The Poor Man

Voting is now open for The Kippies, brought to you by your friends at Diebold.

Voting will close on Kipmas Day, December 25th.

Voting is now open for Wank of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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Voting is now open for Wank of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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Voting is now open for Circle-Jerk of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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Voting is now open for Crybaby of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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Voting is now open for Bush-Fluffer of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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I’ve been trying to find an analogy for this NSA scandal. Long in the private gestation, it was sprung upon us with the force of an explosion, and in its hectic eruption of implication it seems to have cleaved apart the great riddle of this Imperial Presidency. Like a volcanic eruption, maybe, a new Krakatoa, and in the smoking strata of the mysterious, unreachable island we can look, now, less than a day after the revelatory event and see the geological forces that brought these pressures to bear. To wit, Digby:

Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It’s that the administration adopted John Yoo’s theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn’t really John Yoo’s theory at all; it was Dick Cheney’s muse, Richard Nixon who said, “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

This was not some off the cuff statement. It was based upon a serious constitutional theory — that the congress or the judiciary (and by inference the laws they promulgate and interpret) have no authority over an equal branch of government. The president, in the pursuit of his duties as president, is not subject to the laws. Citizens can offer their judgment of his performance every four years at the ballot box.

In fact, that Nixon quote sums up the primary objection his loyalists had to Watergate. His loyalists Karl Rove, Dick Cheney; essentially the whole fat lot of them who were alive at the time. The way they see it, everything in American political history, from that unjustified prosecution right up until 9/11, was a species of mistake. And in the days after the attacks, as a new reality settled around us, they realized that this was their grand political reset button. The political winds, to their minds, finally shifted back to their natural course.

So this NSA scandal, this return to the domestic spying of the Nixon years, is part and parcel of their recreation - amplification - of those halcyon days. They don’t fight for the right to torture because they have a hard-on for torture. They fight for torture because the right is, in our Attorney General’s immortal words, “inherent in the office of the President.” They don’t eschew negotiation, cross-aisle communication, or compromise because they are shrewd political operatives angling to hype up the base. To them, any concession to Congressional prerogatives is showing weakness to an equal, a rival. This is why they hold open votes, threaten nuclear options. What do they care for the traditions and precedents of the Congress? They are The Presidency. They don’t fight “activist judges” because of some kind of constructionist ideology, or even, for that matter, because they crave specific rulings. They fight for ready-to-knuckle-under simps like Scalito because, to them, the three branches of government no more act in concert than do three squabbling candidates in the heat of primary season, or three College Republicans fighting for the same assistant treasurership. They have their horse in this campaign, the presidency, and to win, in this case, means to win absolutely, to take the reins of power singly. Sharing the work of governing is abdication, defeat. You can see this attitude in WPE’s dismissive public comments. In winning the election his office became our nominee for the next phase of the campaign. We backed his horse. Now we need to shut up, stay outside the sausage factory, and let them do what they do best.

“I think the point that Americans really want to know is twofold. One, are we doing everything we can to protect the people? And two, are we protecting the civil liberties as we do so?” Bush said during the PBS interview. “And my answer to both is yes, we are.”

What seems different about this scandal - what tickles the back of the brain - is that this battle has been joined before, during Watergate. This meta-election was lost 30 years ago by these same imperial fools because the American people simply wouldn’t play along. We don’t see it the same way. We want our checks and balances, our accountability, and they don’t realize it. Possibly they are incapable of realizing it. Somebody like WPE, inbred into the wannabe dynasty of the Bush clan, it’s probably never occured to him that any of us plebes don’t share his frame of reference. So, when they’re smearing political opponents they cover their tracks, but when they’re fighting for torture or ordering the NSA to break the law, they don’t even bother to hide it.

President Bush “personally authorized a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official said Friday night.”

I hope that by now everybody’s read Hilzoy’s post at Washington Monthly. I’m just going to excerpt a little of it here, and point out that if it comes down to the ultimate sanction the constitution provides we have American history, American values, and two out of three branches of the American government on our side.

[T]his is something that no American should tolerate. We claim to have a government of laws, not of men. That claim means nothing if we are not prepared to act when a President (or anyone else) places himself above the law. If the New York Times report is true, then Bush should be impeached.

Voting is now open for Chickenhawk of the Year! (Original nominations post here.)

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I’m almost ready to open the Kipmas voting for the First Annual Wingnut Awards, except that I’m looking at the task ahead of me - sorting through the most wretched examples of wingnuttery from all of 2005 - and I’m having a hard time coming up with anything I’d like to do less than that. In fact, I’ve only managed to come up with five things that would be worse:

1. Spending eternity wrangling Courtney Love’s syphilitic pubic lice across the flaming plains of Hell.

2. Receiving a thorough prostate exam from recent proctology-degrees-online.mx graduate Dr. E. Scissorhands.

3. Being tied to a stone altar beneath a dull-bladed pendulum, which, with each swing, shaves off a 1/4″ slice of my flesh, starting with the soles of my feet. Each slice is then boiled in a cauldron of pus, and served to me on a complete set of Franklin Mint “Superstars of Pajamas Media … Gone Wild!” X-rated commemorative plates, which, after consuming the fetid meat thereupon, I must lick clean.

4. Same as #3 above, but with a side order of broccoli.

5. Broccoli.

Additional examples of less appealing things to do would be motivating.

… Best. Website. EVER.

… In the meantime.

Well, the utter abandonment of the people of New Orleans continues apace. Think Progress has a good summation of the clusterfuck so far. Then there’s the Times editorial:

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Hey, you know what? I’m going to tell the people of New Orleans right here and right now: I absolutely do not think it’s too expensive to give you a chance at renewal. If the rebuilding of the city as a safe and protected environment turns out to be untenable (and I can’t tell how much I would love to hear highly-paid experts expertly making their judgements on that), I think that every single cent that would have gone to making these super-levees should go directly into your wallets, so that you might settle where you may in high style.

Of course, it means jack shit what I say. It means jack shit what the Times says, it means jack shit what Gulf politicians say, it means jack shit what sympathetic politicians in Congress say. All that really matters, the only action that could concievably make any difference at all, would be for Worst President Ever (hereafter WPE) to decide that this once, amongst all the opportunities in his lucky and benighted life, he should try and keep his promise.

But we won’t get that. We’ll get an American city dessicated, a decaying mockery of it’s former self. We’ll get get to watch, front row, with popcorn, as the proud population of one of America’s few truly unique urban places is divided, reassigned, ignored. In a way, what we’re beginning to see is a mirror-world Detroit. Those who stay and those who flee reversed, but the eventual outcome of an urban core reverting to a sparsely populated, apocalyptic wasteland the same.

The worst part, at least for me, is that even this malign neglect will fail to keep people safe. As homeowners rebuild in the same place, the same way as they built before, and as the levees suffer being “repaired” to their former inadequacy, none but those who were forced to flee and make do will be any safer than they ever were. Sure, it’ll be the one house on that block in Lakeview that gets destroyed, instead of the 2 dozen (now empty lots) that were there before, but what, really, have we accomplished? Is it really true that, even with this crowd of horrific jokers at the helm, we can’t help ANYBODY? 150 million of us, generous, thoughtful, wealthy people, and we can’t help?

I guess the Times editorial is right. This big “fuck you” to the people of NOLA is coming from all of us, valentines post-dated when we wrote them in Novembers 2000 and 2004.

I write this post because I feel like the least I can do is keep it in the public eye. Sad, sorry, dehumanizing mess that it is, I’m not sure what we can do, but an intentional catastrophe on this level should not go unremarked. These are our friends, our colleagues, our treasured national history that are being kissed off without the problem of how to help them even being considered on the most base level. As a nation, is that our character? We’ll let this happen? We’ll let some drunk jackass with no life skills surrounded by jackals and petulant royalty completely blow this off? I wish, after the last five years, I was surprised.