," but his efforts ended when half a million Warsaw Pact soldiers invaded the country. They call the fall of Communism in 1989 the "velvet revolution."

We visited a town North of Prague, Terezin [Theresenstadt] which had a unique and unsettling story.

As you can see, it was an old fortified city with a nearby walled garrison built in the end of the eighteenth century as a fortification against the Prussians. It was never used for that [the Prussians went around it]. In 1941, the Germans emptied it of its inhabitants and turned it into a Jewish Ghetto. It was portrayed as a model place where the Jews were segregated. There’s a movie made by the Nazis shown at the musuem that shows smiling people wandering the streets, giving concerts, playing soccer. The reality – it was a place where 33,000 people died from neglect, disease,  or were executed. Another 88,000 were sent on to die in the Extermination Camps, and only 19,000 survived the War. It was a grim place:

But the most disturbing thing there was not the prison itself. It was a museum filled with art, and recorded concerts, and photographs of the people who lived and perished there – "putting a human face" on the Holocaust.

Even more than Budapest, Prague is a vibrant European city filled with Castles, Cathedrals, and antiquities. Art Nouveau flourished there under Alfons Mucha and is well represented in the Architecture and public buildings.

Like Budapest, the wonderful sights and sounds of Prague, the spires and buildings, show little evidence of the twentieth century having even happened. Another place. Another couple of lost generations. A historic Jewish Quarter with very few Jews [the ones that survived didn’t come back. Who would?].

I loved Eastern Europe, the people we met, the food, the tourist sites, and even the feel of the streets. But the background of a missed century was rarely far from my mind. Again, I found myself sitting on park benches with a vague sense of tragedy. People in high places getting lost in their own ideas messing with people’s lives. Suicide bombers and American soldiers seemed as present as the ghosts of the Holocaust, the Nazis, the Stalinists. I even thought of the Cherokees who lived in my home in Georgia marched on the Trail of Tears by the settlers, much as they’d driven out the Creeks who were there before. Human beings in groups are capable of doing some pretty horrible things.

When it’s all said and done, the twentieth century in Eastern Europe may not have been so different from what came before – as the various empires swept back and forth across Europe. It may be the experience nearness of the last century that made their twentieth century so pointlessly tragic to me. After all, even "Good King Wenceslaus" was hacked to death by his brother back in the tenth century. But, listening to all the talk of Executive Privilege and War on coming home had a more ominous aura. I keep thinking that we should know how inconsequential contemporary power politics is in the scope of history – how much such things do to the lives of everyday people. According to Hegel, the point of our history is civilization, and he naively thought we were at the end of history. What Eastern Europe said to me was that we sure aren’t there yet. And the process of getting on an airplane said it too. And my newspapers here say it. Hegel’s civilization seems nearly as elusive today as it must have to the Magyars and Slaves that migrated into Eastern Europe at the dawn of the last Millenium.

And it’s not lost on any of us that it is attempts to solve things that cause the problems. The Nazis were out to build a society that endured; same thing with Communism; same thing with the naive Bush Doctrine, spreading Democracy [by destroying it]; same thing with the jihadists. It’s like the race to get to the end of history is what keeps us from getting there. Global warming sits on our shoulder right now screaming that we’d better get our act together or the planet is going to be taken over by tropical plants and cockroaches, and all of us are just going to be the forgotten memories, our molecules floating in the oil-fields of some unknown future.

On another note, Eastern Europe is as much a melting pot as America is. There were Czech-speaking asians hippies on to Metro. Our guide in Terezin was a Phillipean woman who’d met her Czech husband in Prague as a tourist. We met lots of all kinds of people, and it took very little time to find a commonality. I’ve already written about our amazing encounter with a Czech lady in the Metro who told us her life story and of her own lost generation. In a shrinking world, it’s harder and harder to depersonalize other people. I just hope we all get to know each other in time…

When you wake up one day and realized that you’re old, it’s not all creaky joints and thinning hair. There’s something of a freedom to think about whatever you want to think about – at least there has been for me. I just got back from a jaunt to Eastern Europe, and I’m about to go on a couple of American adventures – Northwestern Arkansas in pursuit of Indian Trail Trees and then a couple of weeks with friends in Colorado. So, I think I’ll just write about what I’m thinking about instead of sticking to the political watch on the Bush Administration that usually fills these pages.

Our first stop in Eastern Europe was Hungary, Budapest mostly. I really knew nothing of Hungary’s story. Hungary was founded in 896 AD by tribes wandering from the Ural Mountains in Russia – the Magyars. The firt King, Stephen, Christianized Hungary and was later declared a Saint. The Hungarian language is unique and unintelligible to other Europeans. Throughout the second Millenium, Hungary was an almost constantly occupied country. The Holy Roman Empire, the Mongol Hordes of Khan, the Ottoman Turks, and finally the Austrian Empire that defeated the Turks, but stayed. After their defeat in World War I as part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire, Hungary lost two thirds of its domain. Transylvania went to Romania and the northern and western parts of Hungary became parts of Czechoslovakia and Russia. Hungary sided with Germany during World War II and was dominated by the Arrowcross Party [Hungarian Nazi Party] essentially ending up a satellite to Germany. 400,000 Jewish Hungarians were exterminated in the Holocaust. At the end of the War, Hungary became a Russian satellite with a Stalinist, Communist government. The country faltered leading to the uprising of 1956. They were free for 12 days with an open border [250,000 left the country], but the Russians intervened massively and ruled until 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.

What a story. For the whole first Millenium of their existence, they’ve either been under seige or consumed by the West or the East, and have yet managed to maintain an ethnic identity and culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, although they were still part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, they had some sense of autonomy. They had a celebration of their first Millenium in 1896. Many of the famous landmarks in Budapest were built for that celebration – the Parliment, Hero’s Square, etc.

I’ve mentioned already the thing that had to biggest impact on me in Budapest – the House of Terror – a museum remembering the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Communists, the 1956 Revolt. It will always haunt me – those 50 years in which life in Hungary must’ve been a nightmare. Apparently, the last half – after the Revolt – wasn’t so terrible as before – but certainly by our standards, no picnic. The only remnants of those years outside of the museums are old buildings not yet renovated from the  wars and neglect.

But there’s a modern Metro system, upscale stores, streets filled with bustling, well coiffed, happy people, and the energy of a happening place. It feels like they skipped a whole century. They celebrated in 1896, then picked up again around 1996 and moved forward. There’s almost not evidence of the twentieth century except for the awful  Russian apartment buildings made from concrete panels on the outskirts of the City.

On a trip up the Danube from Budapest, we had an unexpected treat. The power poles in Hungary are short, and made from reinforced concrete or rusted metal – not so attractive. In a small village, we saw this:

Storks who breed along the Danube, then head off for Africa. Who’d have thought?